“Points of Contact” Revisited

Abstract

In 1985 I published “Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought” as the first chapter of my pointedly titled Between Theatre and Anthropology. Things have progressed a long way since then. The “performative turn” in anthropology came. And a new galaxy of contacts between anthropological and theatrical thought has emerged. In the following essay, I will discuss three (new) points of contact. They do not stand alone. They are interlaced with each other, reflecting and interacting with each other. However, they can to some degree be parsed into: 1) Embodiment - experience as the basis of indigenous knowledge that is shared through performing; 2) The sources of human culture are performative; and 3) The brain as a performance site. What undergirds these three points of contact is that performance constitutes, as Diana Taylor shows, a repertoire of embodied knowledge, a learning in and through the body, as well as a means of creating, preserving and transmitting knowledge.