Performance, culture and the sociology of education

Abstract

The article takes as its starting point my recent ethnography of the Welsh National Opera Company, and the forthcoming monograph Everyday Arias: making opera work. In the course of that work I revisited the theme of performance: the ethnography of performance and the performance of ethnography. I discuss briefly the everyday work of the opera producer and director in the rehearsal studio and in the theatre. I suggest that despite the pervasive nature of 'performance' in contemporary sociology and anthropology, we have remarkably few studies of performances themselves. Performances by directors and performers are complex interactions, in which cultural forms, vocabularies of motive, emotional and cognitive frames of interpretation are explored by the participants. The director displays many parallels with the pedagogue. Both are preoccupied with eliciting and evaluating the performances of others. More generally, we ought to expand the sociology of education to take greater account of a wide range of cultural settings. Sociologists of education could learn much about instruction and learning by paying more attention to masterclasses in music and the visual arts, the work of cultural entrepreneurs such as impresarios, artistic education such as choir schools and conservatoires, and similar environments. Furthermore, the sociology of education could and should benefit from a more thorough engagement with contemporary sociologies of art and culture. While the sociology of culture has become central to many aspects of current sociological research and theorising, the sociology of education seems oddly peripheral to mainstream cultural analysis. It is surely not necessary to identify the sociology of education in narrowly institutional terms and to restrict the research gaze primarily to institutions and settings that are narrowly and commonsensically 'educational' in nature.