Social Performativity Research Articles

Traditional and Conservation Interpretations of Pre- and Post-Collection Working Methods for Alaskan Yup’ik Masks

ABSTRACT Seven Central Yup’ik masks from Alaska owned by the Anima Mundi Museum, the ethnological museum at the Vatican, were examined in the museum’s Conservation Laboratory over five months in 2022 by Ellen Pearlstein, in consultation with Chuna McIntyre, a Yup’ik artist and culture bearer. Technical details were documented and these together with cultural meanings were explored jointly by the two authors. The authors explored the history of Catholic missionary acquisition and technologies available to Yup’ik carvers in the 1920s, and ways in which the masks departed from traditional technologies at the time of their manufacture and were altered since then within a museum setting. Such modifications were likely designed to permit Yup’ik masks to take on different functions than sacred or social performance, such that their authenticity might be questioned. In working as co-authors, the criteria for authenticity were defined to be whether the material manifestations of these Yup’ik masks evoked the intangible meanings understood by and significant to a Yup’ik culture bearer. The masks achieve this goal, as do contemporary Yup’ik masks that introduce additional new materials and techniques. It is impossible for non-Yup’ik to decide whether masks evoke sacred and social performativity, therefore conservators of other backgrounds are advised to collaborate with community members in their assessment of culturally distant materials.

Socializing the Materiality of Earthen Structures: TheChaîne Opératoireof Construction Practices at the Neolithic Site of Kleitos 2, Greece

This paper describes thechaîne opératoireof earthen architecture relating to buildings and thermal structures at the Neolithic site of Kleitos 2 in Kozani. It provides a material-based approach to the variable processes involved in construction as a practice of community involvement. Thechaîne opératoire, adapted based on a refined concept of technology, is employed here as a key analytical tool. This paper tackles questions relating to the social scale of the construction processes concerned, specialization in construction, and the participation and collaboration of the builders. By choosing to focus on a local-scale analysis of a single site, we were able to develop a detailed framework that includes all the steps involved in manufacturing the earthen features, from the decision-making processes to questions of spatial allocation, the acquisition and processing of materials and construction practices, together with their subsequent use and end-life. The aim of this paper is to recognize construction processes as a social event involving cooperation and social performativity, which fosters and reaffirms social interactions, obligations and entanglements, shedding light on the dynamics of the society in question.

МЕНА ИМЕН: ХЛЕБНИКОВ, АСЕЕВ И БИБЛЕР

The philosopher V.S. Bibler, relying on Khlebnikov, elaborated on the duality of verbal semantics: indication of formal action and performative production of action. The poetic etymology helped to distinguish the unchanging core of the indication of the properties of the thing and the changeable elements of performativity. But such a specific understanding of the social performativity of the verb was developed not so much by Khlebnikov as by Nikolai Aseev in his doctrine of the change of names, which gives examples that coincide with those of Bibler. Bibler places Aseev and other futurists in the shadow of Pasternak because of the extension of the doctrine of double action to the history of thought, making a number of hypotheses about the specifics of the development of twentieth-century Russian thought. We may speak of the poetic history of thought as an invention of Biebler. Bibler’s idea is prolific for philological analysis because it permits us, along with the syntagmaticity of the utterance, to single out the paradigmaticity of performative techniques, which facilitates a consistent analysis of both the Russian avant-garde poetry and the later poetry.

Medea is a Good Boy: performing, subverting, and unmasking tragic gender

AbstractIn 1981, the Spanish playwright Luis Riaza published the play Medea es un buen chico (Medea is a Good Boy). In it, two male actors perform the main roles of Medea and the Nurse, who comment, with references to other fictional love stories, on the relationship between Medea and Jason. When Jason fails to arrive, the fiction is dismantled, revealing Medea’s identity as Jason’s rejected homosexual lover. Medea es un buen chico mixes elements of performativity, meta-theatricality, and myth in order to explore the limits of gender, sexuality, and the perceived social roles and norms they entail. This article explores how Riaza theatrically reflects on the social performativity of gender through the tragic character and story of Medea, her performance and subversion of her own gendered self, and her eventual rejection and social displacement.

6 Feet Apart: Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine.

Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from travel to retail to work and civil society. They encompass many continents, from Latin America to Asia. Staying six feet apart provides a rubric for the spatial experience and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban life, our understanding of public interaction, crowd practice, and everyday life at home under self-isolation and lockdown. Time changed to a before and after of COVID-19. The temporality of pandemics is noted in its present and historical popular forms such as nursery rhymes (Ring around the Rosie). Place ballets of avoidance, passing by, long days under lockdown and hurried forays into public places and shops create a new social performativity and cultural topology of care at a distance.

Collectively accepted social norms and performativity: the pursuit of normativity of globalization in economic institutions

ABSTRACT Although the philosophical literature on social institutions has been insightful for social scientific studies, the application of its core concepts, such as collective intentionality, to real institutional dynamics remains challenging. One factor contributing to this situation is insufficient work that identifies collectively accepted social norms and shows how they constitute social institutions. Relying on the perspectives of John Searle and Raimo Tuomela, this study integrates recent analyses of the concept of performativity with discourse analysis. It presents an analytic framework, drawing on the concept of nominalization, to identify collectively accepted social norms that performatively constitute social institutions. Finally, it illustrates the identification of collectively accepted ‘globalization’ that performatively constitutes and shapes economic institutions engaged in corporate financial reporting. This study contributes to closing the gap between philosophical analyses of social institutions and social scientific studies by highlighting the performance of nominalized collectively accepted social norms.

Reassembling Energy Policy

Ongoing debates about the need to deeply transform energy systems worldwide have spurred renewed scholarly interest in the role of future-visions and foreknowledge in energy policy. Forecasts and scenarios are in fact ubiquitous in energy debates: commonly calculated using energy models, they are employed by governments, administrations and civil society actors to identify problems, choose between potential solutions, and justify specific forms of political intervention. This article contributes to these debates through a historic study of foreknowledge-making – modelling, forecasting, and scenario-building – and its relationship to the structuring of ‘energy policy’ as an autonomous policy domain in France and Germany. It brings together two strands of literature: work in the anthropology of politics on ‘policy assemblages’, and STS research on the ‘performative’ effects of foreknowledge. The main argument is that new ways of assembling energy systems in energy modelling, and of bringing together policy networks in scenario-building and forecasting exercises, can contribute to policy change. To analyse the conditions under which such change occurs, the article focuses on two periods: the making of national energy policies as ‘energy supply policies’ in the post-war decades; and challenges to dominant approaches to energy policy and energy modelling in the 1970s and 1980s. It concludes by arguing that further research should not only focus on the effects of foreknowledge on expectations and beliefs (‘discursive performativity’), but also take into account how new models ‘equip’ political, administrative and market actors (‘material performativity’), and how forecasting practices recompose and shape wider policy worlds (‘social performativity’).

BUT DO YOU ACTUALLY CARE?

This article explores the notion of empathy through the contemporary lens of social media performativity relating to ‘dark tourism’. Examining Auschwitz as a case study, the article explores the post-Holocaust idea that often this empathy is precarious and accompanied by performed authenticity.Through analysis, this article focuses on concepts of ‘dark tourism’, vicarious victimhood, conspicuous compassion, and self-representation, all portrayed through Instagram. It argues that ‘pilgrimages’ to dark sites of trauma act not only as memorialisation but as spaces of self-validation and representation.In the contemporary Western world, the distinction between ‘authentic’ empathy and conspicuous, socially informed performance is blurred as a result of digitisation and increased pressure on the individual to form empathic connections and then post about it online.

Notes of despair and consciousness: performativity and visibility of albinism in musical practices

Recent studies endeavour to shed light on the multiple ways bodily impairments and disability identities are defined, socially constructed and enacted in various musical practices. The majority of these analyses are from the Global North and do not examine the various entanglements of music and disability in other socio-economic, political and geographical contexts. This article therefore explores the intertwinement of notions of disability identity related to albinism and the enactment of social performativity, visibility and masculinity of the condition in musical productions. This scrutiny is based on both the song lyrics of two renowned artists with albinism, Salif Keita from Mali and Yellowman from Jamaica, and an ethnographic investigation of a Tanzanian musician, Ras Six.

Immigrant, Nationalist and Proud: A Twitter Analysis of Indian Diaspora Supporters for Brexit and Trump

The Brexit referendum to leave the EU and Trump’s success in the US general election in 2016 sparked new waves of discussion on nativism, nationalism, and the far right. Within these analyses, however, very little attention has been devoted towards exploring the transnational ideological circulation of Islamophobia and anti-establishment sentiment, especially amongst diaspora and migrant networks. This article thus explores the role of the Indian diaspora as mediators in populist radical right discourse in the West. During the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election and presidency, a number of Indian diaspora voices took to Twitter to express pro-Brexit and pro-Trump views. This article presents a year-long qualitative study of these users. It highlights how these diasporic Indians interact and engage on Twitter in order to signal belonging on multiple levels: as individuals, as an imaginary collective non-Muslim diaspora, and as members of (populist radical right) Twitter society. By analysing these users’ social media performativity, we obtain insight into how social media spaces may help construct ethnic and (trans)national identities according to boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. This article demonstrates how some Indian diaspora individuals are embedded into exclusivist national political agendas of the populist radical right in Western societies.

Development of a Measure of Permeability between Private and Public Space

This article focuses on the development of a measure for frontage permeability, which we argue is needed to complement existing metrics used to describe urban environments and assess, amongst others, social performativity. Built density and street network centrality are two characteristics often discussed in relation to urban vitality. However, high densities and high centrality do not always result in higher urban vitality, which can be partially explained by a typical densification model often used in Brazil and in some other Latin-American cities with high-rise residential buildings. To understand the relation between urban form and social performativity, the metrics for density and network centrality are thus not sufficient and we propose to add two other urban form properties: frontage permeability and plot size. The hypothesis is that the mentioned densification model combines higher density with larger plots and lower permeability. Many scholars have shown that higher density is often associated with increased urban vitality, but larger plots are said to have the opposite effect and in Latin American cities, it is observed that lower vitality is found where buildings have less permeable frontages. This research aims at studying the combined effect of density, permeability, and plot size on urban vitality or, more generally, social performativity. However, there is no well-developed method to measure frontage permeability. Therefore, this article first presents a method to measure frontage permeability, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. This measure is then combined with existing measures of density and plot size to analyse how these three urban form metrics relate to each other. In a forthcoming paper, pedestrian observation data will be added to the analysis, to be able to give more insight in the relation between the three urban form metrics and urban vitality using pedestrian counts as proxy. We will show that the developed measure seems to be coherent and effective in describing permeability. Further, the preliminary results confirm the hypothesis that the Brazilian densification model with high-rise residential buildings generates a decrease in frontage permeability, although it does not appear to significantly change plot sizes.

Dys-appearing/Re-Appearing: Trans Men Actors Resisting Cisnormative Theatrical Traditions with Phenomenal Stage Presence

In “Dys-appearing/Re-Appearing: Trans Men Actors Resist- ing Cisnormative Theatrical Traditions with Phenomenal Stage Presence” Joshua Bastian Cole lays the groundwork for a theory of acting for trans men that incorporates an understanding of various symptoms of dysphoria, rather than labeling them undesirable “absences” that must be eliminated in the pursuit of a normatively-conceived stage “presence.” Using a de-pathologizing medical model of trans subjectiv- ity in combination with various phenomenological theories of trans embodiment, Cole explores trans men’s abilities to actively create a body in space and time. He argues that these creative survival techniques can be used as a the basis for a method for stage acting. He concludes with a postscript that provides an application for his ideas, an exercise which bridges the gap between social performativity and stage performance.

On the elusive nature of critical (accounting) research

Abstract This essay addresses a deceptively simple question, namely, what is critical (accounting) research? Reflecting on key experiences that led me to be increasingly involved in the critical paradigm of accounting research, I present some of the main sources of influence that retrospectively played a significant role in articulating my (evolving) sense of “what critical research is”. In particular, I elaborate a “conceptual compass”, made up of several tentative referents, in order to help doctoral students and others develop their own understanding of the critical accounting research project’s (evolving) identity. Despite its fuzziness, my sense of the critical accounting research project is that it is primarily focused on developing a better understanding of marginalization processes − as a basis to engage in social intervention and praxis. The ontological foundations of this project reflect a mix of social constructionist and performativity approaches. Methodological openness characterizes the project although a significant degree of intolerance vis-a-vis discourses, ideas and methods that sustain the interests of marginalizing parties is noticeable.

From Classroom to Asylum

From Classroom to Asylum

Sartre, Goffman, and Fictional Nazis: Homogeneity as Identity in Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (1991) and Edgar Hilsenrath's The Nazi and the Barber (1971)

Abstract This article seeks to consider the role of homogeneity as a character trait in literary representations of Holocaust perpetrators. It will engage with Erving Goffman's “on face-work” and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist philosophy. The drawing together of these two distinct theoretical approaches, while not new, is based on the conceptions of “social performativity” and “nothingness” that inform both methodologies. Thus, this article is concerned with the depiction of Nazi protagonists whose identity is enmeshed with that of the wider social discourse but who, at the same time, display the potential for other versions of selfhood (what I call self-potentiality). The analysis concludes by examining the possible ethical implications of this kind of characterization.

The Witness Security Program: Becoming Imperceptible in the Relocation Matrix

How are relocated witnesses in the US federal witness security program equipped to “hide in plain sight” and remain untraceable? Two models of social identity combine to account for this—social role play (Goffman) and performativity (Butler, Barad, Braidotti)—as an immanent process of “becoming-imperceptible.”

El automóvil: genealogía de un objeto de poder

How it is built, investigated and polemic on cars as a privileged object of the industry and society in the Western market. The car on their own dimension of individuality, but also an object of consumption can be read while it is used; one could say that the car is the social object that represents the individual, in that form of discipline and social control. While the symbol, too, of this enormous machine that is power. Ultimately, it is an object showing the tensions between the individual and the social. Then, we affirm in this work is not just a machine, but also the most complete example of social technology, political representation and performativity of today.

Barter Fairs, Ethnic Configuration and National Multiculturalism in the Argentinean Andes

ABSTRACTIn the Argentinean Andes, fairs constitute the main setting where lowland and highland Kolla peasants barter their agricultural production. In order to preserve these encounters – seen as traditional – in a context of peasants’ growing participation in capitalist economy, public organizations invest money for boosting old fairs and instituting new ones. The author proposes to qualify these fairs as ‘institutional’, compared with the ‘spontaneous’ ones that come along with religious celebrations. Alluding to Bourdieu's concept of institutional rituals, this expression enlightens how such meetings assert social categories, whose boundaries are otherwise blurred. Drawing on an analysis of institutional fairs’ social and symbolic performativity, the paper argues that rather than ‘safeguarding ancestral customs’, as claimed by the organizers, these specific festivals publically state the conditions for the ethnic group at play to be integrated within the nation state.

City, Crowd and Public Art: A Theoretical Approach to the Social and Political Performativity in th

This paper proposes an expansion or extension of the performance concept and public art in relation to the deployment of contemporary social movements also called global movements. We try to meet a number of essential features that can guarantee the value of this type of collective action in the ethical and socio-political context of the protest, the insubordination and struggles for collective claims. Research Project A-88-15-10 Consejo de Desarrollo Cientifico, Humanistico, Tecnologico y de las Artes DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES ULA

Casting Matters: Colour Trouble in the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao

This article argues that all casting practices have significant discursive power. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s analysis of materiality, and J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, it asserts that, in all contexts, casting produces bodies as discursively meaningful, and can facilitate a reflexive gap between actors and the roles they play. The article focuses on Ben Kingsley’s performance as The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 to explore how this gap might articulate both dramaturgical and social performativity. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) The Orphan of Zhao is then analysed to consider why ethnic pretence was critiqued by British East Asian artists in this production. Ultimately, the article argues that the way in which The Orphan of Zhao was staged leads to possible charges of cultural imperialism – a charge that framed the relationship between actor and role as ‘authentic’, and prevented the casting from being truly ‘integrated’.