Culture and Performance

This article explores the performative dimensions of the Zar ceremony as carried out throughout the Persian Gulf. This ceremony is mirrored by similar ones throughout North and East Africa, suggesting that the Zar may have resulted from cultural diffusion along historical trade routes. The Zar practitioners, the baba and the mama, have extensive demands in musical performance, movement and coordination in order to affect a palliative relief for persons affected by spirit ‘winds’ that inhabit them. The analysis in this paper uses the framework of ritual structure developed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner to show how the practitioners skilfully guide the person at the centre of the ceremony and the community of the ‘People of the Wind’ to a successful conclusion by bringing persons under treatment from a ‘normal’ state through a ‘liminal’ state to an eventual ‘reincorporated’ state in which relief is experienced. The performative aspects of the ceremony move those who are being treated through stages in which the inhabiting spirit is  addressed: induction, movement into a trance state both for the practitioner and the person being treated, addressing of the spirit by the practitioners and return of the person being treated to normal life. All of these stages are marked by special music, chanting and movement. The Zar ceremony is an important method of non-allopathic treatment for emotional disorders that might elsewhere be treated through psychiatry in clinical settings.

In many respects, the challenges facing musical performers will differ depending on whether they are dealing with historic or contemporary repertoire. Such challenges become increasingly apparent when one form of performance practice involves the use of historical instruments, and the other contemporary music technologies. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why one might separate forms of practice, perhaps offering technical, aesthetic, practical, cultural and even metaphysical rationales as a diagnostic for the ostensible cleavage between many different forms of performance. In doing so, however, we potentially neglect a core challenge that binds musical performance, irrespective of style, genre, tradition or technology; in all cases, performance requires the performer to confront the prevailing attitudes, concerns, preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies common to the cultures from which their practices are drawn. In this respect, forms of performance practice are united, involving the painstaking assimilation of knowledge whether historic or contemporary. This paper presents personal accounts of both historically-informed performance practice and contemporary performance practice from two active performers. It has three central aims: 1) to survey the central processes and methods involved in the planning, preparation and delivery of each form of performance practice; 2) to consider the various similarities and differences that hold between those forms of practice; 3) illuminate the relations between the performance, as a seemingly autonomous event, and the broader cultural context that underpins every aspects of the performance itself. In doing so, the paper places those cultural contexts at the heart of the musical performance, before noting that even the contemporary will, as time passes, become the historic.

This article explores the performative dimensions of the Zar ceremony as carried out throughout the Persian Gulf. This ceremony is mirrored by similar ones throughout North and East Africa, suggesting that the Zar may have resulted from cultural diffusion along historical trade routes. The Zar practitioners, the baba and the mama, have extensive demands in musical performance, movement and coordination in order to affect a palliative relief for persons affected by spirit ‘winds’ that inhabit them. The analysis in this paper uses the framework of ritual structure developed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner to show how the practitioners skilfully guide the person at the centre of the ceremony and the community of the ‘People of the Wind’ to a successful conclusion by bringing persons under treatment from a ‘normal’ state through a ‘liminal’ state to an eventual ‘reincorporated’ state in which relief is experienced. The performative aspects of the ceremony move those who are being...

An extended Introduction to the volume which presents the main argument of the editors, i.e. that the notions of culture and performance are indispensable to a profound understanding of aspects of social and political life of the Left, across national boundaries.

In the introduction, the editors make the case for the significance of the components of this comparative study because the historical, political and cultural context that binds the Left in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus: These societies emerged as the only non-socialist constituents of South-eastern Europe after the Second World War, and Left-wingers in all these contexts have had similar experiences of long periods of manifold persecution, beginning in the Interwar years, but continuing subsequently.

In terms of theory, the introduction revisits analyses that have probed the Left in and between Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, including their cultures, by reconsidering two core issues. First, by showing that the link between nationalism and internationalism in left-wing cultures and performances is more complex and aporetic that usually approached, especially when seen through a novel transnational vantage point. Moreover, directs the attention towards dimensions of left-wing politics beyond the institutional terrain, incorporating a focus of wider social and political transformations that usually evade conventional political analysis.

The editors present their case for using the notion of  'culture' to explore both the everyday life of politicised leftists subjects as constitutive of a 'left-wing political culture', but also the 'outcomes' of a politicised life in the wider local or national culture(s), in music, films, theatre, or other forms of artistic production. Therefore the editors suggest the term "cultures as/in performance" as a way of stressing this heterogeneity and fluidity of the notion .

Although “culture movements” of the sort that have become increasingly common in the Pacific and elsewhere are reactions and responses to colonialism and globalization, and are often at least partly inspired by imported models, they nevertheless have locally (culturally) specific content and effects. This is because the things that are “revived” are always grounded in particular local institutions, genres of practice, traditions of interpretation, and modes of expression. Form in these cases carries content, and the content is for that reason rooted in local socially inherited traditions. Contemporary New Zealand Maori liken urban communities to those based on kinship, and they do so by employing a variety of representational conventions, ranging from songs to carved meeting houses. These forms connect asserting kinship to making claims about land, and link land to culture and to a distinctive status within the nation-state.