One of four faculty research clusters in Performance Studies. Each cluster offers a possible way for a student to focus their studies; students choose to work across the cluster range, and with a wide variety of faculty.
Performance and culture at the local, societal, national, transnational and global levels, including the interaction of humans and their material environments. The ecology of a given culture in performance terms (how it manifests and is maintained in process). Ethnographies of performance. The interaction of culture and the environment. The influence of colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism on performance and culture.
This cluster of interests is intended to speak to scholars who interrogate broader social processes beyond the individual, who chart the relationship of individuals to the environment, and who investigate performance in culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, ethnographers, ethnic studies scholars and those studying the performative aspects of cultural symbols. Ecologies will attract scholars of literature and languages dealing with issues of nationalism, state formation and other forms and organizations of power. It will serve scholars working on the use and influence of space and the built environment including architects and urban planners. It engages the process of thinking about the relationship between human performance and sustainability.
Cultures/Ecologies refers to the area of scholarly inquiry that engages human cultures and/or their social and material environments, either separately or in interaction through their interdependence. Research areas may encompass issues constituent of the following: the interdependence of globalization and cultural performance (such as how hip-hop youth culture has become transnational, interfacing with many discrete cultures across the globe); anthropological studies of performance, both traditional and contemporary, in world cultures (engagement of Victor Turner’s self-reflexive paradigm of Anthropology as Theater in studying contemporary Indian pow-wows for example); ethnographies of specific performance art practices globally (for instance, a study of New York choreographers Eiko & Komo’s work in relation to traditional Japanese Buddhism); ecological processes of environmental sustainability as models of new social behaviors (studies that might encompass a city’s “green” efforts as a “scripted” choreography of efforts, linking theater devices to effective coordination of sustainable living in city planning); music, dance, and theatre, and rhetorical studies in relation to the “performance of real life” (studies of how race, gender, and/or sexuality are performed through enactments, subversions, and re-enforcements in the US); the interaction of culture and the environment as national performances (ambitious historical studies of how national cultures are invented and performed, and changed through policy, politics, and rhetoric — the “invention of tradition” paradigm); and many more.
Cultures/Ecologies assumes “culture” as a learned collective process of becoming that engages the traditional past with the contemporary “new.” This understanding of culture is augmented by the increasing awareness in the 21st century of our global environmental interdependence as what binds us beyond cultural differences. This perspective of culture and ecology allows critical engagement of decades-old paradigms of performance as well as emerging models of sustainability by creative, inventive graduate students interested in Performance Studies.