Oral, ritual, and shamanic performance

In this chapter we focus on oral, ritual, and shamanic performance practices, the earliest to emerge in primary oral cultures before theatre – part of that pre-literate past that is 99.9 percent of human history. Our main purpose is to discover as much as we can about archaic forms of performance in pre-literate, smaller-scale societies. A secondary purpose is to understand that oral, ritual, and shamanic performance are not part of a “primitive” past, but are dynamic and often adaptable forms of performance that continue to shape many peoples’ personal, social, and/or cosmological identities today (Figure 1.1).