ABSTRACT
Following the pioneering work of Erving Goffman in the late 1950s, recent years have seen a steady increase in the social role ascribed to public performance.1 This covers not just the dramatic performance one finds in theatre, but the ways in which humans publicly perform their own individual and group identities, witness and respond to such performances from others, and endeavour to create performances which will affect the identities of others. This is the realm of social performativity, and it covers not just identity, though that has been a prominent feature of recent scholarship, but all those areas of social interaction, from gender to geography, and self to sales, through which societies seek to manage themselves.2 Richard Schechner has argued that traditional types of theatre and performativity in culture can be understood using the same set of concepts:
From this trend in theory has emerged the notion of the dramaturgical society, which the social geographer Peter E.S. Freund describes in an important article as ‘one in which the manipulation of appearances is an important skill and a highly complex and self-conscious act’.4 No term could more aptly characterize the society of medieval and early-modern Scotland than ‘dramaturgical’. But the other side of dramaturgy is spectatorship.
