ABSTRACT
Edward Schieffelin is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University College London. His research interests could be described as being about both outer and inner dimensions of ritual and belief. He has researched and published not only on "ritual and performance" but also on ethnopyschology and emotions. In the last ten or fifteen years anthropologists interested in cultural performances have moved increasingly away from studying them as systems of representations to looking at them as processes of practice and performance. Performance is also concerned with something that anthropologists have always found hard to characterize theoretically: the creation of presence. Performance is often thought of as characterized by conscious intent. In a recent work Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw differentiate between "ritualization" and performance as distinct modalities of action on this basis. The character of performance as accomplishment, together with its interactive quality and element of risk, make it easy to differentiate it from the notion of "text".
