ABSTRACT
This chapter experiments with a series of games—syllabi games, classroom games, and ethnographic ones—involving anthropology and improvisation. It begins with the challenge of taking the texts of cultural anthropology and the handbooks of theater and dance improv, and read them as doppelgängers, as uncanny doubles of each other. The chapter also begins by discussing games—using “game” in the way that theater and comedy training talks about “theater games”—a set of light rules within which people “play”, and in doing so, learn to improvise better. A different score involves attending to one’s own attention as an index of culture, as a habit of composing worlds. Schemata (structures of feeling pace Berlant) have a political function here, enabling us to see and talk and feel about the world without challenging it, and they even provide us with habits of thought when we are at a loss for words and action.
