ABSTRACT
Recognising something as performance is not a simple matter: cultural insiders have heightened insight, and sometimes this knowledge cannot be transmitted to others. Historians face additional challenges of gaining access, insight, and interpretability to the “setasidedness” of performance, but sometimes also possess advantages that come with recognising long-lived traditions that otherwise were not as transparent to the culture that produced and received performance in the first place. The post-modern insight that performance is a way of querying experience — culture disarranging itself, whether or not the act registers in human consciousness — makes such efforts to locate it in time and place important. Performance historicisation, in turn, emerges as a way of asserting something about the world in a fundamentally unstable epistemology. Investigating performance history can show the stakes of such instability, with a multiplicity of points of view and degrees of insight. This chapter illustrates these challenges with several case studies, including kinship recognition, the transmission of material objects, and comparative taxonomies.
