ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together scenes of “performance” Indigenous peoples have enacted that animate Indigenous plays of social drama from the perspective of anthropology. Turner’s evocation of Dilthey’s “lived-through experience” and Schechner’s “bodily as well as mental life of humankind” brings embodiment back into anthropological analysis. Turner’s experiential/embodiment approach to performance anthropology echoes the phenomenological approach of medical anthropologists such as those contributing to Kleiman and Good’s seminal work on cross-cultural studies of culture and depression. Columbus, ignorant of the languages and cultures of the native peoples, provided a script for Old World peoples for engaging in everyday relations with the New World inhabitants. News of the strange peoples of the newly discovered lands would create tensions between Old World imaginaries of savagery and noble savagery. Dramatic changes in the landscapes of the social dramas created opportunities for some native actors to improvise.
