ABSTRACT
As a performing art, kathakali dance-drama shares certain general characteristics with other Indian traditions (religious, literary, etc.). All such traditions may be thought of as dynamic systems of action constantly undergoing a process of generation and degeneration. A tradition like kathakali exists simultaneously as (1) an inherited collection of established ways of feeling, thinking, and doing passed on through generations, and (2) the active and ongoing process of transmitting what has been handed down orally, through entrainment, enculturation, and/or written records. A performance tradition includes both the system of performance as a collection of practices and the social-structural network within which its practices are carried out. A tradition, then, is created, maintained, or changed by the dynamic interplay between what is received and what is passed on by its students, performers, craftsmen, critics, audiences, and patrons. The degree of maintenance, variation, elaboration, transformation, and degeneration within a tradition varies historically as the conventions, rules, boundaries, socio-economic realities, discursive/aesthetic principles, and the like are constantly (re)negotiated in the dynamic interplay of individual and social formations.
