ABSTRACT
The term "cultural performance," widely found in anthropological and ethnographic writing, was coined by Milton Singer. Singer suggested that the culture content of a tradition was transmitted by specific cultural media as well as by human carriers and that a study of the operations of such media on particular occasions could provide anthropology with "a particularization of the structure of tradition complementary to the social organization." Between his two surveys of the former field in 1963 and 1972, Richard M. Dorson noted the rise of a new orientation, which he called a "contextual approach" to folklore research. The emphasis of such an approach shifts from the text to its function as a performative and communicative act in a particular cultural situation and has looked to the field of sociolinguistics for much of its theory and methodology. Dell Hymes has characterized this blending of communication models and cultural placement as a "ethnography of communication."
