Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 9

Performing Culture
J.P. Singh
J.P. Singh is Professor and Chair of Culture and Political Economy at The University of Edinburgh.
He is Director of the Institute for International Cultural Relations, The University of Edinburgh.
Culture, replete with ritual, symbols and practices, is a performance.
Culture provides the historical and mimetic links all of us as actors need to
re-present familiar and disruptive tropes to our audiences – the outsider and
insider, celebration and violence, comfort and catharsis. It is in this interplay
between actor and audience that the ‘we’ of culture makes it performative
storytelling with recognizable, if not new, cues embedded in the artwork.
This performative aspect of culture might account for the bind between
culture and Culture: the anthropological way of life culture and the
culture of arts. In the call to prayer, lighting of candles, batteries playing
at a carnival, or the sound of bagpipes in Scotland, cultural performances
provide comfort through their execution. However, one person’s affirming
familiarity may be the other’s strangeness. Collectively, we turn to the arts
to witness interpretations of this alienation amid a sense of belonging; to
understand it and make sense of it. It must a self-centered conceit then that
storytelling too often narrates resolutions with a happy ending.
There are innumerable tropes and parables that creative works engage with,
but stories of cultural interactions primarily are that of the familiar clashing
with the unfamiliar. Edward Said’s Orientalism (����) reveals a world that the
Occident found to be its veritable ‘other’. The book has its devout followers
and critics, but its central insights are confirmed through elementary
sociology. Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (����)
enumerates the production of social meanings and their acceptance and
institutionalization through language, censors (‘reality checks’), and
reification through everyday experience. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (����) speaks to the disruptions in narrative cues for
travelers. “Reports by Western traveler are filled with instances in which
their dramaturgical sense was offended or surprised.”
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