Material Culture, Narratives and Social Performance. Objects in Contexts

2014 ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. A. Hall

Play and playfulness is a key element in enabling social performance and one that transcends ethnicity, time, and space across all social levels. This contribution explores board games as a case study of play and performance in the medieval period, in a European context. It highlights some of the key discoveries of gaming material culture and their diverse contexts: castles, monasteries, churches, villages, and ships included. These underpin questions of gender, identity, pilgrimage behaviour and ritual, and the life-course. Play, it is argued is fundamental to the performance and negotiation of agency in a range of gendered settings both secular and religious.


Classics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis

Ancient Greece—despite differences in local societies and diverse discontinuities over a span of many centuries—laid distinctive emphasis on verbal art as performance and developed numerous forms of performance culture, from theatrical to political to musical. The present bibliographical article includes sections on major areas related to ancient Greek performance cultures (see below) and discusses scholarship written in different European languages (especially French, German, Greek, and Italian) instead of considering primarily English-language publications. The concept of performance in contemporary research in the social sciences and the humanities has acquired significantly broad connotations (it has become an all-encompassing concept, as in the case of social performance, and sometimes even a metaphor). It has thus been applied to many aspects of human activity and communicative interaction. In light of such usage of the concept, one may trace “performance” in a particularly large number of—or in all, as some theoretically informed scholarship would argue—areas related to ancient Greek material culture and texts. As these are areas surveyed and to be surveyed in the future in other Oxford Bibliographies articles, this bibliographical article does not address topics like ancient Greek sports (except briefly in General Overviews); performance of identity in the ancient Greek world (except, from a particular art-historical perspective, in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art and Performance); politics and performance; performance and ethnicity; or the performance of hundreds of religious rituals in Greek antiquity (however, see Ritual and Performance and Burkert 1985, cited under General Overviews). In a bibliographical article focusing on performance culture, overlap among some sections is unavoidable. Given the prescribed structure and scope of Oxford Bibliographies articles, it has proved unfeasible to discuss all books, let alone articles, focusing on ancient Greek performance cultures from the archaic period to later eras. This article places emphasis not only on research on the archaeological material and written sources about sufficiently investigated performance contexts like theater and ancient Greek symposia, but also on archaeological and historical investigations of musical and poetic competitions; methodological perspectives on ritual, orality, and popular song; archaeological approaches to Music and Sound; and epigraphic and historical research on artists’ guilds.


Author(s):  
Olaya Sanfuentes

The nativity scenes discussed in this chapter reveal the eloquence of material culture as a contemporary agent, as a medium for interrelating material and immaterial dimensions, and as a historiographical source of relevance for researchers today. This chapter focuses on nativity scenes in late nineteenth-century Santiago de Chile as objects that hold special significance for religious communities that, through the performative ritual they enhance, provide access to an immaterial realm of sacred historical allusion or reenactment. To this end, the chapter examines in detail the different elements that come together to inform this work: the crèches, the ritual’s participants, and the late nineteenth-century newspapers that serve as sources for these practices. The focus is on the public celebration of Christmas, and it shows how rituals of Christmas celebration using nativity scenes, among other performative practices in the public sphere, worked as agents of social cohesion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 314-325
Author(s):  
Kimberly F. Frazier ◽  
Jessica Collier ◽  
Rachel Glade

Background The aim of this study was to determine the clinical efficacy of combining self-management strategies and a social thinking approach to address the social performance and executive function of an adolescent female with autism spectrum disorder. Method This research examined the effects of a social knowledge training program, “Think Social,” as well as strategies to improve higher order cognitive abilities. Results and Conclusion Although quantitative improvement was not found, several qualitative gains in behavior were noted for the participants of this study, suggesting a benefit from using structured environmental cues of self-management strategies, as well as improved social understanding through social cognitive training.


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