Performative turn
From Geography
The performative turn is a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences. It has affected a lot of disciplines, for example anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, history and the relatively young discipline of performance studies. The concept of performance is central to the performative turn. Performance is now often employed as a heuristic principle to understand human behaviour. Earlier it was used as a methphor for theatricality. All human practices are 'performed' is the assumption. Any action at whatever moment or location can be seen as a public presentation of the self. This methodological approach is rooted in the 1940s and 1950s but entered the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s. The need to conceptuealize how human practices relate to their contexts in a way that went beyond the traditional sociological methods that dit not problematize representation is underlying the performative turn. They focused no longer on given symbolic structures and texts, scholars stress the active, social construction of reality as well as the way that individual behaviour is determined by the context in which it occurs (Wikipedia, 2012).
Prominent figures
References
Wikipedia. (2012). performative turn. Find on, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_turn
Contributers
Page created by Anke Janssen, on Octobre 24 2012
