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Today, the interdisciplinary fields of performance studies have become a focal point for attempts to rethink the question of political and aesthetic agency for both individuals and groups. Together with some forms of cultural studies and the ethnography of ritual practice, performance studies have become important to our understanding of social life and the differences of power that mark even everyday relationships. The work has many precursors. From Erving Goffman to Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu, analyses of the theatricality of everyday life have revealed how differences of power and class are visible in faces, masks, bodies, costumes, and scripts. Such analyses make part of the project of performance studies, which, through explorations of mimesis, alterity and mimicry, attempt to bring theatrical practices (playing roles and parody, for example) to bear on social life. Awareness that performance is everywhere has been accompanied by an explosion in theatrical experimentation. The "four walls" of the theater, constructed so recently, have been tumbling down, have opened up, or have been made more permeable to what was once confidently held apart as the “real world”. To what extent -- and how -- can theater practices change the understanding and practice of social life?

This topic is designed to intensify the connections between the social sciences and the humanities. On the one hand, it engages philosophical issues like those raised in Austin’s distinction between performative and constative utterances and his focus on speech as action--issues that have significantly influenced both traditional disciplines and critical, legal and gender studies. On the other, it engages the anthropological and sociological tradition of observation of class-stratified performances of high and low culture both at home and abroad, a tradition that has long understood the theatricality of the observing situation. What other models of cultural performance exist alongside, merge with or challenge those Western analytical traditions of anthropological humanism? Can a global culture of performance be envisioned and practiced? What are the relations between the theater and “the real world”?

The CCACC invites proposals on all aspects of the topic. Work may be empirical or theoretical; may be structured by a traditional disciplinary or an interdisciplinary framework; and may deal with any world culture or subculture. A few possible angles of approach are given below, but they are meant to be suggestive, not definitive.

• the participant-observer in anthropology and ethnography
• the performance of social relations
• the performance of political authority
• the media and social identity
• everyday speech as performance
• alternative genealogies of performance studies
• history and aesthetics of "performance art"
• drama and theater history
• the public contexts of performance
• performance and the city
• global and local performance
• performance and emergent cultures
• hybrid and cross-cultural performance
• self-presentation: bodies, costumes, dress, hair
• rituals and compulsions
• rites and rights: the performance of citizenship
• performance of gender, race, sexuality
• the spaces of reception (theaters, courtrooms, bedrooms, classrooms)
• institutional actors and individual actors
• scripts for performance or communication
• rhetoric and persuasion
• "folk" and elites
• tourism and observation (as industry, as pleasure)
• political action and reaction
• symbolic politics
• disciplinary questions: drama, theater, film, performance studies
• electronic media and new performance modalities