Affecting performance

Combining symbolic interpretation, discourse analysis, semiotics, history, political economy, and gender studies, Corinne A. Kratz examines the power of ritual to produce social transformation and explores how children are made into adults through initiation rites. Taking girls' passage into womanhood as her topic, Kratz considers dramatic structure, costume, song, ritual space, and the discourse, rhetoric, and poetics of ceremonial performance. Based on nearly twenty years of research among the Okiek of Kenya, Affecting Performance demonstrates how representations of the central themes of initiation - gender relations and cultural identity - probe the tensions and contradictions that characterize relations between men and women, young and old, and the Okiek and their neighbors. Numerous interviews with Okiek women and men of several generations enable Kratz to situate Okiek ceremonies historically. She provides a rich description of changes in Okiek life and ceremonies from 1900 to 1990. Kratz's sensitive and detailed analysis of ritual language and ritual action provides an important synthesis and critical perspective for understanding ceremonial structure and performance and for interpreting the efficacy of ritual performances both from actors' and observers' viewpoints.