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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Play as a Cognitive Primitive
  • Richard Schener , Playing, The Future of Ritual.
    • In the West, play is a rotten category tainted by unreality, inauthenticity, duplicity, make-believe, looseness, fooling around, and inconsequentiality…The reason … is because the multiple realities of playing are situated inside a pyramidical hierarchy of increasing reality leading from unreal make-believe to “just the facts, Ma՚am”.
from Play as a Cognitive Primitive
  • I՚m going to talk about play, but not about any of its ordinary manifestations, in games or politics or culture or whatnot. There is a very interesting literature on that, from Homo Ludens to Richard Schener՚s approach to theater and ritual. Homo Ludens is quite remarkable in how, despite being a heavey and erudite tome of classical scholarship, it manages to embody some of the spirit of play it is trying to describe.

Richard Schener

30 Oct 2026 - 30 Oct 2026
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    • Read his work on theater and ritual a long time ago and I no longer remember it. But it doesn't feel like cheating to Ask Claude
        • Ask Claude
          • Here's a solid summary of Schechner's key ideas on theater and ritual:

          • Richard Schechner on Theater and Ritual

          • Schechner is one of the founders of Performance Studies, and his thinking on theater and ritual is spread across several major works — principally Performance Theory (1988), Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), and The Future of Ritual (1993).

          • Theater and Ritual Are Not Opposites

          • His central provocation is that theater and ritual exist on a continuum, not as separate categories.
          • Rituals are performative — they are acts done — and performances are ritualized: codified, repeatable actions. The functions Aristotle and Horace identified for theater (entertainment, celebration, social solidarity, education, healing) are also functions of ritual. The difference lies in context and emphasis.
          • Whether one calls a specific performance "ritual" or "theater" depends mostly on context and function — where it is performed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

          • The Efficacy/Entertainment Braid

          • One of his most famous frameworks is a spectrum between efficacy and entertainment.
          • Rituals emphasize efficacy: healing the sick, initiating neophytes, burying the dead.
          • Theater leans toward entertainment. But no performance is pure efficacy or pure entertainment — performance originates in the creative tensions of the binary efficacy-entertainment.
          • Where a performance falls on that spectrum determines whether we call it ritual or theater, and that position can shift over time.

          • Restored Behavior

          • His most foundational concept is "restored behavior" (also called "twice-behaved behavior").
          • Schechner defines performance as "twice-behaved behaviour" or "restored behaviour" — actions that are repeated, rehearsed, or consciously enacted.
          • Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems that brought them about.
          • This applies equally to actors in rehearsal and to ritual participants — both are performing behaviors that preexist them and that they have internalized and re-enacted.

          • Victor Turner and Liminality

          • Schechner developed his ritual theory in close dialogue with anthropologist Victor Turner.
          • He borrows from Turner the concept of liminality — the threshold space where standard rules don't apply and transformation is possible.
          • Schechner and Turner shared the belief that performances deal with transformation — how people use performance to change.
          • Turner distinguished between the liminal (found in ritual in traditional societies, collective and transformative) and the liminoid (found in leisure and art in modern societies, more individual and optional).
          • Schechner clearly distinguishes "transformation" and "transportation," and picking up on Turner's distinction between the properly liminal and the postmodern liminoid, recognizes the latter as shaped by modernity.
          • In theater, you are transported (you experience something and return changed in feeling); in ritual, you may be transformed (your social status actually changes — you are a different person after).

          • Between Theater and Anthropology

          • In Between Theater and Anthropology, Schechner argues that in failing to see the structure of the whole theatrical process, anthropologists in particular have neglected close analogies between performance behavior and ritual.
          • He drew on fieldwork across Asia and elsewhere to connect ethology, play, sports, and shamanism into a single expanded theory of performance.

          • The Future of Ritual

          • In The Future of Ritual, Schechner denotes in ritual actions — both human and animal — a similarity with those that emerge in the artistic performance field. He identifies elements such as violence and sexuality in rituals and characterizes ritual as the dynamic capable of dealing with social crises that overturn culturally recognized systems. Following Turner, he recognizes ritual as having a creative property, capable of generating new images, ideas, and practices.
          • The short version: For Schechner, theater is a form of ritual and ritual is a form of theater. What separates them is not essence but context, intent, and the degree to which a performance aims at social efficacy versus entertainment. All performance is "restored behavior" — the re-enactment of prior behaviors — and both theater and ritual create liminal spaces where transformation (or at least transportation) becomes possible.
       to summarize it, I paid my actual dues.