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Contemporary life in most nation-states is not truly cultural, but rather "culture-like," especially in large-scale societies. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental events including play, ritual, work, and carnival and connects personal embodied habits and large-scale cultural practices.

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1. Special Events and Everyday Life 2. Play as Performance 3. Rituals and Ritual-like Genres 4. Performative Processes: Types of P/p relations 5. Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process 6. Problems in Performance and Cultural Theory

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"Lewis pays tribute to and builds upon [Victor] Turner´s sense of social process as he considers the complex enactments of culture . . . The present volume could prove a useful overview for graduate students wishing to gain a grasp of the history, development, and possible futures of performance studies . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty." - CHOICE

"A masterful and nuanced expansion of Victor Turner´s pioneering work on the ritual process and on culture as a procession of quotidian events and critical performances. Drawing on Peirce´s semiotics and on phenomenology, J. Lowell Lewis simultaneously provides an interdisciplinary perspective on performance studies and opens up new theoretical horizons on role-playing, ritual and dramaturgy in social life." Michael D. Jackson, author of Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology

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Lowell Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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