Cultural Anthropology and Theatre Historiography: Notes on a Methodological Rapprochement

Abstract

After a century of carefree source research conducted against the background of positivist objectivism, theatre historiography now finds itself in the throes of a methodological paradigm shift. Quite independent of its historical disciplinary affiliations, whether as an extension of literary criticism of the various national literatures or as a subsidiary of the historical sciences, theatre historiography is no longer able to resist engagement with fundamental and increasingly complex methodological debates. Particularly in North America there has been a broad discussion on the crisis of traditional, positivist theatre history. The result has been to open up theater historiography to other approaches such as semiotics and diverse theories and methodologies of a poststructuralist provenance. Despite this intensifying and often broad-ranging methodological debate there have been hitherto hardly any attempts to bring theatre history into a dialogue with historical anthropology or ethnohistory, both of which are strongly influenced by the methodologies of cultural anthropology. The deficit is all the more remarkable as these areas have ignited a veritable explosion of interest amongst historians and ethnologists which has transcended the narrow disciplinary borders of both fields of scholarship.