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Having cleared a bit of theoretical ground in Chapter 1, I now want to move on to consider types of special events and their relations to ordinary life in particular social worlds. Following the work of the anthropologist John MacMoon, among others, I refer to event types as genres and will maintain, along with Erving Goffman, that these genres are (usually) named consensual frameworks that punctuate the flow of social life and that, in turn, can be multiply subdivided within themselves. Again, adapting a suggestion by MacAloon (1984), I will begin by distinguishing macrogenres (e.g., theater in Europe), genres (e.g., text-based theater), and subgenres (e.g., theater of the absurd), but these theatrical examples clearly would benefit from even more degrees of elaboration. I will also use his suggested term metagenre, but in a somewhat different way: to distinguish theoretical types meant to be useful for comparing special events from different social worlds. This latter move is somewhat problematic, as I indicated in Chapter 1, but nonetheless inevitable, since the entire project of anthropology as human self-understanding depends on the comparative method, as many have noted. One restatement of this position is what Lee has called "critical internationalism" (1995)—his attempt to retain something of the comparative approach in the face of sustained critiques against it.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342386_2

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