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Cultural performance has frequently been implicated in the creation of group identities and in the differentiation of one group from another, but it is also central to the phenomenon of celebrity and other forms of enhanced personal identity. As I indicated in Chapter 2, childhood play has repeatedly been shown to be involved in both personal and social identity formation, and children's play is clearly connected to adult play in a variety of ways. Given the manifold relations between types of play and cultural performance, it is no exaggeration to assert that together they are central to both group and personal identities: to their creation, maintenance, and re-creation. In an earlier work, I began to explore the problem of selfhood as related to embodiment, arguing (along with many others, notably Drew Leder [1990]) that Cartesian dualism, also known as the mind-body split, represents a cultural and historical misunderstanding of human being, at least a partial one (Lewis 1995). In that piece, I tried to bracket out the problems of intersubjectivity by focusing heuristically on the relations between self and body, but clearly this artificial separation could only be an opening move. Accordingly, in this chapter I want to continue the exploration into the relations between personal and group experiences of events. The main question I want to address is this: In what sense could the phenomenological focus on experience relate to groups rather than to separate persons only? If shared experience exists, how does it occur and what are its manifestations?

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342386_5

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