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Experiential and
Performative Anthropology
in the Classroom
Engaging the Legacy of
Edith and Victor Turner

Edited by
Pamela R. Frese
Susan Brownell
Experiential and Performative Anthropology
in the Classroom

“I can’t wait to adopt Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom. As

indicated by its subtitle, the book recapitulates and updates the Turner’s foundational work
on the subject of ritual and performance. Each new generation of cultural scholars returns to
ritual as a focus of study, and for good reason; ritual allows tacit cultural truths,
contradictions, and conundrums to be artfully embodied and spectacularly performed. And
there are no two scholars more qualified to bring us this timely text. Pam Frese and Susan
Brownell were students of the Turners and they have continued to advance the field.
Supplementing seminal essays by Victor and Edith Turner are chapters by ritual scholars
who share their own time-tested teaching techniques, each of which is either adapted or
adaptable to the contemporary world in which our ritual experiences are almost always
electronically/digitally mediated in some form or fashion. Frese and Brownell share their
wealth of research and teaching experience as well, drawing essential connections between
field and classroom while demonstrating the integral relationship between ritual theory and
methodology. In reading this book, we remember not just how to teach ritual, from an
intellectual perspective, but why to do so, drawing on the entire body and full range of
senses. I often quote the line “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” in my
classroom. Frese and Brownell remind us that “dancing about architecture” is not only
reasonable and common, but that ritual and performance are at the heart of what it is to be
human. The book is also a reminder that not all things can be reduced to “text.” At a time
when all disciplines seem to be rediscovering care and affect, scholarly writing on those
subjects often remains as dry, cold, and dispassionate as ever. Frese and Brownell’s writing
is refreshingly clear, substantive, and insightful. Their book will be as useful to the seasoned
professor as it is accessible for undergraduate and graduate students. The latter will benefit
not only through learning about the history, theory, and ethnographic methods as applied to
ritual, but also they will gain directly applicable knowledge as instructors-in-training.
Trained mostly through text and talk, graduate students often need a great deal of coaxing
and scaffolding in order to experiment with embodied, multimodal, multimedia, and
performative forms of expression, communication, and research. Experiential and Perfor-
mative Anthropology in the Classroom will help students to move beyond their comfort
zones in order to reinvent the future of ethnographic research and teaching.”
—Mark Pedelty, Professor of Communication
Studies, Affiliate Professor of Anthropology, and
Fellow at the Institute on the Environment,
University of Minnesota, USA
Pamela R. Frese Susan Brownell
•

Editors

Experiential and Performative

Anthropology
in the Classroom
Engaging the Legacy of Edith and Victor
Turner
Editors
Pamela R. Frese Susan Brownell
Department of Sociology Department of Anthropology
and Anthropology and Archaeology
College of Wooster University of Missouri-St. Louis
Wooster, OH, USA St. Louis, MO, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-41994-3 ISBN 978-3-030-41995-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41995-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard
to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: nespyxel/Moment/Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
We dedicate this volume to Vic, Edie, and
Roy, and the other inspirational faculty at the
University of Virginia who shared in the
spirit of invention that enriched our lives and
offered up a new pedagogy to students like
ourselves who, as Edie put it, “no longer
need cold description, but the eager spirit
itself.”
Contents

1 The Foundations of Experiential Performance Pedagogy . . . . . . . . 1

Susan Brownell and Pamela R. Frese
2 Points of Contact Between Anthropology and Theatre, Again . . . . 21
Richard Schechner
3 Performing Ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Victor Turner and Edith L. B. Turner
4 Revisiting the Past for the Present: The Wedding Ritual
Performance in the Turners’ Seminar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Pamela R. Frese
5 Structure, Anti-structure, and Communitas in the Classroom:
Notes on Embodied Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Susan Brownell
6 Bridges to the Ancestors: Engaging Students with Ethnographic
Performances in the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Pamela R. Frese
7 The Smell of Smudge, the Work of Smoke: Reenacting Native
American Ritual in an Anthropology Course . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Edmund (Ned) Searles
8 Grotto Water and Potato Chips: Turnerian Ethnographic
Performance as Pedagogical Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Michelle C. Johnson
9 Dance Lessons: Performance as Engaged Experiential
Embodiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Jonathan S. Marion

vii
viii Contents

10 Pedagogies of the Imagination: Toward a New Performative

Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston
11 Cultivating Empathy by Performing Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Lauren Miller Griffith
12 Moving Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Pamela R. Frese and Susan Brownell, with an essay
by Edith L. B. Turner

Appendices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Further Notes: Additional Readings—Intellectual Descendants
of Turnerian Performance Ethnography by Susan Brownell
and Pamela R. Frese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Notes on Contributors

Susan Brownell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St.

Louis. While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, she took part in ritual
reenactments organized by Victor and Edith Turner as part of the famous weekly
seminar held in their home. She is an internationally-recognized expert on Chinese
sports and Olympic Games, and traces her interest in the intersection between sport
and ritual back to the first paper she wrote on the topic in Turner’s seminar. She is
co-author (with Niko Besnier and Thomas F. Carter) of The Anthropology of Sport:
Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics (2018).
Pamela R. Frese is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Wooster. She was
a graduate student of Victor Turner, who served on her Ph.D. committee, and
worked on many projects with Edie Turner over the course of 32 years. Pam’s
contribution of her Ph.D. work to Victor Turner’s graduate seminar led to her
ongoing use of ethnographic performance in most of her classes. Her research and
publication interests include ritual performances in Mexico and in contemporary
United States, the use of wedding ritual food in the United States since the colonial
period, museums and archaeology in Latin America, New Age religious specialists,
and gender in the US military.
Lauren Miller Griffith is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech
University. She studies performance and tourism in Latin America and the United
States, with a focus on the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira. Her work has been
published in Annals of Tourism Research, the Journal of Sport and Tourism, and
Theatre Annual. She is the author of In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders
Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition (Berghahn Books, 2016)
and (with Jonathan S. Marion) Apprenticeship Pilgrimage (Lexington Books,
2018). Her newest work is on capoeira and social justice.
Michelle C. Johnson is Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University, with a
specialty in religion and ritual in Africa and the contemporary African diaspora. She
has conducted fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau and with Guineans in Portugal and has

ix
x Notes on Contributors

held grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Department of
Education, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is the author of Remaking
Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon-Mecca-Bissau (Indiana University Press, forth-
coming) and co-editor of a volume on reciprocity in anthropological fieldwork, to
be published by Lexington. She received the 2019 Class of 1956 Lectureship
Award for Inspirational Teaching.
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is Associate Professor of Theatre at York
University. Her book, Staging Strife (2010), was awarded the International
Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Outstanding Qualitative Book Award and the
Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Prize (2011).
Her article, “quiet theatre: The Radical Politics of Silence,” was awarded the
Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR) 2019 Richard Plant Prize,
granted annually to the best English-language article on a Canadian theatre or
performance topic. She is a co-founding member and co-curator of the Centre for
Imaginative Ethnography (CIE), and winner of the 2019 New Directions Award
of the American Anthropological Association’s General Anthropology Division.
Jonathan S. Marion is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the
VIS (vision/image/sense) Lab at the University of Arkansas. His primary research
foci are (1) interrelationships of performance, embodiment, gender, and identity;
and (2) issues of visual research ethics, theory, and method. A past president of both
the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the Society for Visual Anthropology,
his publications include Ballroom: Culture and Costume in Competitive Dance
(2008), Visual Research: A Concise Introduction to Thinking Visually (with Jerome
Crowder, 2013), Ballroom Dance and Glamour (2014), and Apprenticeship
Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise Through Travel and Training (with Lauren
Griffith, 2018).
Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus, Tisch School of the Arts,
NYU, editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, and founding artistic
director of The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. He has directed plays
and/or conducted performance workshops in North and South America, Europe,
Africa, Asia, and Australia. He is editor of the Enactments Book Series for Seagull
Books. He is author of many books including Environmental Theater, The End of
Humanism, Performance Theory, Between Theatre and Anthropology, The Future
of Ritual, Performance Studies—An Introduction, and Performed Imaginaries. His
honors and awards include Guggenheim, NEH, Asian Cultural Council,
Leverhulme, and Erasmus Mundus fellowships, three honorary doctorates, and
several “lifetime achievement” awards.
Edmund (Ned) Searles is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Bucknell University. His primary research interests include
Canadian Inuit identity, human-environment relations in the Arctic, and local
responses to food insecurity in Nunavut, Canada. His work has appeared in
Notes on Contributors xi

Anthropology and Humanism, Études/Inuit/Studies, Food and Foodways, and most

recently, Hunter Gatherer Research. He is currently co-editing Reciprocity Rules:
Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters (Lexington Books, forthcoming). Among
the courses he teaches regularly at Bucknell are The Anthropology of Native North
America and Culture, Nature, and Place.
Edith L. B. Turner (1921–2016) received little professional recognition until, at
62, she set forth on a solo career after her husband’s death, publishing The Spirit
and the Drum: A Memoir of Africa (1987), The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit
Presence among a Northern Alaskan People (1996), Heart of Lightness: The Life
Story of an Anthropologist (2006), and Communitas: The Anthropology of
Collective Joy (2012). A founding member of the Society for Humanistic
Anthropology, she edited Anthropology and Humanism from 1992 to 2010. Its Edie
Turner First-Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing commemorates her mentorship of
junior scholars.
Victor Turner (1920–1983) was the William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology
and Religion at the University of Virginia from 1978 to 1983. During this time, his
collaboration with Richard Schechner produced the creative synthesis between
anthropology and theater that resulted in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human
Seriousness of Play (1982) and posthumous publications, including The
Anthropology of Performance (1986), The Anthropology of Experience (co-edited
with Edward M. Bruner, 1986), and chapters in multiple books. The Society for
Humanistic Anthropology awards an annual Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic
Writing that best exemplifies the humanistic approach in anthropology.
List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Nesting of frames. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 42

Fig. 3.2 Stealing the “bride’s” garter; original image from the 1982
publication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 44
Fig. 4.1 Minister, best man, groom, and father of groom waiting
by altar in the Turners’ “kiva” downstairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 55
Fig. 4.2 University of Virginia faculty and students in the receiving
line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 55
Fig. 4.3 The bride and groom cut their wedding cake before sharing
it with the “guests” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 56
Fig. 4.4 The lucky man who caught the garter standing
with the groom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 57
Fig. 4.5 The two decorated “brides” toasting in front of the
bride’s cake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 63
Fig. 4.6 The groom’s cake at the 2019 AAA workshop, “Performing
Gender in the Classroom: Ethnographic Performance
of a Bridal Shower and Bachelor Party”; the theme
of the meetings was “Changing Climates” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 64
Fig. 5.1 Edie demonstrates how “The Hands Feel It” while signing
a student’s copy of the book at the 2003 AAA meetings . . . .. 82
Fig. 6.1 The altar for the 2019 Dia de Los Muertos showing students’
ofrendas and educational posters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 94
Fig. 7.1 This sign identifies the origin of Bucknell University’s Tree
of Peace and is located adjacent to the tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 102
Fig. 7.2 Bucknell University’s Tree of Peace, October 14, 2019 . . . . .. 103
Fig. 8.1 The Senior Man performs the sacrifice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 120
Fig. 8.2 Theory in Anthropology students perform the ritual
circumambulations at a Victor Turner shrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 121
Fig. 8.3 The Grotto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 127

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Seen here performing at Dance Legends 2013, World

Professional Latin Ballroom competitors Stefano di Filippo
and Dasha Chesnokova perform their versions of masculinity
and femininity according to genre specific aesthetics and
values quite different from ballroom dancers competing
in the Standard Ballroom dances (e.g., waltz, foxtrot,
and quickstep), and from partner-dance genres such as West
Coast Swing, Argentine tango, Salsa, Bachata,
and Brazilian zouk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 137
Fig. 10.1 An abandoned tree trunk swing encountered by students
in the Humber River-Black Creek Parklands . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 160
Fig. 10.2 Plastic bag suspended on tree shrubs found by students
in the Humber River-Black Creek Parklands . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 161
Fig. 11.1 Griffith records the decisions made by the students during
each round of the activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 174
Chapter 1
The Foundations of Experiential
Performance Pedagogy

Susan Brownell and Pamela R. Frese

I’ve long thought that teaching and learning anthropology should be more fun that they often
are. Perhaps we should not merely read and comment on ethnographies, but actually perform
them. (Victor Turner 1979, 80)

Just as theater is anthropologizing itself, so anthropology is being theatricalized. This

convergence is the historical occasion for all kinds of exchanges. (Schechner 1985, 33)

Our goal in this book is to recuperate for the twenty-first century the lines of thought
that were pursued over three decades ago by Victor and Edith Turner, Richard Schech-
ner, and their friends and colleagues during a tremendously creative time when they
explored experiential and performative anthropology. Our focus is on how “ethno-
graphic performance”—the performed re-creation of ethnographic subject matter—
may be used in a classroom setting as a pedagogical tool to facilitate learning about
the diversity of cultures and ways of being in the world. The Turners conducted
many ritual re-enactments in the seminar that met in their home at the University of
Virginia. These re-enactments were the fruit of a line of serious theoretical inquiry
that had been explored by the Turners beginning in the late 1950s and Schechner
since the late 1960s, leading to their collaboration beginning in the late 1970s.
The Society for Humanistic Anthropology was established in 1974 at an AAA
meeting in Mexico City, centering around Victor Turner and “his work on ritual, per-
formance, and theater that, of course, is a staple in the discipline of anthropology”
(Society for Humanistic Anthropology, n.d.). Edie came into her own as a scholar
after Victor’s death, helping to re-shape the society’s journal into Anthropology and

S. Brownell (B)
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology,
University of Missouri–St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
e-mail: sbrownell@umsl.edu
P. R. Frese
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA
e-mail: PFRESE@wooster.edu

© The Author(s) 2020 1

P. R. Frese and S. Brownell (eds.), Experiential and Performative
Anthropology in the Classroom,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41995-0_1
2 S. Brownell and P. R. Frese

Humanism, which she edited from 1992 to 2010. Edie continued to teach experiential
and performative anthropology at the University of Virginia until her retirement in
2016. Schechner became the first professor of performance studies when New York
University created a Department of Performance Studies in 1980; he launched the
influential journal TDR/ The Drama Review; and he established Performance Stud-
ies International in 1997, an active international organization that sponsors annual
conferences.
Because our model of classroom ethnographic performance is deeply embed-
ded in Turnerian performance theory, our primary focus is on ritual re-enactments
(described by Pamela Frese in Chapters 4 and 6, Susan Brownell in Chapter 5,
and Edmund (Ned) Searles in Chapter 7). Other performance genres may also be
utilized, such as social drama (described by Susan Brownell in Chapter 5, Pamela
Frese in Chapter 6, and Lauren Griffith in Chapter 11), pilgrimage (Michelle Johnson,
Chapter 8), festival (Susan Brownell, Chapter 5), dance (Jonathan Marion, Chapter 9),
or theater (Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, Chapter 10). However, in our pedagog-
ical model, the performance must be informed by and framed within Turnerian theory
in order to have the specific kind of impact that we describe, because Vic and Edie’s
ritual theory pinpointed specific techniques that they believed enabled rituals to do
certain kinds of “work.”
Based on our experiences in performing ethnography in our classes over several
decades, we maintain that the performance facilitates a form of “embodied learn-
ing,” transforming more traditional anthropological and ethnographic perspectives
on society and culture into special kinds of experienced realities. The contributors
to this volume both describe and theorize their classroom learning activities, con-
tending that these exercises in “engaged learning” can greatly enhance students’
understandings of themselves and of the very real people described in ethnographic
texts, facilitating experiential and imaginative ways of learning that move beyond
more traditional forms of pedagogy.
The editors of this book were both students at the University of Virginia: Pam was
a Ph.D. student of Victor Turner and Susan took his seminar while an undergraduate.
What we took away from our experiences is described in our individual chapters.
Both of us maintained contact and collaborated with Edie in the decades after Vic’s
passing in 1983. With Edie’s passing in 2016, we began to fear that anthropology
was in danger of losing something of value that is needed now more than ever. It
is hard to articulate precisely what is slipping away to the younger generation of
anthropologists, who never experienced the intoxicating creativity that flowered in
this branch of cultural anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s. It was an inter-
mediate era sandwiched between the wild energy of the psychedelic sixties and the
conservative neoliberal turn of the nineties that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Turner-Schechner collaboration partly tamed the creativity of the sixties and
harnessed it toward addressing rigorous theoretical questions, but by the late 1980s
anthropologists were under pressure to tone down their psychedelic tendencies. The
turn toward postmodernism, the critique of colonialism, and the rejection of uni-
versalist “grand theory” opened up aspects of the Turnerian project to criticism.
Nevertheless, Turnerian theory continued to expand into many different disciplines.
1 The Foundations of Experiential Performance Pedagogy 3

The contributors dedicate this volume to Vic and Edie Turner and Roy Wagner,
taking what we have learned from our intellectual forbears seriously and seeking to
share this knowledge with our own students. The teacher-scholars who share their
work here represent different generations of intellectual “children” of the fertile work-
shops and conferences in which Turner, Schechner, and other scholars honed their
perspectives on the performance of ethnographic texts. Our diversity in approaches
would be applauded by Vic and Edie, as they would be delighted that their own
experiential pedagogy has produced so much fruit. In this volume, we offer new
ways in which to share ethnographic experiences and embodied knowledge with our
students. The unique Turnerian approach synthesizes an awareness of the power in
“performance” with an engagement with ethnographic “experience” and an under-
standing of the concepts of liminality, anti-structure, communitas, and social drama.
The sharing of these elements of ethnography with Schechner and other scholars in
the late 1970s and 1980s ultimately led to the Turners’ introduction of ethnographic
performance in the classroom. With this book, we hope to introduce the tradition to
those who are not familiar with it, and re-energize those who are familiar with it, by
sharing our inheritance of experiential knowledge and pedagogical skills.

Cultural Performance and Turner Before

the Schechner-Turner Alliance

Turner’s mother was a founding member and actress in the short-lived Scottish
National Theatre in the 1920s, while his father was an electrical engineer. As Vic
wrote, “My training in fieldwork roused the scientist in me—the paternal heritage.
My field experience revitalized the maternal gift of theater. I compromised by invent-
ing a unit of description and analysis which I called ‘social drama’” (1982, 9). The
tension between art and science, the two irreconcilable “cultures” represented by his
parents, who divorced when he was eleven, preoccupied him throughout his career.
He strove to reconcile humanistic approaches, focused on the power of symbols
in human communication and the expression of cultural differences, with scientific
approaches that applied universal categories to human behavior in order to make it
intelligible across cultural boundaries. But he was always concerned that “the general
theory you take into the field leads you to select certain data for attention, but blinds
you to others perhaps more important for the understanding of the people studied”
(Turner 1982, 63). He felt that the “objective” scientific approach eliminated the
humanity of the ethnographic subjects because of its inadequacy in capturing human
experience—“the whole human vital repertoire of thinking, willing, desiring, and
feeling… A cognitive Occam’s razor,” he wrote, “reducing all to bloodless abstrac-
tions, would simply make no sense here” (1986, 35). This concern, of course, also
informed his search for ways to teach ethnography that combined objective and uni-
versalistic science with a humanistic attention to meaning and difference—a concern
that also underpins this book.
4 S. Brownell and P. R. Frese

The concepts of cultural performance and performance genre were developed by

Milton Singer, an anthropologist of India who conducted fieldwork in the 1950s. He
argued that public events such as weddings and temple festivals, along with music,
dance, and drama performances, could serve as basic units for the study of a culture.
Singer’s When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) is often cited as the starting
point for anthropological studies of performance, and Turner’s conceptualization of
cultural performance largely reflected Singer’s (Beeman 2002, 94). Also in the 1950s,
sociologist Erving Goffman had conducted what he called a “dramaturgical analysis”
of everyday life, in which he used theater as a metaphor to show that people alter the
ways in which they present themselves to other people based on the time, place, and
audience. The title of his book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959),
indicated his focus on performances with a lowercase p (behaviors that are daily
activities) rather than cultural Performances with a capital P (special events). This
distinction is useful for this volume, which focuses on planned, intentional, Perfor-
mances, while recognizing that they form a continuum with mundane performances
(Lewis 2013, 1, 2).
Turner’s attempt to reconcile art with science drew him back to his early exposure
to theater. During his field experience among the Ndembu, the artist in him began to
feel that there was a theatrical potential in social life, and that something like drama
was constantly erupting from the even surfaces of social life. To describe this, he
invented a unit of description called social drama in his first book (Turner 1957).
He felt that social tensions everywhere tend to follow the same processual structure
when they erupt into public: (1) public breach, (2) crisis, (3) application of redressive
machinery (juridical process, religion, sacrifice, ritual, etc.), and (4) either reconcili-
ation or permanent schism. Because redressive machinery—institutionalized actions
mobilized to resolve the crisis—typically involves rituals of various kinds, the third
phase is where ritual liminality comes into play. While cultural performances con-
dense and express cultural meanings in a more or less intentional and crafted manner,
social drama more or less unintentionally reveals relationships among categories of
people, individual character, rhetorical style, moral and aesthetic differences, choices,
and the power of symbols in human communication (Turner 1982, 9). This early
foray into the intersection of anthropology and theater would eventually lead to his
collaboration with Richard Schechner two decades later.
The Turners’ exploration of performances drew heavily on the theories about ritual
that they had already developed based on fieldwork among the Ndembu of Northern
Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in the 1950s. In particular, their brand of performance
theory drew on the theory of liminality. Rituals—as well as cultural performances—
typically pass through three phases: (1) spatial, temporal, and symbolic separation
from the flow of everyday life and normal social structures; (2) liminality, or a state
of being “betwixt and between” states; and (3) reincorporation into the normal social
structure. The liminal period is the middle of the event, when the routine structures of
everyday life have been left behind, the participants are freed from normative rules,
and they have not yet rejoined the quotidian world. This freedom from the normative
social structure is anti-structure.
1 The Foundations of Experiential Performance Pedagogy 5

Liminal periods often evoke a heightened feeling of communitas among the par-
ticipants—a generalized human bond or sense of communion. Indeed, frequently
rituals as well as cultural performances are intentionally designed to do so. In addi-
tion, they may provide an occasion when the “passengers,” temporarily freed of
normative constraints, reflect back on the status quo and perhaps question it. This
is called reflexivity, and it results from the fact that rituals present the “as if,” the
“world as we want it to be” rather than “the world as it is.” While rituals generally
function to reinforce the existing social structure, the reflexivity and the solidarity
experienced by co-travelers may also lead to challenges to the status quo. Thus, rit-
uals possess revolutionary potential and are frequently surrounded by a great deal of
social tension and anticipation as the people involved wonder how they are going to
turn out.
For both Edith and Victor Turner, a crucial idea was that rituals “do work”; that
is, they accomplish social transformations. A Ndembu boy who has undergone the
mukanda circumcision ritual returns to the village as an adult, and now occupies
a different social role and is treated differently. Turner did not attribute such an
unambiguous power of social transformation to cultural performances, and thus did
not acknowledge performative genres such as literature, theater, music, or sport as
fully “liminal” in character. He preferred the label “liminoid,” a distinction that was
later largely abandoned by scholars utilizing Turnerian theory. This also seems to
contradict his experiments in ritual re-enactment as potentially transformative, but
perhaps the way to explain this seeming paradox is to acknowledge that at the time
of his untimely death at the age of 63, these theories were still in the formative stage
and he had not yet fully resolved the contradictions.
Certainly, Turner and Schechner were aware of work by other scholars who had
been considering the role of performance in folklore, linguistics, sociology, and
other disciplines since the 1960s (Abrahams 1977, 1986; Alland 1967; Bauman
1977; Ben-Amos and Goldstein 1975; Hymes 1964, 1975; Turnbull 1979). Increasing
numbers of scholars shared an understanding of cultural performances as “temporally
condensed” moments when participants consciously represented and evaluated social
values, roles, and institutions. Clifford Geertz did not cite this work in his widely
read essay, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” but a much-quoted phrase in that
essay captured the essential point that cultural performances are “a story [people]
tell themselves about themselves” (Geertz 1972).
Singer and Geertz saw cultural performances as reflections or condensations of
cultural meanings. Turner went much further; he argued that the relationship between
cultural performances and mundane social life was not just unidirectional; it was
reciprocal and reflexive. Cultural performances were a “text in context,” a dialectic
between dramatic and sociocultural processes in a given place and time. In fact, he
argued that cultural performances often contained revolutionary or transformative
potential due to their liminal character (Turner 1988, 21–22, 29).
6 S. Brownell and P. R. Frese

The Wenner-Gren Symposia and the Collaboration

with Schechner

The foundation of what we know today as an experiential, performative anthropol-

ogy was laid in the 1970s. A series of four symposia funded by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research probed the potential of interpretive and
symbolic approaches to illuminate cultural performances. Wenner-Gren, the pre-
mier grant agency for the discipline of anthropology, never funded as many as four
symposia for another core group of scholars, demonstrating the importance that the
discipline assigned to these explorations. Max Gluckman, Sally Falk Moore, and
Victor Turner organized the first in 1974 under the title “Secular Rituals Considered:
Prolegomena Toward a Theory of Ritual, Ceremony and Formality.” It included many
luminaries of the time, such as Erving Goffman, Jack Goody, and Terence Turner.
The symposium explored the idea that some rituals are not fundamentally religious.
The participants asked what a theory of ritual would look like if the supernatural
element were stripped away from it; were there other defining features that sufficed
to define ritual? While the participants generally agreed that “secular ritual” existed,
there was debate about how far the category could be extended (Moore and Myerhoff
1977).
The second Wenner-Gren symposium, held in 1977, has gone down into the history
books as the occasion that launched the legendary collaboration between Turner
and Schechner. Schechner remembered, “I was happily drawn into Turner’s net in
the Spring of 1977” when Turner invited him to participate in a Burg Wartenstein
Symposium; he tells the story in Chapter 2 in this volume. “Cultural Frames and
Reflections: Ritual, Drama and Spectacle,” organized by Turner, Barbara Myerhoff,
and Barbara Babcock, was held at Burg Wartenstein, the castle in Austria that had
been bequeathed to the foundation by its benefactor and namesake, Axel Wenner-
Gren. While Turner and Schechner had been aware of each other’s work before then, it
was in preparation for that conference that they met for the first time. The symposium
was “a performance in itself” (Stoeltje 1978, 51), bringing together “anthropologists,
literary critics, folklorists, a historian, a semiotician and impresario, a dramatist
and stage director, novelist, poets, and an ethnopoetician – participant observers
and observer-participants preoccupied with many kinds of cultural performance”
(MacAloon 1984b, 2). Interwoven with the conference papers were poetry readings,
dramatic techniques, storytelling, and viewings of Fellini’s La Strada and the film
version of Dionysus in ’69, the avant-garde play that had established Schechner’s
reputation in theater. The resulting edited volume, Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle:
Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (MacAloon 1984a), could only
capture a fraction of what went on; the more important legacy probably derived from
the fact that, rather than answering the original questions, the symposium altered the
models of reality that the participants brought to the table in the first place (Stoeltje,
451), and each of them returned to their work at least slightly transformed.
In 1978, the Turners, along with Barbara Myerhoff and Erving Goffman, joined
an intensive, two-week summer workshop of about a dozen anthropology and drama
1 The Foundations of Experiential Performance Pedagogy 7

students and teachers organized by Schechner in New York. Schechner believed,

“This intense summer workshop…laid the groundwork for what Turner and his wife
Edith called ‘performing ethnography’” (1990, xv).
The students re-wrote the social dramas described in Turner’s ethnography of the
Ndembu as scripts to be performed in the class. However, Turner admitted that for
him, crafting a “play” from ethnographic experience was not easy:
Particularly since I had no skill or experience in direction, the task of communicating to
the actors the setting and atmosphere of daily life in a very different culture proved quite
formidable. In one’s own society an actor tries to realize “individual character,” but takes
partly for granted the culturally defined roles supposedly played by that character….These
roles are made up of collective representations shared by actors and audience, who are usually
members of the same culture. By contrast, an actor who enacts ethnography has to learn the
cultural rules behind the roles played by the character he is representing. How is this to be
done? (1979, 85)

The final two Wenner-Gren symposia were fully devoted to exploring the inter-
section of anthropology and theater as the outcome of the bond that had developed
between Turner and Schechner in the 1977 symposium. The first, “Yaqui Ritual and
Performance,” was a symposium on Yaqui deer dancing held at the Oracle Confer-
ence Center and at the Pascua Pueblo near Tucson in 1981. By this time, the stated
goal of the meetings had evolved so as to “approach the genres of theatre, dance,
music, sports, and ritual as a single, coherent group, as performance, where it was
hoped that the conferences would lay the groundwork for proposing general princi-
ples or ‘universals of performance’” (website of Wenner-Gren Foundation). The final
symposium in 1982 in New York City, “Contemporary Japanese Theater: Wadeda
Shogekiji” included a welcoming ceremony by a Korean shaman, a Japanese noh
drama, and an Indian kutiyattam drama held at the Japan Society. The participants
also attended other events, including a church service at the Institutional Church of
God in Christ in Brooklyn, an experimental theater performance in a 23rd Street store-
front theater, and “A Chorus Line” on Broadway. The two symposia were published
as By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (Schechner
and Appel 1990).
Turner and Schechner crafted an innovative perspective on performing ethnog-
raphy that laid the foundation for a critical exploration of all kinds of performative
behaviors:
we examine the relationship between the two modes of acting – in “real life” and “on stage”
– as components of a dynamic system of interdependence between social dramas and cultural
performances. Both dramatistic and textual analogies then fall into place. (Turner 1990, 16)

Turner borrowed an image for the relationship between life and stage that Richard
Schechner had developed, a figure eight laid on its side, or an infinity symbol. One
loop represented social drama and the other stage drama, connected in the center by
a processual flow from the implicit and hidden to the overt and manifest, and back
again: Stage drama contributes aesthetic models that implicitly shape how social
dramas “play out” (to use a theatrical pun), and social dramas contribute social
processes that implicitly shape the dramatic plotlines of plays (1982, 73–74). The
8 S. Brownell and P. R. Frese

never-ending and double-sided loop was also reminiscent of a Möbius strip, another
way of envisioning (uppercase) Performance and (lowercase) performance as two
sides of a single social process.
We should observe at this point that a parallel, yet unconnected lineage of schol-
arship integrated the study of performance and anthropology in the same period. In
1976, the director Peter Brook, then a “theatrical cult figure,” created a play adap-
tion of anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People, an ethnography of the
displaced Ik tribe in Uganda. While the play had a mixed reception and left many
viewers “puzzled” (Weinraub 1976), it did alert Victor Turner to “the possibility of
turning suitable ethnographic data into playscripts” (1979, 82):
That experiment persuaded me that cooperation between anthropological and theatrical peo-
ple was not only possible but also could become a major teaching tool for both sets of partners
in a world many of whose components are beginning to want to know one another.

Nathan Garner, a trained actor and professor of theater studies, was in the audience
for the opening night of The Ik, and had a very different response from the New York
Times critic. Although he had attended the rehearsals, he was “thoroughly captivated”
by the way the play made “that which was remote and inaccessible both relevant and
attainable” (Allen and Garner 1997, 3). One year after the workshop organized by
Schechner in New York, Garner collaborated with Turnbull to co-direct a Humanities
Institute at George Washington University on “Anthropology, Drama and the Human
Experience: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Social Values” funded
by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Turnbull and Garner 1979). Some
years later, Turnbull reflected on the need for a relationship between anthropology and
theater in his review of Schechner’s The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance:
Those of us who do not follow theatre intensively are deprived of a fresh and exciting look at
a vitally important part of human behavior to which we as anthropologists have given far too
little attention. Too often we either dismiss theatre as entertainment, or force entertainment
into our conceptual framework by removing it from that category and treating it under some
such rubric as “ritual drama.” (1985, 84)

The statement seems to indicate that Turnbull disagreed with Turner’s melding of
theater with ritual theory; we should note, however, that Turner himself did not use
the phrase “ritual drama,” and the reference is left vague. It appears that there was
little or no cross-fertilization between the two groups. The collaboration between
Schechner and Turner is not mentioned, even though Turnbull acknowledged in his
review of Schechner’s book that he had “been experimenting with a new technique
that enables us not only to bring life to our teaching, but also gives students and
teachers room to explore and experiment” (Turnbull 1985, 84–85). The Turnbull-
Garner lineage produced a separate body of works melding theater with anthropology
in the classroom using a somewhat different approach, as discussed below.
Another random document with
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who would lead him to Stephan and Maria. But the rustling stopped.
After a little while he went on, frowning. Later the rustling began
again, somewhat nearer.
And then Cunningham heard whistles far off in the thickets. He
heard other rustlings, as if men were moving swiftly through the
undergrowth. These last sounds came from both sides of him. And
then he came suddenly upon a young Stranger, running headlong
toward him with his hand on his knife-hilt. The Stranger lifted his
hand, unsmilingly, and ran on.
“Stephan,” cried Cunningham; “where is he?”
The runner waved for Cunningham to continue as he was going
and disappeared. The mysterious sounds continued, to right and to
left. Then everything was abruptly very still.
Cunningham halted uncertainly. There was no trace of a path
anywhere. The earth fell away sharply at one side but he had lost all
sense of direction and did not know which way to go. Then he heard
a thrashing below him as if someone were moving rapidly to cut him
off.
Then there was the sound of panting near by and a small boy ran
into view. He was a young Stranger, an aquiline-nosed, brown-eyed
youngster with the legs of a race-horse.
“Hi, there,” shouted Cunningham. “Where’s Stephan?”
The boy gasped in relief and flew toward him. He thrust a bit of
paper into Cunningham’s hand and stood panting. Cunningham
unrolled the scrap. On it was written in awkward letters:

“Someone follows to kill you. What will happen if we kill him?”

Cunningham started. Vladimir! He’d sent his servant to bushwhack

him.
“They’ll hang,” he said grimly. “Tell them not to do it.”
The boy nodded and started off.
“Wait!” called Cunningham. “Will they stop, since I’ve said so?”
“No,” panted the boy. “They kill him already, I think.”
He sped away, down toward the spot where the thrashing in the
bushes sounded as if someone were trying to head Cunningham off.
Cunningham clenched his fists and ran after him, determined to stop
the foolishness.
The boy vanished suddenly. A figure started up.
“Wait! He lives yet! Wait!”
But Cunningham plunged on, not understanding. He only hoped to
be in time to keep the Strangers from worse trouble than they were
already in.
He burst through a thicket as warning cries sounded suddenly
from all sides. And there was Vladimir’s servant, staring stupidly
about him in sudden fright at the sound of many voices. He was
waist-high in brushwood. He swerved in panic at the sound of
Cunningham’s rush; then his face lighted with ferocity. With lightning
quickness he had leveled a weapon and fired.
Cunningham’s life was due to the fact that he had just tripped
upon one of the innumerable small boulders strewn all over the
slopes. He was falling as the bullet left the gun. He felt a searing
pain in his left shoulder and crashed to the ground. Maria’s voice
shrilled in anguish.
“Dead! He is killed!”
The breath was knocked out of Cunningham, but he struggled to
shout that he was all right, and was afraid to because the servant
might pot at him again.
But then he heard half a dozen little metallic clangings, like the
rattle of steel knife-blades on rock. The air was full of minor
whirrings. And then he heard a sudden agonized bellow, like the
roaring of a wounded bull. And then a man screaming in horrible
terror.
 10

There was an air of formality, even of solemnity, in the gathering that

faced Cunningham several hours later. A full two hundred Strangers
were gathered in a little glade with slanting sides that formed a sort
of amphitheater. Scouts were hidden in the woods beyond.
And Maria was there, with a white and stricken face which dashed
Cunningham’s joyous mood. Vladimir’s servant was there too, ashen
with dread and with a crude bandage about his arm where a
throwing-knife had gone through his muscles as he tried to shoot
Cunningham a second time. And Stephan, Maria’s father, with his
features worn and very weary.
Cunningham’s shoulder had been dressed with crushed plantain-
leaves. It was a tiny wound at best, hardly worth more than adhesive
plaster. The bullet had barely nicked the skin, but Maria had wept
over it as she bound it up.
Cunningham had felt that this was no time for common sense. He
knew.
“I love you,” he whispered as she bent down above him.
Brimming eyes met his for an instant.
“And I love you,” she said with a queer soft fierceness. “I tell you,
because I will never see you again. I love you!”
Cunningham felt a nameless dread. Stephan looked at him with
dreary, resolute eyes. Maria’s lips were pinched and bloodless. The
Strangers regarded him with somber faces which were not
unfriendly, but perturbingly sympathetic.
The gathering seemed to be something like a court. The women
were gathered around the outer edges. The men stood about a rock
on which Stephan had seated himself. Maria stood beside him.
Cunningham found himself thrust gently forward.
“My friend,” said Stephan wearily, “you find us gathered in council.
Men say that you kissed my daughter, Maria.”
Cunningham flushed, then stood straight.
 “I did,” he said evenly. “I ask your permission to marry her. Is it a
crime for me to speak to her first and have her answer?”
Stephan shook his head wearily.
“No. No crime. And if you were one of us I would be glad. I think
you are a man. I would join your hands myself. But you are not of our
people.”
“And who are you,” demanded Cunningham, “that I am not fit to
marry into?”
Stephan’s voice was gentle and quaintly sympathetic.
“We have killed one man who knew the answer to that question,”
he said in the teasing soft unfamiliar accent that all the Strange
People had. “We do not wish to kill you. And you are not unfit to
marry my daughter. My daughter, or any of us, is not fit to marry
you.”
Cunningham shook his head.
“Let me be the judge of that.”
Again Stephan made a gesture of negation.
“I think you are our friend,” he said heavily. “We need a friend of
those who are not like us. We may die because we have not such a
friend. But you must come here no more. What says the council?”
A murmur went up about the amphitheater—a murmur of
agreement. Cunningham whirled with clenched fists, expecting to
see hostile faces. Instead, he saw friendly sorry ones.
“He must not come again,” ran the murmur all about the crowd, in
the faint and fascinating dialect that could not ever be identified. Men
gazed at Cunningham with a perturbing sympathy while they
banished him.
“But why?” demanded Cunningham fiercely. “I am your friend. I
came hundreds of miles because the picture of Maria drew me. I
refused offers of bribes. That man”—he pointed at Vladimir’s servant
—“tried to kill me only today, only because I am your friend. And
what have I asked of you? If Maria tells me to go, I will go. But
otherwise——”
Stephan put his hand on Cunningham’s shoulder.
“You must not come again,” he said quietly, “because Maria loves
you also. Our people know such things quickly. She has said that
she loves you. And we dare not let our women marry any man but
one of ourselves. It is not that we hate you. We kept that man from
killing you today, and we would have killed him if you said so. We will
kill him for you now, if you tell us. But we dare not let one of our
women marry you. So you must go.”
“Will Maria tell me to go?” demanded Cunningham fiercely.
“Yes,” said Maria, dry-lipped. “Go! Oh-h-h-h. Go, if you love me!”
She flung herself down upon the grass and sobbed. Some of the
women murmured to each other and one or two moved forward and
patted her shoulders comfortingly.
“She tells you to go,” said Stephan wearily, “because we would
have to kill you otherwise.”
“But why? Why?” demanded Cunningham desperately.
Stephan rose from his seat and spread out his hands.
“Because no woman can ever keep a secret from the man she
loves,” he said wearily. “Some day she would tell you who we are.
And then you would hate her and hate us. You would turn from her in
horror, and you would denounce us. And we would die, swiftly. I am
not happy, my son. Maria is my daughter and I would see her happy.
But some day she would tell you who we are——”
Cunningham found himself being crowded gently away from
Maria. He thrust himself fiercely against the pressure.
“But who are you?” he cried savagely. “Dammit, I don’t care who
you are! You’re making her cry! Let me pass! Let me get——”
Stephan made a gesture. With the quickness of lightning
Cunningham was seized by a hundred hands. He fought like a fiend
against the innumerable grips that clasped his hands, his arms, his
feet. But they were too many. He stopped his struggling, panting,
and stared raging at Stephan.
“We give you a gift,” said Stephan quietly. “Gold, my son. Much
gold. Because if Vladimir tells our secrets we will all be killed, and he
threatens to tell.”
“I don’t want your money,” panted Cunningham savagely. “I want
this silly mystery ended! I want Maria! I want——”
“Go in peace,” said Stephan drearily.
 Cunningham was laid upon the ground and tied fast. He struggled
with every ounce of his strength, but in vain. The Strange People
were too many and too resolute. But they seemed to take pains not
to injure him. Indeed, when they put him in a litter and started off with
him, there seemed to be a consistent effort by the bearers not to
make him even uncomfortable.
Cunningham raged and tore at his bonds. Then he subsided into a
savage silence. His lips were set into a grim firmness. Maria sobbing
upon the grass ... this abominable sympathy for him....
The litter stopped. They took him out and cut his bonds. They
offered him the bags of hammered gold-pieces again.
“I don’t want them,” he said with grim politeness. “I warn you, I’m
coming back.”
The leader of his escort was the young man who had first come
out of the woods the first time Cunningham had seen the Strangers.
He nodded gravely.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I loved a girl not of our people, last year.”
The litter-bearers had vanished into the woods. Cunningham
matched at a straw of hope. Perhaps here was a friend, or even a
source of help.
“You understand,” he said in a hurried, eager undertone. “Perhaps
we can——”
“I gave her up,” said the young Stranger quietly. “My people would
have killed her if I had married her. You see, I might have told her.”
He shrugged and pointed off through the woods.
“Coulters is there,” he said gravely. “You would not take gold. I am
sorry. But we think you are a man.”
“I’m coming back,” said Cunningham grimly.
The Stranger nodded and touched the hilt of his knife regretfully.
He swung away and vanished in the underbrush.
Cunningham started toward Coulters. He knew they would be
watching him. But perhaps a quarter of a mile on the way he
stopped. He heard nothing and saw nothing. He slipped aside into
the woods. And he had gone no more than a dozen paces before
there was a little golden glitter in a ray of the dying sun. A knife had
flashed past his face not two feet away. He turned back, raging.
 Later he tried again. And again a warning knife swept across the
path before him.
 11

Cunningham had nearly reached the valley in which the hotel was
built when he saw Gray below him, climbing sturdily up into the eyrie
of the Strange People. Gray had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Gray!” shouted Cunningham.
Gray stared and abruptly sat down and mopped his forehead. He
waited for Cunningham to reach him.
“Damn you, Cunningham,” he said expressionlessly, “I like you,
you know, for all I think we may be working against each other. And
word’s just gone in to Bendale that you’ve been killed by the
Strangers. I was going up in hopes of getting to you before they
wiped you out. And I already had cold chills down my back, thinking
of the knife that nearly went into it yesterday.”
“I’m safe enough,” said Cunningham bitterly, “but I’m run out of the
hills.”
“Best thing, maybe,” said Gray. “I’m hoping, but I think there’ll be
fighting there tonight. A posse’s going to raid the Strangers after
dark.”
“I’m going to raid the hills tonight,” said Cunningham fiercely, “and
bring Maria away with me. I’ll marry her in spite of all the Strangers
in creation.”
Gray grunted as he heaved to his feet. “You’re a fool,
Cunningham, and I’m another. If you go, I go too. I might learn
something, anyhow.”
Cunningham poured out the story of what had happened to him
during the day, as they made their way down to the hotel. The sole
objection to him lay in the fact that if Maria loved him, some day she
would tell him who the Strangers were. And she did love him.
Vladimir was the only outsider who knew their secret and he was
threatening to disclose it, on what penalty Cunningham did not know.
“Maybe,” said Gray quietly, “it would be a good thing if Vladimir did
tell what he knows. But I suspect he won’t, and for your sake I’d like
to see you safely married to that girl you’re so keen about before he
did start to talk. I’m with you tonight, Cunningham.”
“Better stay behind,” said Cunningham curtly. “They’ll be watching
for me.”
“No,” said Gray quietly. “I sent some wires today and they may not
be strong enough. Two of us might get her out where one wouldn’t.
And I’m thinking that if you do marry her and she does tell you the
secret of the Strangers, it might avert a tragedy. I’ve done all I can
without certain knowledge. Now, watch your tongue when we reach
the hotel.”

Cunningham ignored the raging astonishment with which Vladimir

saw him, and was savagely amused at the worriment the man
showed. Vladimir had sent his servant after Cunningham to kill him,
and had been so certain of the attainment of that object that he had
already broadcast a tale of Cunningham’s death which laid it at the
Strangers’ door.
Cunningham waited for darkness. He was sure he had been
watched back to the hotel. But after darkness was complete and
before the moon rose he and Gray slipped secretly out of the house.
They struck off down the valley, and when the monstrous ball of the
full moon floated over the hills to the east, they made their way
beneath thick trees, lest the moonlight show them to hidden
watchers. They had gone perhaps a mile when Gray pointed
suddenly upward.
Far, far up, where a tree-grown peak ended in a bald and rocky
knob, fires were burning. Plainly visible in the clear night air, it could
be seen that there were many fires and many people about them.
Through the stillness, too, there came half-determinate sounds
which might have been singing, or chanting, or some long-continued
musical wailing.
The moon was shining down upon the valley, with its tidy New
England farmhouses—upon Coulters, where uncomfortable rural
police officers tried to convince themselves that they would be quite
safe in dealing with the Strange People—upon Bendale, with its
electric lights and once-a-week motion picture theater. And the same
moonlight struck upon a ring of fires high up in the mountains where
the Strangers moved and crouched. Old women gave voice to the
shrill lament that was floating thinly through the air.
Gray glanced once at Cunningham’s face and if he had been
about to speak, he refrained. Cunningham was making grimly for the
hills.
The woods were dark. The two men crept through long tunnels of
blackness, where little speckles of moonlight filtered through
unexpectedly and painted the tree-trunks in leopard-spots. The
valley had been calm, but as they climbed, the wind began to roar
over their heads, rushing among the tree-branches with a growling
sound. That noise masked the sound of their movements. Once they
saw one of the Strangers cross a patch of clear moonlight before
them. He was moving softly, listening as he half trotted, half walked.
“Sentry,” whispered Gray.
Cunningham said nothing. They went on, and heard voices
murmuring before them in a foreign tongue. They halted and swung
to the right. Perhaps two hundred yards on they tried again to
continue up toward the heights. A crashing in the underbrush made
them freeze. A Stranger trotted within five paces of them, peering
about him cautiously. Only their immobility saved them from
detection.
When he had gone they made for the spot from which he had
come. It was breathless work because at any instant a liquid little
glitter in the moonlight—a throwing-knife—might be the only herald
of a silent and desperate attack.
But they made their way on and upward. It seemed as if they had
passed through the ring of sentries. The trees grew thinner. The wind
roared more loudly above their heads. And suddenly they saw the
glow of many fires before them.
If they had gone carefully before, now they moved with infinite
pains to make no noise. A single voice was chanting above the
wind’s screaming. Gray listened and shook his head.
“I thought I knew most languages by the sound of them,” he
whispered, “or could guess at the family anyhow. I worked on Ellis
Island once. But I never heard that one.”
 They went down on their hands and knees for the last hundred
yards. Then they could see. And Cunningham stared with wide eyes,
while Gray swore in whispers, shaking with excitement.
There were a dozen huge bonfires placed in a monster circle
twenty yards across. They roared fiercely as the flames licked at the
great logs they fed upon. And the wind was sweeping up from the
valley and roaring through them and around them and among them.
The rushing of the wind and the roaring of the fires made a steady,
throbbing note that was queerly hypnotic. The flames cast a lurid
light all around, upon the trees, and the rocks, and the Strange
People, and the vast empty spaces where the earth fell away
precipitously.
A single aged man chanted in the center of the twelve huge
beacons. He was clad in a strange, barbaric fashion such as
Cunningham had never seen before. And the Strange People had
clasped hands in a great circle that went all about the blazes, and as
the old man chanted they trotted steadily around and around without
a pause or sound.
The old man halted his chant and cried a single sentence in that
unknown tongue. From the men in the circle came a booming shout,
as they sped with gathering speed about the flames. Again he cried
out, and again the booming, resonant shout came from the men.
“The sunwise turn,” panted Gray. “Widdershins! It’s magic,
Cunningham, magic! In New Hampshire, in these days!”
But Cunningham was thinking of no such things as magic, white or
black. He was searching among the running figures for Maria. But he
did not see her. The barbaric garb of the Strangers confused his
eyes. That costume was rich and splendid and strange and utterly
beyond belief in any group of people only eight miles from a New
England mill-town with an accommodation train once a day.
“Magic!” cried Gray again in a whisper. “Cunningham, nobody’ll
believe it! They won’t, they daren’t believe it! It’s impossible!”
But Cunningham was lifting himself up to search fiercely for a sight
of the girl he had found at the end of the route to romance and to
high adventure. Here were strange sights that matched any of the
imaginative novels on which aforetime he had fed his hunger for
romance. Here was a scene such as he had imagined in the midst of
posting ledgers and day-books in a stuffy office on Canal Street. And
Cunningham did not notice it at all, because he was no longer
concerned with adventure. He had found that. He was fiercely
resolved now to find the girl who loved him and whose love had been
forbidden by the laws of the strange folk of the hills.
He saw her. Not in the circle. She was crouched down on the
grass amid a group of women. Rebellion was in every line of her
figure. Cunningham loosened his revolver. It was madness, but——
A shout rang out sharply. And the running line of men broke and
milled. Cunningham saw a hundred hands flash to as many knife-
hilts. He saw the sheriff and four frightened-looking constables come
plunging out of the brushwood, shouting something inane about
halting in the name of the law. There was a shout and a scream, and
then a man’s voice raised itself in a wild yell of command and
entreaty. Cunningham’s own name was blended in a sentence in that
unintelligible language.
The Strangers darted for the encircling woods. The women
vanished, Maria among them. There was only a blank space in the
open lighted by monster flames, and the sheriff and two constables
struggling with a single figure of the Strangers.
“Go git ’em!” roared the sheriff, holding fast to the captive. “Git
’em! They’re scared. Ketch as many as ye kin!”
Cunningham felt Gray holding him down in an iron grasp.
“Don’t be a fool!” rasped Gray in a whisper. “It’s too late! The
Strangers got away, all but one.”
The other men were racing about here and there. They found
nothing but a bit of cloth here, and a woman’s embroidered cap
there, left behind in the sudden flight.
The struggle in the open space ceased abruptly. The sheriff
triumphantly called to the others.
“I got one now! Dun’t be scared! We got a hostage!” He reared up
and yelled to the surrounding forest: “Dun’t ye try any o’ your knife-
throwin’ tricks! This feller we got, if we dun’t get down safe, he dun’t
neither! Dun’t ye try any rescuin’!”
 He bent down to jerk his prisoner upright. And Cunningham heard
him gasp. He chattered in sudden stillness and the others huddled
about him.
“Dead!” gasped one of them.
“He stabbed hisself, I tell ye,” shrilled the sheriff. “He stuck his own
knife in hisself!”
The five ungainly figures stared at each other, there amidst the
roaring, deserted bonfires. One of them began to whimper suddenly.
“They—they’ll be throwin’ their knives all the way down to the
valley!” he gasped. “They’ll be hidin’ behind trees an’ a-stabbin’ at
us.”
The sheriff’s teeth began to chatter. The others clutched their
weapons and gazed affrightedly at the woods encircling them.
“We—we got to try it,” gulped the sheriff, shivering. “We got to!
Else they’ll get guns an’ kill us here. If—if ye see anything movin’,
shoot it! Dun’t wait! If ye see anything, shoot....”
With staring, panic-stricken eyes, they made for the woods.
Cunningham heard them crashing through the undergrowth in the
darkness, whimpering and gasping in terror at every fancied sound.
They left behind them nothing but twelve great fires that began
slowly to burn low, and a crumpled figure in barbaric finery lying with
his face upturned toward the sky. It was the young Stranger who only
that afternoon had told Cunningham of the girl he had loved and lost
because she was not of the Strange People. He had stabbed himself
when captured, rather than be taken out of the hills and forced to tell
the secret of the Strangers.
 12

By morning the outside valleys were up in arms. One man—the

foreigner of the train—had been killed by the Strange People, and a
servant of Vladimir’s had disappeared among them. And witchcraft
had been believed in not too long ago in those parts. The wild
ceremony of the Strangers among their blazing fires was told and
retold, and with one known killing to their discredit and the long-
smoldering hatred they had inspired, at the end it was related as
devil-worship undiluted. Something out of Scripture came to be put in
it and men told each other—and firmly believed—that children were
being kidnaped and sacrificed to the Moloch out of the Old
Testament. The single Stranger who had been killed became another
human sacrifice, confusingly intermingled with the other and more
horrible tale, and there was no doubt in the mind of any of the local
farmers that the Strangers planned unspeakable things to all not of
their own kind.
Had any Stranger been seen without the hills, he would have been
mobbed by an hysterical populace. Sober, God-fearing men huddled
their families together and stood guard over them. Women watched
their children with their husbands’ shotguns in their hands. Wilder
and ever wilder rumors sped with lightning speed from homestead to
homestead in the valleys.
And all this was done without malice. The native-born people had
distrusted the Strange People because they were strange. They
disliked them because they were aloof. And they came to hate them
because they were mysterious. It is always dangerous to be a
mystery. The story of what the sheriff and his four constables had
seen among the fires on the heights became enlarged to a tale of
unspeakable things. It would have required no more than a leader
with a loud voice to mobilize a mob of farmers who would have
invaded the hills with pitchforks and shotguns to wipe out the
Strange People entirely.
 They did not fear the Strangers as witches, but as human beings.
They feared them as possible kidnapers of children to be killed in the
inhuman orgies the fire-ceremony had become in the telling. They
had no evidence of such crimes committed by the Strangers. But
there is no evidence of kidnaping against the gipsies, yet many
people suspect them of the same crime. Had any man spoken the
truth about the Strangers, he would have been suspected of horrible
designs—of being in sympathy with them. And because of the totally
false tales that sprang up like magic about their name, to be
suspected of sympathy with the Strangers was to court death.
Cunningham’s rage grew. Gray shrugged and rode furiously to
Bendale to send more telegrams. Vladimir went about softly, purring
to himself, and passed out bribes lavishly to those who could be
bribed, and told lies to those who preferred to be suborned in that
way.
He was holding back the plans of mobbing. The sheriff, acting on
his orders, broke up every group of wild-talking men as soon as it
formed. But Vladimir held the Strange People in the hollow of his
palm. Half a dozen murmured words, and the men who had taken
his lavished money would stand aside and let the simmering terror of
the countryside burst out into the frenzy of a mob. And then the hills
would be invaded by Christian men who would ferret out the
Strangers and kill them one by one in the firm belief that they were
exterminating the agents of Satan and the killers of innumerable
children.
It did not matter that Vladimir’s hold was based on lies. The lies
were much more exciting than the truth. The truth was dull and bare.
The Strangers had been dancing about the fires. The constables had
rushed out and they had fled, without attempting to resist or harm
their attackers. One of them had stabbed himself when caught. And
the truth was mysterious enough, and inexplicable enough, but it did
not compare with the highly colored tales of human sacrifice and
heathen orgies that had been embroidered upon the original tale.

Cunningham was inevitably in the thick of all these rumors. Men

came rushing with news. A Stranger had been seen lurking about
where children were playing. He was instantly suspected of planning
to kidnap one of them. He had been shot at and now was being
chased by dogs. A Stranger had stopped a doctor in the road and
asked for bandaging for an injured arm. He had been shot by one of
the constables the night before. Other Strangers guarded him lest
the doctor try to arrest him while he dressed the wound.
That was in the morning. As the day went on the reports became
more horrible. It became clear that if any Stranger showed his face
he would be shot at as if he were a mad dog.
Word came from one place. Two Strangers had been seen and
fired on. They vanished, leaving a trail of blood. From another place
came another report. An old Strange woman had come out of the
hills, to beg for medicines for their wounded. Dogs were set on her
as she screamed her errand. She fled, and knives came hurtling
from the brushwood, killing or wounding the dogs that were in
pursuit.
Gray had promised much. With a drawn and anxious face he had
told Cunningham that this day help must come. His telegrams must
have produced results. They must have had some effect! He had
long since dropped his pretense that his only mission in the hills was
the study of the Strange People’s dialect. He was off in Bendale,
struggling with a telephone, pleading with a long-distance operator to
give him a connection to somewhere—anywhere outside.
Noon came and passed. The afternoon waned, with the
inhabitants of the valley growing more and more hysterical in their
hatred of the Strange People, and more and more detailed and
convinced about the horrors they ascribed to them. The wholly
imaginary menace of the Strangers was making it more and more
difficult to prevent the formation of a mob. Men raved, wanting to
protect their children by wiping out the hill folk. Women grew
hysterical, demanding their annihilation.
Cunningham went to Vladimir. Vladimir blinked at him and licked
his lips.
“Your servant is a prisoner among the Strange People,” said
Cunningham, coldly. “I’m authorized to say he’ll be killed if a mob
enters the hills.”
 Vladimir smiled, and all his cruelty showed when he smiled.
“How are you authorized to speak for them?”
“Let that go,” said Cunningham grimly. “He’s alive and safe, but he
won’t be if that mob goes in.”
The sheriff came in hurriedly.
“Mr. Vladimir——” he began.
Cunningham cut into his report with some sharpness.
“Sheriff, the Strange People are holding Vladimir’s servant
prisoner, as a hostage. They’ll kill him if you raid the hills again.”
Vladimir laughed.
“He is vastly mistaken, sheriff. I had a servant here, it is true. But I
sent him to Boston, on a mission. And I had word from him yesterday
that he was quite safe and attending to my orders.”
He blinked at Cunningham and moved close to him.
“Fool,” he murmured gently, so that the sheriff could not hear, “do
you think his life counts any more than yours?”
The sheriff glared at Cunningham hatefully.
“Tryin’ to scare me, eh?” he rumbled. “I got enough on you to
arrest you. You’re in thick with them Strangers, you are. I reckon
jail’s the best place for you. You won’t get no chance to talk about
bribes there.”
Cunningham felt himself growing white with fury. His threat to
Vladimir had been a bluff, and Vladimir had shown complete
indifference to the fate of the man he had sent to murder
Cunningham. But there was one thing he would not be indifferent to.
“You try to arrest me,” he said softly to the sheriff, “and I’ll blow
your head off. And as for you, Vladimir”—he made his tone as
convincing as he could—“I just tell you that you’d better call that mob
off or I’ll tell them who the Strangers are and where they came from!”
Vladimir’s eyes flamed close to madness, while his cheeks went
ashen.
“So they told you!” he purred. “Sheriff, go to the door. I wish to
speak to this man privately.”
The sheriff, rumbling, moved away.
“My friend,” murmured Vladimir softly, “now I shall have to kill you.
Not myself, of course, because that would be illegal. And dangerous.
But I give you news. Today, while you and Gray were outside, a little
note was tossed into your window. I heard the breaking glass and
found it. It was from a girl, who signed, ‘Maria.’ She said that she
loved you and would wait for you at a certain spot to flee with you.”
Cunningham’s heart stopped. Vladimir laughed at his expression.
“Oh, she was met,” murmured Vladimir. “She was met—and
arrested. She is held fast. And tonight a story will go about and the
women of the neighborhood will learn where she is. She is in the
hotel here, safely bound. With such a tale as will be spread about, do
you not think the women will pull down the whole hotel to tear her in
bits? Now do you go and tell the secret of the Strangers! No one will
believe you. But you believe me!”
He tossed a scrap of paper to Cunningham. And Cunningham
knew that the story was true.
“Now,” said Vladimir, purring, “I shall give orders that you be
arrested. If you are taken, she will be torn to bits. And that is how I
kill you, my friend. That is how I kill you! For I do not want anyone to
live who will remember or believe the secret of the Strangers.”
 13

Then the news took a definitely dangerous turn. A farmer who was
hastening to Coulters was stopped by a band of Strangers. They had
taken his shotgun and shells from him, contemptuously tossing him
half a dozen of the square lumps of gold. The gold would pay for the
gun ten times over, but men raged. Another man came in foaming at
the mouth, with a similar tale. He had seen a Stranger and raised his
gun to fire as at a wild beast. A knife had flicked at him and gone
through the fleshy part of his arm. They took his gun and shells,
leaving gold to pay for them.
No one saw anything odd in firing on the Strangers at sight. But
everyone grew hysterically excited at the thought of the Strangers
taking guns with which to shoot back. Then a man rode up on a
lathered horse, shouting hoarsely that twenty Strangers had raided a
country store some six miles away. They had appeared suddenly.
When they left they took half a dozen shotguns—the whole stock—
three rifles, and all the ammunition in the store. They left gold to pay
for the lot.
Cunningham heard all this as one would hear outside sounds
during a nightmare. He was like a madman. He would have gone
rushing through the place in search of Maria but that it was still broad
daylight and there were twenty or more armed men in the place, all
mad with excitement and fury. As it was, Cunningham was in a cold,
clear-headed rage. He went to his own room and packed his pockets
with cartridges.
Vladimir was right in one respect. The natives were in no mood to
listen to the truth. They would believe nothing that he told them. He
was suspect, in any event. They classed him with the Strangers, and
they classed the Strangers with the beasts. Fighting such men was
not fighting law and order. The sheriff was bribed. The rest were wild
with rage and terror. They did not know they were catspaws for
Vladimir. Even the sheriff probably knew but little of Vladimir’s plans.
 He went into Gray’s room and searched for a possible second
revolver. As he pawed grimly among Gray’s possessions he heard
the sheriff speaking, through a partition. Gray’s room was next to that
occupied by Vladimir, and Cunningham abruptly realized how Gray
had obtained much information.
“I’m doin’ my best to hold ’em,” the sheriff was saying anxiously,
“but it’s gettin’ to be a tough job. I’d better send for militia——”
“Fool!” snarled Vladimir. “What do I give you money for? There will
be no fighting! We will march into the hills. We will pen up these folk
—surround them. If your mob kills a few, what harm? Afterward you
shall pick out your murderers—as many as you choose! They will
confess to anything you choose, after I have spoken to them. And
then the rest of the Strangers will move away. They will go away
forever, with me! I will take them!”
“But it looks bad——”
“They will lick my boots,” rasped Viadimir. “They will crawl upon
their knees and beg me for mercy. And I will give you four men to
hang. They will confess to their crime. And I will take the rest away.”
Cunningham nodded grimly. At least this clarified the situation a
little. Vladimir was afraid of the Strangers’ secret becoming known.
He only wanted to get them away. If he could find Maria and she
would tell him, and Gray brought the help he had promised——
Cunningham was not thinking for himself, except as his liberty
meant safety for Maria, and secondarily for the Strange People. But
he would have to go into every room in the hotel filled with armed
and suspicious men. It was lucky he had two guns. There would
surely be shooting. There would probably be a bullet or two for him.
“Now send your deputies to arrest Cunningham,” snapped
Vladimir on the other side of the wall. “Tell them to shoot him if he
resists. He was teaching the Strangers to shoot and advising them to
resist arrest. That is enough.”
“I’ll send a bunch,” whined the sheriff uneasily. “He’s a desp’rit
character. Talkin’ about accusin’ me of takin’ bribes....”
“You’ll be rich for life when this is over,” Vladimir purred.
“Remember that!”