Frame, flow and reflection: Ritual and drama as public liminality

What, at first glance, could be less close, less akin than drama and reflection? Drama demands a stage, actors, a heightened atmosphere, spectatorsthe smell of the crowd, the roar of the greasepaint. Reflection is at least one of the things one does with one's solitude. But to counter this opposi tion an anthropologist tends to think in terms not of solitary but of plural reflection, or, much betterplural reflexivity the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray understand, and then act on itself. Essentially, public reflexivity takes the form of a performance. The languages through which a group communicates itself to itself are not, of course, confined to talking codes: they include ges tures, music, dancing, graphic representation painting, sculpture, and the fashioning of symbolic objects. They aredramaticthat is literally "doing" codes. Public reflex ivity is also concerned with what I have called "liminality." This term, literally "being~on-a-threshold " means a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, dayto-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and orderand registering structural status. Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a time of enchantment when anything m ight even should, happen. Another way of putting it would be to say that the liminal in socio-cultural process is similar to the subjunctive mood in verbs -just as mundane socio-