Performing Culture : Stories of Expertise and the Everyday

Performing Culture presents a detailed and probing account of cultural studies' changing fixations with theory, method, policy, text, production, audience and the micro-politics of the everyday. John Tulloch encourages academics and students to take seriously the need to break down the separation between high and low cultural studies. Tulloch's case studies show that the performance of cultural meanings occurs in forms as diverse as The Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare and Chekhov productions and our everyday work and leisure encounters. Drawing upon anthropological and dramatic studies of performance, the book emphasizes that academic research also performs cultural meaning. A central feature of the book is its reflexive consideration of the representations of culture constructed by academic 'experts'. Performing Culture lays down a challenge for the future development of the subject. It will be required reading for students of cultural studies and the sociology of culture.