Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
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Yoram S Carmeli
His research interests include modernism, religion, performance, and play. His publications include ‘Travelling circus: An interpretation’ (1988); ‘Text, traces, and the reification of totality: The case of popular circus literature’ (1994); and ‘Lion on display: Culture, nature, and totality in a circus performance’ (2003).
Abstract
Based on fieldwork carried out between 1975 and 1979, it was discovered that most of the circus performers were living and performing as families and many had traced their origins to circus families. The traveling conditions and relative isolation account for this family basis, as do the circus' labor-intensive economy (only an entire family's labor can provide for its needs), as well as the reproduction of its labor as the main source of the parents' long term security. The public expects to see a ‘family’ in an esoteric traveling show and the performing family strengthens its bonds through building the act in its own image. The performing family is there as through its ‘family’ performance, and invoking the audience's nostalgia, it perpetuates itself as well as the condition of social (and ontological) isolation in which the family-based circus emerged. The family, embodying ‘family’ among the circus performers, is not only a mode of economic survival, but a mode of being out of social time and out of relations.
About the author
His research interests include modernism, religion, performance, and play. His publications include ‘Travelling circus: An interpretation’ (1988); ‘Text, traces, and the reification of totality: The case of popular circus literature’ (1994); and ‘Lion on display: Culture, nature, and totality in a circus performance’ (2003).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Plant names and folk taxonomies: Frameworks for ethnosemiotic inquiry
- Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded
- Umwelt, milieu(x), and environment: A survey of cross-cultural concept mutations
- Bridging theories: A logical-functional perspective on languages
- The ‘handles’ and ‘sides’ of metaphor
- Here is the author! Hyperlinks as constitutive rules of hypertextual communication
- Race, pigskin, and politics: A semiotic analysis of racial images in political advertising
- The serpent's egg: Communication and the bio-semiotics of image making
- Semiotic interpretations of biological mimicry
- Symbol-intertextuality-deconstruction (on the dialectic of stability and variability of concept and symbol)
- Analyse paradigmatique d'un corpus de proverbes à l'aide des matrices de concepts
- Semiotic silence: Its use as a conflictmanagement strategy in intimate relationships
- Peirce on categories: Towards a metaphysical foundation of pragmatics
- Narrative and ontology in Hesiod's Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A catastrophist approach
- Traveling and family in the 1970s British circus
- Structures and semiotic systems
- Eye on Picasso
