Richard Bauman: performance, text, and the politics of making talk “count”.
Performance, genre, and how talk becomes portable
Today, I want to talk about Richard Bauman because he gives us a way to analyse spoken interaction that connects our last three articles.
From Hymes, you get the event-based view of language: who speaks, to whom, where, with what norms.
From Gumperz, you get the micro-tools: contextualisation cues and the fine-grained management of meaning in interaction.
From Kaplan, you get a hard reminder that context is not “background”. It is part of meaning, especially for indexicals and demonstratives.
Bauman’s move is different. He asks when, and by what signals, do participants treat language as a public display, and what changes once they do?
1. Performance is a frame, not a genre label
Bauman treats performance as an interpretive frame. It is not “a dramatic thing”. It is a socially recognisable way of packaging speech so that listeners evaluate it as a display.
A line that captures the whole stance is this:
“Performance is seen as representing an interpretive frame.” (Bauman, 1974, p. 1)
The point is methodological. If performance is a frame, we do not start by hunting for “folklore texts”. We start by looking for how speakers and audiences key that frame in real time.
2. Keying tells you when participants shift into “watch this”
Bauman borrows the interactional logic we already saw in Gumperz, but he uses it for a specific analytic target: the shift into performance.
He puts it plainly in his early statement of the programme:
“This framing is accomplished through the use of culturally conventionalized metacommunication.” (Bauman, 1974, p. 1)
So, what counts as “metacommunication” here?
Bauman gives a practical inventory of devices that often serve to key performance across cultures, including special codes, formulaic openings and closings, figurative language, and prosodic patterning:
“An etic list of communicative means … serving to key performance …” (Bauman, 1974, p. 14)
This is where Bauman links back to Gumperz in a non-trivial way. Gumperz shows us how meaning gets steered by cues that many analysts miss. Bauman shows us how a whole mode of interpretation gets switched on by cues, and how that switch changes what counts as “good”, “moving”, “clever”, or “skilled”.
Someone tells a story at dinner. The same story, in a flat delivery, can function as information. With a quoted voice, timing, and a punchline, it becomes a performance. Once keyed, the audience evaluates delivery, not only content. That is a different social activity.3. Performance creates accountability to an audience
Performance, for Bauman, is not decorative. It is a social contract: the speaker makes themself answerable for competence.
In his discussion of Malagasy kabary, he describes the role obligation in terms that translate cleanly to modern contexts:
“the assumeption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence [… ] From the point of view of the audience the act of expression […] is thus marked as subject to evaluation […]”. (Bauman, 1974, pp. 9, 10)
That line is one of Bauman’s most important contributions to linguistic analysis, because it turns “style” into a public moral economy. Once speech becomes performance, it becomes rankable, rewardable, mockable, and socially consequential.
This is also where Bauman improves on a simplistic reading of “communicative competence”. Hymes gives us the breadth of what counts as competent participation. Bauman shows us a special case where competence becomes an explicit public object.
4. Genre is not just taxonomy, it is social power
Bauman’s work on performance naturally pushes into genre. If performance is framed and evaluated, then genre is one of the main ways communities stabilise those evaluations.
With Briggs, Bauman argues that genre connects discourse organisation to power relations. Their abstract states the target clearly:
“This article addresses the relationship between discourse, textual and social order, and power …” (Briggs and Bauman, 1992)
The practical takeaway is blunt: genre labels do not merely describe. They authorise.
Calling something “a joke” can licence offensiveness.
Calling something “testimony” can demand belief.
Calling something “banter” can downgrade harm.
Calling something “a formal statement” can raise the burden of precision.
This is not far from Gumperz. It is the same basic sociolinguistic realism, but shifted from local inference to the larger, circulating packages that institutions and publics recognise.
5. Entextualisation and the portability of discourse
The modern payoff of Bauman’s approach is circulation: how stretches of talk become detachable, repeatable, and socially mobile.
A widely cited definition from Bauman and Briggs is:
“the process of rendering discourse extractable …” (Bauman and Briggs, 1990, p. 73)
Even those who have never used the term will know the phenomenon.
A line from a meeting gets quoted in an email thread.
A politician’s phrase becomes a headline.
A 20-second clip becomes “what they really said”.
A slogan gets printed on placards, then becomes a chant.
Once discourse becomes portable, it can be recontextualised. That recontextualisation is where power often sits: who selects the extract, who edits, who captions, who frames it as joke, scandal, proof, or threat.
This is also where my earlier Kaplan piece links back to Bauman. Indexicals, demonstratives, and temporal anchors (“here”, “now”, “this”, “that”) behave differently once talk moves contexts. Portability creates systematic opportunities for misunderstanding and manipulation.
6. What Bauman adds to Hymes and Gumperz
If I compress the comparison , it looks like this.
Hymes: what counts as a speech event, and what “competence” means in social terms.
Gumperz: how participants cue interpretation moment by moment.
Bauman: when talk becomes a framed display, how it gets evaluated, how it becomes detachable text, and how that detachability reorganises authority.
Bauman also makes a quiet but important methodological demand: we have to take participant evaluations seriously as data. If an audience treats something as performance, and treats a speaker as accountable for it, we cannot reduce that to analyst taste. It is part of the social action.
7. Limits and pressure points
Bauman’s framework is strong, but not frictionless.
The performance frame can be ambiguous.
People hedge: half-joking, ironic, “I am only saying”, “do not quote me”, “this is off the record”. These are metapragmatic manoeuvres that both invoke and resist accountability. Bauman gives us tools, but we still have to do careful empirical work.Digital environments complicate “audience”.
The audience may be absent, delayed, algorithmically selected, or hostile. Performance still exists, but “for whom?” becomes unstable.Analysts can over-apply entextualisation.
Not every quotation is socially meaningful. Some are noise. The strength of the concept can tempt us to treat all re-use as ideological work. The fix is the same as in our best Gumperz writing:stay close to evidence.
Conclusion
Bauman is a practical theorist. He helps us see that “performance” is not a decorative label for expressive talk. It is an interactional frame that participants actively build, recognise, and judge. Once that frame is in place, speech becomes publicly accountable, and competence becomes a social fact rather than an analyst’s impression. This pushes us beyond a purely textual approach to verbal art, because the unit of analysis is not only what was said, but how it was keyed, received, and evaluated in the moment. (Bauman, 1974; Bauman, 1977)
Bauman’s lasting lesson is that speech does not merely reflect society. Under the right framing, it becomes an object that circulates, accumulates authority, and reshapes what counts as truth.Bauman also gives us a disciplined way to talk about circulation. When discourse becomes extractable and repeatable, it can be relocated into new settings where it acquires different force, different audiences, and different consequences. That matters for folklore, but it matters just as much for institutions, media, and digital platforms, where quotation, clipping, captioning, and recontextualisation drive public meaning. If we take Hymes seriously on the social organisation of speaking, and Gumperz seriously on cue-based inference, Bauman shows us what happens when those interactional achievements harden into portable “texts” that travel and begin to act on people. (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Briggs and Bauman, 1992).
©Antoine Decressac — 2025.
Further reading:
Bauman, R. (1977/1984). Verbal Art as Performance. The foundational statement of performance as a frame, with method, examples, and analytic vocabulary.
Recent books (last 5 years):
Ahearn, L. M. (2021). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (3rd ed.). Clear, student-friendly routes into performance, ideology, and the ethnography of speaking, with modern examples.
Enfield, N. J., Kockelman, P. and Sidnell, J. (eds.) (2021). The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Broad, high-level coverage, useful if you want a contemporary map of the field that Bauman helped shape.
Duranti, A., George, E. and Riner, S. (eds.) (2023). A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Strong on how the field now treats circulation, publics, and institutions.
Gnanadesikan, A. (2025). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (2nd ed.). Not a Bauman book, but a useful companion for thinking about what happens when discourse moves from event to durable textual object. Manchester University Press