Masters of their conditions: At the crossroads of health, culture and the performing arts

Abstract Achieving one’s cultural or clinical identity is a matter of performance. The performing body is made through a series of apprentice-ships that lead to mastery and then transmission. Performance, like culture and medicine, has its systems of learning, i.e. in the professions of the performing arts. This article examines the methodology of theater anthropology and other aspects of performance studies. Applications to intercultural work are described that make it possible for patient and healer to collaborate to master the condition. Key words embodiment • intercultural therapy • migration • performance studies • rehabilitation • ritual • theater anthropology Individuals with a medical or psychiatric condition are usually referred to as patients. Patients are more or less prisoners of their condition, be it illness, disability or any other trauma that may be clinically expressed. Learning to cope with an illness, its physical and psychological components, its social implications and its cultural specificities, compares with practices that can be learned through an apprenticeship. The performing arts involve forms of apprenticeship that can shape the body of a performer in ways that facilitate understanding the practice in terms of body, mind, soul and environment (spatial, temporal and sensory dimensions). Those who are able to learn these modes of performance progressively master the condition they are living. At some point, they are Vol 40(3): 299–328[1363–4615(200309)40:3;299–328;033594] Copyright © 2003 McGill University transcultural psychiatr