Solving the payment problem: an interactional analysis of street performance
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Date
03/07/2017Author
Smith, Timothy Edward
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Abstract
This thesis investigates how street performers entertain passers-by and audience
members in exchange for money. Specifically, it investigates how this exchange
relationship is accomplished in light of exchange happening outside the routine
context of “the market”, where payment for goods and services is ordinarily
enforceable. In this regard, this thesis seeks to uncover the ways that exchange in
street performance is alternatively organised through donations, and how giving
donations are produced and recognised as interactionally relevant and morally
accountable actions. To that end, this thesis employs the allied approaches of
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. It empirically examines video
recordings of street performances, mostly collected at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Three kinds of street performance encounter are considered: these are musical
busking, living statue performing, and circle show performing. The order of the
discussions of these performances reflects the extent to which the performers
explicitly recruit interactional resources —including talk, gesture and material
objects—to morally obligate audience members and passers-by to give donations.
The main thrust of this thesis is that street performers, passers-by and audience
members collaboratively produce and recognise street performances as gifts that
should be reciprocated. The street performances are initially freely given, but
participation entails indebtedness that in various ways make remuneration
interactionally relevant. In this regard, this thesis also explores how money, value
and materiality feature in the giving and receiving of donations. This thesis provides
new knowledge about how street performance encounters are ordered, how moral
obligation is interactionally worked up through the sequential organisation of social
actions, and how money donations are exchanged in return for entertainment. It
also provides new understanding about how different kinds of street performance
encounters share organisationally similar properties for solving the “payment
problem”, but at the same time possess properties that are distinct.