Cultural Evolution and Performance Genres: Memetics in Theatre History and Performance Studies

Abstract

The academic disciplines of theatre history and performance studies have yet to confront or make use of the growing trend toward Darwinian thinking in the social sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology. This essay focuses on exploring the application of memetics—a branch of cultural evolution theory—to theatre and performance history by using the phenomenon of wild animal shows, specifically big cat exhibitions, as a case study. A meme is the cultural equivalent of the "selfish" gene: a unit of imitation, representation, or information that forms the basis of a cultural inheritance system. A Darwinian historiography reframes causal factors as "selection pressures" and the culture of any particular time and place as a changing physical and social environment to which spectatorship, performance practices, and representational contents adapt over time. Memetics takes seriously the possibility that cultural traits such as performance traditions and genres evolve according to criteria that only make sense when viewed as if the adaptations benefited the memes' own replication, frequency, and survival over time. Where evolutionary psychology and other cognitive approaches emphasize the innate cognitive biases of our social minds, memetics would trace the inherited cultural lineage of specific attitudes, beliefs, and practices, all of which are realized in the social sphere as information that has been replicated and transmitted.

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