The Rally as Ritual: Dramaturgical Politics in Nigerian Hausaland

Abstract

The dramatic aspects of politics in general, and electoral campaigns in particular, have increasingly drawn the attention of students of the American political scene. In addition to Nimmo's scholarly investigations of these phenomena,2 even the general public has been exposed to the consumeristic and entertaining aspects of U.S.-style campaigning by such popular-selling books as The Selling of the President.3 However valuable the task of unmasking the nonpolitical means of achieving political ends, there is the danger, still recurrent in the theoretical investigations of western-oriented social science, of unduly extrapolating from one specific cultural context to the social universe. Thus, even if Nimmo is fundamentally correct in exploring the psychological and dramatistic functions of political action,4 it is less certain that his second-order generalizations possess equally universal or transcultural validity. (For example: Politics is playful, expressive drama by which [the masses] air needs to be with others, needs to be

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