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A Queen's Drowning: Material Culture, Drama, and the Performance of a Technological Accident
Author(s) -
Vannini Phillip
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2008.31.2.155
Subject(s) - performative utterance , drama , ethnography , redress , queen (butterfly) , accident (philosophy) , sociology , sympathy , citizen journalism , personhood , agency (philosophy) , aesthetics , history , media studies , art , visual arts , law , literature , social psychology , psychology , social science , anthropology , epistemology , political science , philosophy , hymenoptera , botany , biology
Drawing on ethnographic data collected among residents of northwest British Columbia's coastal and island residents, I examine a technological accident: the sinking of the M/V Queen of the North. This accident is examined as an instance of social drama, as a succession of what Victor Turner calls breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration and what in this case I call wrecking, coping, inquiring, and mending. Ethnographic description, performative representation, and dramaturgic analysis of the sinking yield the impression that the Queen of the North was a person. Examined throughout this article are the performative processes through which the personhood and agency of this material object is accomplished. In so doing I posit an original dramaturgic approach to technoculture .
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