Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1890s, reading turn-of-the-century anthropology, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison began to develop her theory of the ritual origins of theatre. Embarking on a series of “inconceivably primitive and savage” journeys, she started to leave behind the world of aesthetic antiquarianism and beautiful Greek theatricals, in search of surviving primitive ritual: performances that could efface the boundaries between spectator and spectacle, immerse one in an ecstatic collectivity, and transcend both beauty and theatre itself, which (as she wrote with anti-theatrical gusto) she had come to “loath[e].” This essay explores Harrison's particular version of ritual theory, her creation of an artefact- and performance-based theatre history, and her rejection of theatre (“frivolous mimicry”) for the primal dromenon, or rite, which remained for her the true essence of drama, – suggesting her importance for our understanding of theatrical modernism, the twentieth-century performance avant-garde, and what would eventually become some of the central concerns of performance studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".