Corinne A. Kratz

In Rhetorics of Value, Corinne A. Kratz explores how exhibition design creates and conveys values that have the potential to touch, educate, and engage visitors. Drawing on case studies from the Victoria and Albert Museum, museums in South Africa and Kenya, a Hawaiian resort hotel, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others, Kratz shows how exhibits help shape and narrate cultural categories, values, and histories while provoking questions and evoking memories and experiences. She crosses contexts to consider ethnographic, history, and art exhibits in national and community museums and other display settings. Through these examples, Kratz traces how exhibition designers combine objects, texts, images, lighting, audio, space, and narratives to craft a complex, multilayered communicative form that visitors experience as they move through museums. By investigating the relationship between audience reception and exhibition design strategies, Kratz contends that through design, exhibits can shape the ways we know, the stories we tell, and our contours of meaning and engagement.

In Rhetorics of Value, Corinne A. Kratz explores how exhibition design creates and conveys values that have the potential to touch, educate, and engage visitors. Drawing on case studies from the Victoria and Albert Museum, museums in South Africa and Kenya, a Hawaiian resort hotel, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others, Kratz shows how exhibits help shape and narrate cultural categories, values, and histories while provoking questions and evoking memories and experiences. She crosses contexts to consider ethnographic, history, and art exhibits in national and community museums and other display settings. Through these examples, Kratz traces how exhibition designers combine objects, texts, images, lighting, audio, space, and narratives to craft a complex, multilayered communicative form that visitors experience as they move through museums. By investigating the relationship between audience reception and exhibition design strategies, Kratz contends that through design, exhibits can shape the ways we know, the stories we tell, and our contours of meaning and engagement.

This reissue of "Affecting Performance" makes available a major work in performance studies, linguistic anthropology, ritual and symbolic studies, and African studies. A classic study widely used in the classroom, the book examines how ceremonial performance works and the contradictory dynamics of gender and ethnicity in Okiek initiation ceremonies in Kenya.Combining discourse analysis, semiotics, history, political economy, symbolic interpretation, and gender studies, Corinne Kratz examines the power of ritual to produce social transformation and explores how children are made into adults through initiation rites. Taking girls' passage into womanhood as her topic, Kratz considers dramatic structure, costume, song, ritual space, and the discourse, rhetoric, and poetics of ceremonial performance. Based on decades of research with the Okiek of Kenya, "Affecting Performance" demonstrates how representations of the central themes of initiation--gender relations and cultural identity--probe the tensions and contradictions that characterize relations between women and men, young and old, and the Okiek and their neighbors. Long-term fieldwork and extensive interviews with Okiek women and men of several generations enable Kratz to situate Okiek ceremonies culturally and historically. She provides a rich description of changes in Okiek life and ceremonies from 1900 to 1990. Kratz's sensitive and detailed analysis of ritual language and ritual action provides an important synthesis and critical perspective for understanding ceremonial structure and performance and for interpreting the efficacy of ritual performance both from actors' and observers' viewpoints.