对于一个学者来说,如果他的著述被同行肯定为有用、并进而被翻译为另一种语言,那将是最为荣幸的事情之一了。因此,我特别要感谢这本论文集的译者杨利慧和安德明,他们使我的著述能为中国同行们所使用。这里,也许读者诸君想了解一下本书收录的各篇论文所提出和阐释的表演研究方法背后的知识背景、以及这些观念在民俗学和相邻学科中被接受的情况,那么,下面我就简要地讲讲我从事表演研究的起因和发展的经过。我对表演(performance)的关注开始于20世纪60年代末期,当时是受到了多种因素殊途同归的影响。也许其中最重要的是我在宾夕法尼亚大学读博士学位期间,在语言人类学方面、尤其是在交流民族志(ethnography of communication)方面所受到的训练。在美国,语言人类学是人类学的四个主要分支学科之一(其他还有社会文化人类学、体质人类学以及考古学), It would be one of the most honorable things for a scholar to have his writings surely useful to their peers and then translated into another language. Therefore, I am particularly grateful to the translators Yang Lihui and An Deming for this essay. They made my work available to Chinese colleagues. Here, perhaps readers would like to know about the background of the knowledge behind the performance research methods presented and explained in the various essays included in this book, as well as the acceptance of these concepts in folklore and adjacent disciplines. Briefly talk about the causes and development of my performance research. My focus on performance began in the late 1960s when it was influenced by many factors, all at once. Perhaps the most important of these is my training in linguistic anthropology, especially ethnography of communication, during my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. In the United States, linguistic anthropology is one of the four major branches of anthropology (in addition to socio-cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and archeology)