Reflexivity

Reflexivity first entered into anthropological discourse in the late 1970s in response to several problematics that had emerged in the previous decade, but its use in the humanities and in sociology has a longer history. In the words of Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, two of its advocates, reflexivity "describes the capacity of any system of signification to turn back on itself, to make itself its own object by referring to itself" (p. 2). In the fields of literature, theater, and film, the term is used to describe formal devices by which cultural artifacts call attention to their own production. In the early twentieth century, reflexivity (also known as self-reflexivity, metaliterature, or metatheater) was particularly associated with experimental attempts to undermine the realist conventions of mainstream productions by inserting films (or film production) within films, having literary characters address their readers, and so on. Important early examples would include the work of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Luigi Pirandello's (1867–1936) Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), or Dziga Vertov's (1896–1954) film The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). While it is still associated primarily with experimental works, reflexivity is also found in mainstream cinema and theater.