How can media and performance studies take a place in the discipline of anthropology? IRitual, Performance, Mediademonstrates how individual inventiveness makes society a process of dynamic interaction between creativity and convention. Human beings perform their roles in accordance with the context of the situation--be it in theater, dance, or rites such as spirit invocation or pilgrimages--yet continue to creatively devise ways of extending their engagement with the situation. Case studies of human behavior in relation to contexts in which reality is more than that of everyday routines shows how people continue to actively construct the world in which they live, for the purpose of personal satisfaction and social advantage.