This article explores
the notions of performativity and performance in digital environments
from the combined perspective of linguistic anthropology and
folkloristics. In order to bring these diverging conceptual,
methodological, and disciplinary traditions into mutual contact, an
intermediary heuristic term of "performative enactments" is introduced.
Performative enactments are elaborated as events of communicative sign
behavior that foreground and make use of the principle of
performativity, although not performances proper in the sense of
manifesting a specific "mode of communication" (Bauman 1984).