Theatre state

In political anthropology, the theatre state is a political state directed towards the performance of drama together with ritual rather than more conventional ends such(a) as warfare together with welfare. power to direct or develop in a theatre state is exercised through spectacle. The term was coined by Clifford Geertz in 1980 in address to political practice in the nineteenth-century Balinese Negara, but its ownership has since expanded. Hunik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, for example, argue that advanced North Korea is a theatre state. In Geertz's original usage, the concept of the theatre state contests the conviction that precolonial society can be analysed in the conventional discourse of Oriental despotism.