Drama is one of the main concepts of the performing arts. Drama is a phenomenon that occurs by practicing a design that consists of the components of words, actions, time, and space. When considering the two phases of design and practice as the concretization of the abstract mental activity of design through practice as a physical activity, the knowledge and instruments required for realizing these processes are provided by the designers and practitioners from within human life itself. In this context, the relationship that culture as a phenomenon that encompasses all of human life has with the drama that arises from human life and that offers an alternative existence is more direct and deeper than it might seem. This study focuses on the relationship between drama and culture. Culture has been conceptualized as both the result and cause of human life by being handled around the debates in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies.

From this point of view, this article investigates the similarities between drama and culture by referring to drama as an alternative to human life that arises from within human life and arguing that drama could be considered a reproduction of culture.

To investigate the possibility of establishing the relationship and similarities between drama and culture, this study seeks the abstract and concrete processes that are attributed to drama within the components and mechanisms of culture by considering culture in the context of communication, language, and acculturation. In this respect, the article evaluates drama as an inherent phenomenon within culture by considering human life holistically along the axis of the discussion of naturalness and artificiality as attributed to culture. Subsequently, under the heading of culture and communicativeness, this article argues that the human-specific communicative skill and the instruments and processes invented and constructed concerning this skill can be observed in the construction of drama. The next section discusses language and culture as two interconnected structures and identifies how language and culture are built on the shared reality that is reached by comparing conspecifics and that shapes human lives around the shared purposeful survival drive by providing communicativeness. In this context, the article claims drama to be limited to the language and culture in which it is born due to its inherence to human life. The last section involves culture and enculturation based on the etymology of the word culture and claims the drama that is born in human life and proposes an alternative existence to its ordinary existence to similarly contain the cultural stages of existence, functioning, and reproduction.

A similarity can be established between culture and drama through the concept of culture. The human species has built its language and culture by using all the elements of word,

action, time, and space regarding the perception of the reality it has established at the cognitive level homogeneously. In this way, if meaning and order are attributed to life based on cooperation and common purposefulness, one can argue that drama reproduces the same, this time as a designed alternative. In other words, drama may be conceived as an alternative to life by utilizing the mechanisms of signification and regulation unique to the human species.

The state of being designed that is attributed to drama is crucially similar to the artificiality attributed to culture. Just as culture is a structure designed by the interaction of the human species with the environment in which they live, drama is created by interacting with the culture in which it was born. Therefore, drama can be considered as an inherent phenomenon of culture instead of trying to tackle the culture one lives in as natural and drama as artificial and to analyze drama through contrast. Thus, drama can be considered a part of culture rather than something independent of culture.

The practice of drama is similar to the functioning of culture in terms of shared purposefulness and cooperation. As a designed whole, drama consists of the codes, symbols, and representations that are transferred from culture. Transforming the designed abstract drama into a concrete form by practicing it is similar to the construction of culture in terms of common purpose and cooperation. By using the instruments that enable humans to communicate, such as establishing a shared reality, coding, decoding, and using time and space, one can transform the drama born from culture into a part of the culture. The enculturation process is comparable to drama once the audience encounters it. Enculturation could have similarities to the audience encountering drama. Being an audience to the practice of drama and being exposed to the universe of meanings and symbols used by drama have similarities to being exposed to the practice of culture in the enculturation process.

The audience becomes a part of the drama to the extent that they are aware of the universe of meanings and symbols produced in the drama, just as they can be included in that culture as long as they know about it. In this context, given the similarities between drama and culture, this study concludes that drama, just like culture, can be divided into its components and examined with the anthropological and cultural scientific instruments used for culture. In fact, by considering drama as a part of culture rather than something independent of culture, once can access the knowledge of culture beyond the knowledge offered by the designed drama.

This study attempts to examine drama as a concept that belongs to the performing arts by using instruments belonging to social sciences and drawing from the fields of anthropology and cultural sciences.