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Ethnic students and academics currently affiliated with western or westernized academic institutions and whose research explores indigenous knowledge and cross-cultural subjects often find themselves in a methodological dilemma. Often this dilemma involves repression of knowledges they bring to the academia in order to conform to scientific methodological orthodoxy and gain acceptance within the scientific establishment. This article raises questions concerning such methodological repression that ethnic academics encounter in western institutions. To do this, the author draws on the methodological barriers he encountered in the course of his own research. In so doing, he opens a discussion of the limitations of established methodological orthodoxy in researching the subaltern in his or her own life-worlds. The article concludes with some suggestive pointers towards the enrichment of methodology.

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This article is based on a study of dance floors of Whyte Avenue in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As extended cases, the life processes on the floors are interpreted as manifestations of Canada's emotional history in the form of multiculturalism. Building on observations combined with informal and casual conversations, the study focuses on arousal and expression of emotions through bodily movements on the dance floors. The readings of these spaces along with their life processes are informed by the theoretical concepts of the "carnival" and the "grotesque" (Bakhtin), "liminality" (Turner), and the "civilizing process" and "informalization" (Elias and Wouters). In this theoretical framework, the particular emotional life processes that occur on the dance floors are rendered orderable as historically contingent phenomena that incarnate the wave of multiculturalization that shaped and has continued to shape the cultural, geographic, political, social, and psychological (emotional) landscapes of Canada since the 1960s.This essay is an extended case study of dance floor culture as a microcosm of historical emotional transformation of Canada within the greater context of the civilizing process in Western societies. This emotional transformation manifests itself through interrelated changes in cultural, social, and psychological texture between and within space and culture vol. 12 no.

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