Performing Ethnography

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Drama Review: TDR. Anthropological literature is full of accounts of dramatic episodes which vividly manifestthe key values of specific cultures. Often these are case-histories of conflicts between lineages or factions, spreading into feuds, vendettas, or head-hunting expeditions. Frequently they describe how criminal behavior is defined and handled. Other accounts describe how illness and misfortune are ascribed to witchcraft or ancestral affliction and reveal tensions and stresses in the social structure. Such descriptions are richly contextualized; they are not flat narratives of successive events for they are charged with meaningfulness. The actors commonly share a world-view, a kinship network, economic interests, a local past, and a system of ritual replete with symbolic objects and actions which embody a cosmology. They have lived through hard times and good times together. Culture, social experience and individual psychology combine in complex ways in any "bit" or "strip" of human social behavior. Anthropologists have always favored the longterm, holistic study of a relatively small society, examining its institutions and their interconnections in great detail, locating the links among kinship, economic, legal, ritual, political, esthetic and other sociocultural systems. When they study, say, a particular performance of ritual, they are on the look-out for expressions of shared cultural understandings in behavior, as well as for manifestations of personal uniqueness.Nevertheless, while it may be possible for a gifted researcher to demonstrate the coherence among the "parts" of a culture, the models he presents remain cognitive. Cognizing the connections, we fail to form a satisfactory impression of how another culture's members "experience" one another. For feeling and will, as well as thought, constitute the structures of culture-cutural experience, regarded both as the experience of individuals and as the collective experience of its members embodied in myths, rituals, symbols, and celebrations. For several years, as teachers of anthropology, we have been experimenting with the performance of ethnography to aid students' understanding of how people in other cultures experience the richness of their social existence, what the moral pressures are upon them, what kinds of pleasures they expect to receive as a reward for following certain patterns of action, and how they express joy, grief, deference, and affection, in accordance with cultural expectations. At the University of Virginia, with an-All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions scripts" from them. Then we set up workshops-r...

Bourdieu's Game of Life: Using Simulation to Facilitate Understanding of Complex Theories

“…I first became interested in playful pedagogies that engaged students in actively empathizing with the people about whom we were reading when my students in another course read an article on performing ethnography (Turner and Turner 2007). In this technique, students act out the various roles from an ethnography to gain a better understanding of the culture being described.…”

Recognising The Language of Calypso as “Symbolic Action” in Resolving Conflict in The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago

“…recognise that to the audience, the Calypsonian is a performer and in this relationship, Engaging in this approach requires that I take a view of the Calypso from the studies on "performance theory" (including theatre) as applied by Turner (1974Turner ( ,1982Turner ( , 1986aTurner ( , 1986bTurner ( , 1990, Kapferer (1976) and Frisbie (1980) and, the area of "verbal art", as developed by folkloric narrative genres. In the process of taking this perspective, this work adds a particular set of intellectual tools to the study of Calypsos that are sung on the social, political and economic issues occurring in Trinbago as these Calypso becomes a medium for the resolution of conflict in the country.…”

“…He claims that theatrical activity originates from ritual. He argued that sacred ritual serves as a model for social ritual and in turn social dramas (Turner 1974(Turner & 1982. This developmental process helps focus thematic material, used in drama for presentation to the public.…”

Rethinking ‘at-risk’ in drama education: beyond prescribed roles

“…In my research, with appropriate ethical approval, I employed popular theatre as a participatory, performative research method (Kidd & Byram, 1978;Turner & Turner, 1982) to explore students' perceptions of their experiences including experiences that might deem them 'at-risk'. I facilitated a popular theatre project with a group of high school drama students in a rural Alberta community whose population was mainly of Aboriginal descent.…”