The Muncie Race Riots Of 1967, Representing Community Memory Through Public Performance, And Collaborative Ethnography Between Faculty, Students, And The Local Community

Abstract

In October 1967, a footnote in the larger national struggle over civil rights for African Americans occurred at Southside High School in Muncie, Indiana. On the nineteenth, a fight broke out between about 100 black and white students in the halls of the school, where the football team was named the “Rebels,” and a modified Confederate flag flew just in front of the building. In spring 2001, a group of Ball State University faculty and students along with a group of more than thirty consultants from the Muncie community engaged in a collaborative ethnographic project to present the community’s memory of the event as a theatrical performance. This essay details this process as well as its consequences for practicing reciprocal and collaborative representation.

Moving Past Public Anthropology and Doing Collaborative Research

“…In reality, our moral and ethical commitments to our ethnographic collaborators may take us in very different directions, where the coproduction of texts is secondary to other more pressing community‐based issues and concerns (see Lassiter 2004a:8). Collaborative ethnography, though, is often most appropriate when dealing with issues of voice and representation—such as, in my own research, when documenting American Indian song traditions (see, e.g., Lassiter 1998b; Lassiter et al 2002; Kotay et al 2004; Horse and Lassiter 1998, 1999) or redressing the representation of African Americans in the famous Middletown studies literature (see, e.g., Lassiter 2004c; Lassiter et al 2004; Papa and Lassiter 2003). Other recent examples include Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings's Blessing for a Long Time (1997), in which an anthropologist and a tribal historian chronicle for the Omaha people, using Omaha conventions of storytelling, the history, meaning, and contemporary significance of the venerable Sacred Pole; Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers's Pictures Bring Us Messages (2006), in which Brown and Peers cointerpret with members of the Kainai Nation the repatriation of Kainai images from the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum; Cedric N. Chatterley and colleagues“ I Was Content and Not Content ” (2000), in which researchers document along with consultant Linda Lord the closing of the poultry plant in which Lord worked; and Laurie Thorp's Pull of the Earth (2006), in which Thorp and the teachers and students of a local elementary school together recount the story of a school garden and its transformative effects on their school and everyday lives.…”

Turning the Song: Music, Power, and the Aesthetics of Collaboration

“…Scholars of collaborative anthropology demonstrate a strong concern for the power relations that inhere in the ethnographic encounter and strive to allow the voices of their collaborators to emerge in the fi nished, written product as much as in the process of research (Lassiter 1998(Lassiter , 2005Papa and Lassiter 2003). More than that, they seek the kind of collaboration where research consultants set the agenda for research as much as voice their opinions about the fi ndings; that is, they envision collaboration as "a space for the coproduction of theory" (Rappaport 2008: 2).…”