Keywords

1 Introduction

Performance and ethnography—two modes of examining everyday life—both depend on embodied experience. Whether we examine auto-ethnography, participatory research, or ethnography in which the researcher is engaged with a group: being there matters. Pachirat (2018) wonders in his ethnographic drama, could ethnography be done if the ethnographer were invisible, rather than as a visible part of the scene? While ethnographers have used the body as a technical tool to gain access, performance scholars consider the body as a critical site of knowledge production and, as a result, ethnography bolsters the discipline’s orientation. Whether we think of Wacquant’s (2004) participation in a boxing gym or Lee’s (2016) engagement with a rap community, the researcher in the world is crucial. In this chapter we present strategies and tactics, derived from performance studies, that aid ethnographic research. Our descriptions, explanations, and interpretations of the performance theories in this chapter are not comprehensive but only gesture toward surrounding academic discourses.

A complete separation of the approaches of performance studies and sociology is both impossible and undesirable. In fact, the examination of performances and the sociological analysis of social scenes has a long and intertwined lineage and history, even though the institutionalization of sociology as a discipline far predates the development of performance studies (and theatre studies) in academia. As an early and renowned theatre scholar, Max Herrmann (1914, p. 118) first theorized the concept of performance (Aufführung) by emphasizing the ephemerality and liveness of theater and conceptualizing it as an event in opposition to drama as a text-based literary genre. While the institutionalization of performance studies was first achieved in the 1980s, scholars in both sociology and anthropology had shown interest in the relationship between performance and the social world far earlier. At mid-century Kenneth Burke’s (1968) dramatistic model of human behavior and Gregory Bateson’s (1972) attention to framing helped bring performance to the fore. One might even reach back to Ferdinand Tönnies, who in 1887 wrote in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft “[c]onsequently, real and natural persons exist because there are people who think of themselves in these terms, who take on and play this ‘role’, each one taking on the ‘character’ of a person like a mask held up before the face” (Tönnies 1887, p. 203). Likewise, in his 1948 Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers, philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1948, pp. 208–223) claims that theater reflects the human existence not simply because it represents humans, but because the practice of acting is already the mode of human behavior. He concludes that human beings are naturally distanced from themselves. Subsequently, Rudolf Münz (Münz and Baumbach 1998) in Theater und Theatralität. Zur Historiographie von Theatralitätsgefügen differentiated the terms Theater and ‘Theater’ in order to distinguish between the art form of theater and non-artistic behavior during festivities and social roles in general. Drawing on those models, anthropologists and theater scholars moved away from theories of acting and the assumption of social roles and toward a theory of performance and performativity, disputing claims about the ‘fakeness’ of theater and performance.

Norman Denzin argues that we live in a performance-based, dramaturgical culture. He writes that “[t]he dividing line between performer and audience blurs, and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance” (Denzin 2003, p. x). This recognition has become more influential in the 21st century and is now embraced by many outside the academy as well. Political discourses about heteronormativity, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, cultural criticism, and social media and selfie cultures generated a consciousness about self-staging, politics of identity and sensitized us to interpret the events around us in light of these themes (Denzin 1995, 2002; Birringer 1993). In particular, ethnographers must be aware of these shifts in world-making in order to contextualize research participants’ behaviors and accounts of their worlds.

Recognizing that disciplinary boundaries are always moving, we describe the discourses that overlap social science ethnography and performance studies, focusing on symbiotic relations more than points of contention. This is not to be mistaken for the goal of producing a consensus, but rather as offering productive suggestions for collaboration, a vantage point for future conversations.

Performance ethnography can broadly mean different things in current academic discourse: specifically, we divide the chapter into four domains, examining 1) Ethnography with Performance Methodologies, 2) Expanded Models of Performativity, 3) Ethnography as Performance, and 4) Ethnography in Performance. Each conception of ethnography and performance has theoretical, practical, ethical, and political implications, together creating the complicated and convoluted field of Performance Ethnography that we reflect upon in our closing Convolution.

2 Ethnography with Performance Methodologies

As ethnographers we enter the field in order to experience life first-hand—to be present as the phenomenon we are researching unfolds. We want more than written statements and the spoken word, we want to see our acting research participants in situ, witnessing their behaviors and expressions: life fully lived. The body is privileged as a site of knowledge production. Performance ethnographers view interaction as a means to comprehend “how human beings fundamentally make culture, affect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world” (Madison and Hamera 2013, p. xii).

But what is performance? Performance can be defined as “a tangible, bounded event that involves the presentation of rehearsed artistic action for a specific audience in a particular time-and-space bound continuum” (Bial 2007, p. 59). This understanding is linked to notions of ‘acting’, ‘directing’, ‘dancing’, ‘playing’, part of a mise-en-scène or choreography. In short, it is a cultural performance (Singer 1972, p. xiii). But while the German dictionary Duden defines ‘performance’ in this sense as an artistic happening (Duden online 2018), the term can also be conceived as an everyday social interaction, an unplanned and (relatively) unscripted happening linked to behaviors, strategies, negotiations, and sometimes deceptions. Accordingly, the Oxford English Dictionary describes performance as the “carrying out of something commanded or undertaken; the doing of an action or operation” (Oxford English Dictionary online 2019). Any action is here conceptualized as performance. In order to differentiate the two, Richard Schechner (2006, pp. 38–40) distinguishes between is performance and as performance. The first as ontology, the latter as epistemology (Taylor 2007, p. 3).

Besides Burke’s dramatism (1968) the idea of everyday performance in the social sciences was promoted by Erving Goffman (1959). Goffman suggested that subjects in social situations present themselves in ways that are favorable to them; they manage how they are perceived by others. This performance of the self is not ‘fake’ in the sense that performers consciously choose to be someone else, but rather a performance of how they wish to see themselves.

Henri Lefebvre (2005) and Pierre Bourdieu (2014), in contrast, treat everyday behavior as habituated. As a result, action is not primarily an expression of inner desires, but a reflection of the influence of social groups. Lefebvre’s model of dressage extends beyond the behavioral and argues that it is the construction process for subjectivity in general. The dressage is a subjection of the body and mind to everyday training and rules until they become naturalized and build the foundation of the social being. Behavior is therefore both founded in as well as founding the base of society. Considering the repetitive, rehearsed nature of behavior that operates via social scripts leads to the notion of the agential performing subject. If all behavior is habituated, if social beings are conditioned to act in certain ways, how can ethnographers locate intentionality in behavior? Clifford Geertz (1973) suggests the method of thick description, the careful semiotic decoding of behaviors within their cultural contexts, revealing patterns of behavior as well as their cultural significance. This implies that, while meaning is culturally codified and trained, the individual actor can draw on the codes of behavior and deploy them to further their own goals.

This conception complicates the notion of ‘fakeness or inauthenticity’ often associated with performance. Instead of being ‘fake’, performance constructs and perpetually reconstructs social reality. The philosopher John Austin (1975) treated performance as constitutive and constructive in How to do Things with Words in challenging the idea that language simply reports on reality. Instead, Austin conceptualizes speech as an act, emphasizing that language does something, which he calls a performative utterance. His famous example of a wedding ceremony in which the wedding officiant says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ exemplifies how speech actually creates a new reality rather than simply reflecting one. Austin’s student John Searle (2012) extended this framework by claiming that speech in ritualistic environments orders the social. Consequently, everyday speech does not merely mirror the world but makes sense (i.e. creates sense) of it through the speech act. Whenever there is intention in speaking, there is also the performative.

In discussing iterability and iteration, Derrida (1988) problematizes Austin’s and Searle’s model by noting that neither of them considers repetition. He claims that not language itself, but the repetition of language is what produces reality (Derrida 1988). Drawing on Austin’s model of performativity as citational, and Schechner’s (1973) conception of performance as twice-behaved behavior, Judith Butler (1990, 1993a, b) deploys the concept of performativity in her discussion about gender as socially constructed. Conceiving of the body and behavior as textual, Butler extends Austin’s model of performativity to embodied practices. She claims that a girl is only a girl when first pronounced to be a girl, and secondly conforms with ‘girlish’ behavior as constructed through discourse and repeated codes of behavior. The hegemonic power of discourse becomes evident when considering Butler’s distinction between performance and performativity. She writes, “performance as a bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake” (Butler 1993b, p. 24). Thus, performativity refers to coercion into the repetition of norms, while performance is an embodied theatricality that usually conceals its conformity. While Butler here locates potential transgression and resistance in performance, she later questions this differentiation. Performance is both transgressive and resistant, and dominant and hegemonic. It generates a space of resistance and constrains the human subject by a preexisting “script” (McKenzie 1998, p. 220).

Subsequent scholarship emphasized the transgressive potentiality of citationality as the reenactment of previous acts and behaviors even more directly (Langellier 1999). Richard Schechner (2011, p. 52) describes performance as “restored behavior”, emphasizing the perpetual (re-)production of meaning while noting the importance of the subject doing and transmitting the performance. Here, subjectivity appears not only as a referent for meaning and interpretation, but also as having agency to change and re-signify. Dwight Conquergood and E. Patrick Johnson (2013), Homi Bhabha (2004, pp. 146–149), Jill Dolan (2001), and Elin Diamond (1996) all emphasize the subversive power of performativity by conceptualizing it as an intervention that challenges hegemonic meanings.

The ethnographic challenge of performativity’s analytical deployment lies in the need for precision. To interpret whether citations are intentional, unconscious, transgressive, or normative, the ethnographer must describe and analyze carefully. Under the motto ‘you cannot not communicate’ the ethnographer needs to analyze not only ‘what’ is said, but also ‘how’ it is said, including dimensions of tone, rhythm, gesture, and expression with due attention to what is not said, but what might be expected within a given cultural context (Geertz 1973). The context, in the sense of how events are scripted (e.g. conducted interviews with research participants, but also rallies, rituals, and group meetings), also involves how they are produced, rehearsed, and represented.

But the rewards are worth the labor. If we understand behavior as normative and constrained as well as expressing a subject’s agency, will, and choice, we can analyze social groups as structured by those very norms while still being perpetually negotiated through the performances of difference. Embodiment illuminates how actors position themselves in relation to other actors and institutions. Social performance is part of broader power relations that can be illuminated, critically interrogated, and potentially intervened in. Performance does not necessarily help us to distinguish between truth and fiction. But these categories are no longer desirable when deploying a framework of performance. We can instead find ways of knowing and doing that are multivocal, heterogeneous, contradictory, contingent, and risky.

3 Expanded Models of Performativity

Performance scholar Joseph Roach examines the repetition of performance, while focusing on the historical transmission of cultural practices as mnemonic devices that sustain cultural identity. With his concept of performance genealogy, Roach uses Foucault’s genealogical approach to explore New Orleans’ carnival tradition. The body is here the site of the performative knowledge as well as the site of knowledge transmission. His research is thus able to demonstrate the significance of embodied performances for the “rootedness of contemporary local performative behaviors in deep historic structures” (Roach 1996, p. 43).

Similarly, Taylor (2007) emphasizes the repetitiveness of embodied actions. Her concept of ‘repertoire’ is defined as embodied transmission of knowledge that exists outside of institutionalized archives. What is discarded by history does not simply vanish but circulates within observable social groups as embodied behavior. The distinction between Butler’s and Schechner’s notion of citationality and Roach’s and Taylor’s repetition of behavior is that the former scholars emphasize continuity (but not sameness) and transfer of everyday behavior while the latter describe specifically cultural performances and knowledges in their historic rootedness.

These scholars remind us that a “performance-sensitive ways of knowing” (Conquergood and Johnson 2013, p. 26) demands immediacy and involvement by the ethnographer. Plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings are privileged over secure and positivist paradigms and analytical distances (Pelias 1999 pp. ix–xi). We must observe critically and be aware that performances never happen in a vacuum. Performance takes place at a site, where there are objects, people, and institutions. Together this is the mise-en-scène. Analyzing the mise-en-scène allows for a relational analysis of actors, the environment, and their actions as meaningful. We can describe how site, space, architecture, and artifacts perform, how they are part of a dramaturgy, and how they are performatively produced (Lefebvre 2009; Carlson 1993). Objects are analyzed in the process of being used which is simultaneously a process of producing the object as significant (wa Thiong’o 1999; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2009; Hamera 2006a, c).

4 Ethnography as Performance

The blurry line between performance and performativity has implications for the ethnographic subject. As Peggy Phelan describes, “[p]erformance and performativity are braided together by virtue of iteration; the copy renders performance authentic and allows the spectator to find in the performer ‘presence’. Presence can be had only through the citation of authenticity, through reference to something (we have heard) called ‘live’ or have seen called life” (Phelan and Lane 1998, p. 10). The subject is no longer merely “textual” but present in the body (Denzin 2000, p. 60). This locates the research participant and ethnographer in a ‘real’, socially experienced space, contextualizing the subjects as well as the encounter.

In this sense, the doing of ethnography is understood as a performance in itself and the ethnographer is no longer conceived as an objective transcriber of culture. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu (2013 [1977], p. 1) gestures toward the positionality of the ethnographer as an outsider who is “condemned to see all practice as a spectacle.” Later, scholars such as Conquergood (1992) object to having theory and practice separated, challenging the implied distance between researcher and subject. He calls for engagement and embodied participation in ethnography. Performance moved from mimesis to poiesis and now must move to kinesis. His ideal ethnographer is not a fly on the wall but a witness in co-performance who understands through both observing and doing. In examining Conquergood’s contribution to performance ethnography, Soyini Madison (2005, p. 168) concludes that ethnographic encounters constitute a “co-performance”:”[c]o-performance as dialogical performance means you not only do what subjects do, but you are intellectually and relationally invested in their symbol-making practices as you experience them with a range of yearnings and desires.”

Both sociologists and performance scholars engage with the positionality and ethical and political implications of researcher/research participant interactions, such as Laud Humphries (1970) voyeuristic observations of gay men in a public restroom in an urban park (known as “tearooming”). Humphries posed as a watchqueen, observing the men’s embodied activities without disclosing his status of a researcher to all research participants and secretly tracking them later through the license plates of their cars. Performance studies additionally centers the inquiry in the body. But this process is difficult and requires not only consciousness but also restraint. Conquergood describes this process as a double consciousness, the ethnographer being in-between his own identity and the Other, “at all times, playing a We” (Conquergood 1986, p. 34). The tension that is produced is a productive space for both generosity towards the research participants and criticality within the analytical process, a space in which ethnographers must reflect their own positionality. This is “a way of having intimate conversation with other people and cultures. Instead of speaking about them, one speaks to and with them” (Conquergood 1985, p. 10). It further avoids the dominance of the researcher over the research participant and accordingly, the research output provides a multi-vocal conversation rather than an authoritative narrative. Conquergood attempts to subvert the usual power differences. Critical generosity is needed because the relationship between the ethnographer and the subject is not a natural one. In order to understand and acknowledge each other’s beliefs, we must disbelief while maintaining critical thinking.

Performance ethnography is particularly good at this. It locates the research participants as well as the researcher in the world. Thus, the research output will always involve performance. As a result, many ethnographers put their body on the line. To research Living in the Big Red, Dwight Conquergood (1991) moved into a Chicago neighborhood with high crime rates and violence, not only to observe residents, but also to experience the everyday in his own body. He was beaten up and scared. While this is an extreme approach, his affective understanding of this community everyday enabled him to conduct a multi-layered analysis that did not only report on events, but also compiled the information into a narrative that allows readers to get closer to the experience themselves.

5 Ethnography in Performance

The earliest engagement with performance ethnography on the part of sociologists occurred in the field of ‘ethnography in performance’. The second edition of The Handbook of Qualitative Research featured a chapter on Performance Ethnography. Michal McCall (2000) states that while performance became part of academic discourse in the 1970s, in the 1950s under the terms happenings and experimental theater, events took place that are today described as performances.

As sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s began to turn their ethnographic field notes into performances, performance studies scholars began to conduct ethnographic research in order to devise performances as research (Becker et al.1989; Denzin 2000; Mienczakowski 2001; Paget 1990; Richardson 1997; Siegel et al. 1985, 1990; Smith 1993, 1994). These early attempts to work with performance by social scientists were “very much text based” (McCall 2000; McCall et al. 1990). In turn, performance scholars were more ‘theatrical’ or ‘artistic’, considering Della Pollock’s (1990) work based on Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Hall et al. 1987) as an example. Even as their representations were different, McCall (2000, p. 426), like Pollock, wished to “return the stories to the communities out of which they emerged” by performing the research. This revealed a shift in sociological ethnography from distance to closeness. Do the perspective, the questions, and the way of seeing change because the research output will be presented differently? Even in the third edition of the same handbook, Bryant Keith Alexander (2005, p. 411–412), the author of the chapter on performance ethnography, claims that “ [p]erformance ethnography is literally the staged re-enactment of ethnographically derived notes.” He counts on embodied aesthetic practice to “provoke audience to a critical social realization and possible response” (Alexander 2005, p. 411–412). The audience and the participants recognize the performed subject is a “synecdoche for larger politics of representation and identity (i.e. race, culture, class, gender, etc.” (Alexander 2005, p. 412). The production of knowledge is located in the performance, and audiences must interpret the social life by witnessing the verbatim performance of the fieldwork. The performance setting puts them into the position of the ethnographer—but only as an observer, not an interactor.

The performance is seen as a medium of mimetic representation of the ethnographic experience, but also as a moral strategy which Alexander (2005, p. 413) calls “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.” He exemplifies this with a collegiate performance in which students performed as Mexican street vendors who were chased away by the police. He describes how passionately they performed and invokes Conquergood’s notion of dialogic ethnography: “[t]he student performance is a dialogic engagement in which they extend the voices of ‘the other’ into the specialized place of public access, the classroom” (Alexander 2005, p. 413).

The ethnographic performance is simultaneously product and process. It is a medium of experience and a vantage point for future conversation. Performance as site of knowledge production, negotiation, and struggle in sociology predominantly took the form of the ethnodrama (Wellin 1996; Mienczakowski 2001; Richardson 1997). Here, the performance is devised in collaboration between ethnographer and research participant in order to give the latter control over the narrative constructed about themselves.

In performance studies, scholars did not only perform their research in the academic context, but also devised performances in collaboration with their research participants that were performed in the field. Conquergood (2013) used performance in a Hmong refugee camp to raise awareness of sanitary problems in the camp, collaborating on possible solutions. Soyini Madison (2011) describes in Acts of Activism how she devises a performance with Ghanaian women to bring awareness of hegemonic forces restricting access to water.

In accord with Worthen’s (1995) critical analysis of textuality, Judith Hamera (2018) moves away from the dichotomy of text and body, emphasizing aesthetics that do not differentiate the body and the text. “Aesthetics are the criteria and implicit social contracts that shape how performance and performative repetitions are perceived and understood” (Hamera 2018, p. 637). Aesthetics are historically and culturally specific. The aesthetic is not reduced to the paradigm of fine arts but is understood to be part of the everyday as perceived and experienced. Hamera further describes how performance ethnographers deploy the aesthetic perspective, naming Harris Berger’s (1999) ethnography on Metal, Rock, and Jazz and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1935) Mules and Men as exemplars for the deployment of aesthetics: she writes, “[i]n performance ethnography, it is useful to think of aesthetics as sets of interpretive and expressive strategies to be interrogated, deployed, or resisted. The researcher must be mindful of the history and specific ideological freight each strategy carries. She needs to know the unique conventions, standards of taste, genres, and techniques circulating, however implicitly, within her site” (Hamera 2018, p. 638). Hamera describes Hurston’s writing as “vetriloquat[ing] voices from the field, blurring the position of researcher/writer and researched/speaking into orature in this most ‘textual’ of devices” (Hamera 2018, p. 640).

This is where the text also functions as performance. As ethnographers, we should take advantage of the performative power of the written word. Many experimental forms of writing have been practiced in recognition of this power. Ethnographic research lends itself especially well to an aesthetically sensitive narrative. Madison’s Performing Theory/Embodied Writing pushes those boundaries in her performance of theory. She postulates: “This essay performatively expresses specific theoretical ruminations on class, language, and race. This writing is a performance, while it is or is not necessarily for the ‘stage’. […] Theory becomes another way to know performance better; and performance becomes the desired illuminator of theory” (Madison 1999, p. 107). Performance and theory come together in an act of embodied writing, reperformed by the embodied reading by the reader (Denzin 2003).

6 Convolution

In order to emphasize what Bakhtin (1984, p. 166, 252) calls the “unfinalizability” of the process of disciplinary developments, convergences, overlapping, and shifts, we end not with a conclusion but with a convolution. Ethnography shifted from viewing performance as imitation, or dramaturgical staging (Goffman 1959), to an emphasis on performance as liminality and construction (Turner 1986), and now looks at performance as a site of struggle and as intervention (Conquergood 1992).

Conquergood (2002a, p. 343) emphasizes the potential of ethnographic observation: “[a]s embodied performances, rituals make visible abstract principles and inchoate concepts—such as ‘Justice’. Justice can be seen only when it is acted out.” But performance ethnography allows insight into more than simply operational efficacy. We can weigh resistance against perpetuation and create multivocal and multi-positional accounts of events (Cole 2010, p. xvii).

Current research highlights what Conquergood (2002b) coined as the triad of triads, making explicit the entanglements of performance ethnography. After framing ‘performance’ as a theory, a method, and an event, he further describes the respective implications:

‘I’s: imagination, inquiry, intervention

‘A’s: artistry, analysis, activism

‘C’s: creativity, critique, citizenship

While scholars disentangle these processes to make them comprehensible and to construct analytical categories only to collapse them again, the entanglement and convolution of new and old trajectories is never-ending. Our analyses go beyond the textual. We value all the senses, care about affect, and treasure emotion. But however fleeting and ephemeral, we recognize their historical situatedness. Contemporary scholars find ways to circumvent mere descriptions by deploying performance as a pedagogical tool: on the one hand for academics at their desks, and on the other for research participants in the field.

Contemporary performance ethnographers utilize the concept of performativity to seek out the transformative power and spaces of agency in the divergence from norms, as survival strategies of the oppressed, and as a means to counter (epistemological) violence (Muñoz 2013; Madison 2006, 2011; Hamera 2006b; Johnson 2016; Rivera-Servera 2013; Theidon 2014; Chambers-Letson 2016).

Finally, ongoing projects combine ethnographic engagement with archival research and attempt to encounter the past through performance. Taylor (2007) deploys her concept of repertoire to retrieve allegedly ‘lost’ histories in and from embodied behavior. Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) methodology of critical fabulation combines ‘factual’ categorized data with a fictionalized narrative. Both projects grapple with national and state-sanctioned narratives that exclude and/or oppress communities and their histories as a strategy to sustain hegemony. Performance ethnography is thus a political act and recognized as such, as scholars turn toward the oppressed and disenfranchised and tackle ethical issues in the everyday and in the extraordinary as a form of counter-practice, resistance, or rebellion. Performance ethnographers are engaged with the field and with the world.