Ethnography in/as Performance: On the Politics and Ethics of Ethnography in International Performance Research

Abstract

The authors examine the intersections between performance, ethnography and transnational knowledge production in order to inquire into the political and ethical implications of doing ethnographic fieldwork as a key method for International Performance Research. As historicized and politicized embodied practices, these fields have the potential to question such dichotomies as observer/participant or knower/known, and to provide opportunities for self-reflexive and cross-cultural inquiries. Reflecting on their own experiences as graduate students from the first cohort of MAIPR and early career performance scholars who are rooted outside the ‘Western’ circuits of intellectual productions but also routed through them, this chapter charts the authors’ commitments and challenges to doing fieldwork in postcolonial contexts. Through their respective research on the practices of media spectatorship in the Philippines and ritual performance of place in Peru, their discussion converges and diverges around questions of positionality, crossing borders within and outside academia, and the relationship between the centres and peripheries of knowledge production.