Textual Fields: Representation in Dance Ethnography

Abstract

Writing dance culture, to borrow from the title of Clifford and Marcus’s landmark text, Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), is conventionally thought to be the final stage in the production of dance ethnography. Indeed this phase is commonly referred to as ‘writing up’ as if the act of presenting dance through textualization was a practice distinct from the lived experience of fieldwork. The notion of ‘writing up’ also implies that the messy, open-ended and often confusing business of negotiating with other cultures can be tidied up and neatly packaged into an authoritative and fully comprehensive account of the dance culture in question. Such ethnographic accounts often effect a form of closure, thus circumscribing the other within a set of paradigms which do not necessarily represent that other’s concept of his or her own culture. The intellectual status of both the dance ethnography and its author is assured, but little or no room remains for the negotiation of alternative meanings. These forms of textual representation gain a status denied to those deployed in situations of face-to-face interaction, where the ‘results’ of fieldwork are merely written down (see Fabian in Okely, 1992, p. 3), in a manner usually conceived of as unproblematic because author and reader are one and the same person.