For a Verbatim Ethnography

Abstract

In recent years, documentary theatre — a category of staged performance in which the actual words of real people are edited into a script and performed on stage by actors — has burgeoned in popularity, gracing ever-increasing numbers of playhouses across Europe and North America. Although such productions are rarely driven by concerns that are primarily scholarly or ‘anthropological’, their recent proliferation serves as a timely reminder that theatre can be a powerful and popular medium through which to present ethnographic materials to a public audience. For professional anthropologists, this may hardly seem like news: excellent handbooks on the techniques of ‘performance ethnography’ have long been available, and several scholars have developed full length documentary plays on the basis of their research. Most notably, perhaps, E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea, a one-man show based on Johnson’s ethnographic work with black gay men in the American South, toured the U.S. to critical acclaim in 2010–2011. Despite this, however, the pressures of limited resources, together with the desire to create an ethnography that can be consulted at a moment’s notice (rather than a finite theatrical event, bounded in time and space), have led most anthropologists to focus on producing texts and films as their primary outputs.