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Text and Performance Quarterly

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Marking New Directions in Performance

Ethnography
Della Pollock
Version of record first published: 18 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Della Pollock (2006): Marking New Directions in Performance Ethnography, Text
and Performance Quarterly, 26:4, 325-329

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 Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2006, pp. 325  329

Marking New Directions in

Performance Ethnography
Della Pollock
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This is an effort in marking: in walking through*from place to place*possibilities

for new work in performance ethnography. Accordingly, I begin by rehearsing some
of what performance has done for ethnography. Very briefly:

1. It has shifted the object of ethnography to performance, redefining the cultural

field that the ethnographer writes as broadly composed of radically contingent,
omnipermeable, micro- and macroperformances.
2. It has shifted the relationship of the researcher and the ostensibly researched (the
field and field subjects), reconfiguring longstanding subject-object relations as
coperformative; beyond anything like documentary interview: as the reciprocal
intervention of each on the other, transforming each in turn.
3. It has consequently moved the writing in the writing of culture into a
performance frame such that (a) performance ethnography manifests given power
relations in the poeisis of their undoing, and (b) it not only allows for but requires
variously sensuous retellings and ongoing re-creations, in word and body.
4. Finally, for now, by emphasizing the kinetic values or doing of ethnographic
research, it charges the activism nascent in putting ones body on the line, whether
that line is on the page or on the stage, in vigil or in protest, or connecting
interlocutors in dialogue.

In light of these four movements, these shifting parameters of doing the

conventionally excavatory work of ethnography and the different kinds of mobility
they imply, I imagine five correlated but certainly not exclusive directions for
performance ethnographic research. In pale homage to the king of alliterative lists, I
will call these: international, immersive, incorporative, integrative, and interven-
tionist.

Della Pollock is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Correspondence to: Della Pollock, Department of Communication Studies, CB# 3285, 115 Bingham Hall, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3285, USA. Email: pollock@email.unc.edu.

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10462930600828733
 326 D. Pollock

International
With regard to the object of study: first, I want to emphasize the inter in
international. To the extent that focusing on cultural performance means focusing on
culture as an interstitial process, we are particularly well-positioned to address
contested boundaries, threshold experiences, and emergent diasporas. We have a
particular prerogative and imperative in turn to engage our privileged in-betweenness
in more comprehensive articulation of localized field study and issues of political
economy, class, and the distribution and circulation of performative power within
global markets in whose shadow the nation as such is ever more vigorously
rehearsed.
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Jon McKenzie makes a similar call in Perform or Else. Dwight Conquergood has set
the standard. Diana Taylor pursues it elegantly (Archive; Disappearing ).

Immersive
Rethinking the subject and object of research as cosubjects could mean that the pleasure
of the fetishistic gaze is just doubled. I would argue for an immersive ethnography in
which, contrary to the hidden I of allegedly objective recording; or the deferential
I apparently standing fixed, or maybe its just paralyzed, at the convergence of
discourses marked in reflective perspectivalism by those long, often apologetic lists: I
am white, female, sub/posturban. . . .; or, on the one hand, the representational/
foundational or, on the other, the hyperreflexive I of much autoethnography: the
self-subject of the researcher is immersed in the cosubject, entangled with,
even ravished by the cocreative process such that the subjectivity of the researcher
is diffused within, even to the point of disappearing into, the fields body.
Accordingly, we no longer see the scholar I at work but we certainly feel her
passion, his grace.
I think of the work of the anthropologist Carol Stack and the historian Jacquelyn
Hall in particular here (Living; Writing).

Incorporative
All too often scholarly rigor is identified with the consistent application of a single
method. To the extent that one method is interrupted by others, especially by
anything that involves actually talking with people, it is at best eclectic; worse:
diluted, a puddling mess.
Id like to suggest the introjection of performance ethnography into other research
modalities such that (a) any one method proves insufficient, (b) the excesses and
contingencies of the field claim the emerging text, and (c) the tacit equation of
unified textuality with scholarly rigor breaks.
Neither Michael Bowmans search for Stonewalls arm nor Brian Rusteds excursions
into the performance of visual culture could be more incorporative, rigorous, or
generative (Performing the Visual North; Performing Visual Discourse).
 New Directions in Performance Ethnography 327

Integrative
In that light, our first charge might be to integrate more fully methodologies
conventionally identified with exteriority and interiority, outer and inner worlds, by
working harder to combine social theory and psychoanalytics. We have for too long
assumed their irreconcilable difference. One aim would be, if nothing else, to wonder
why we have so vigorously, even brutally maintained this binarism while gleefully
dissolving others. Another, of course, would be to expand access to the fullness of
selves in culture.
The work of Cathy Caruth, Carolyn Steedman, and Judith Hamera is certainly
exemplary in this regard.
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Interventionist
Borrowing the trope directly from Conquergood, Id like to point in two directions.
First, the more we open up the subjectivity of researcher-researched, the dynamics
of cultural performance and performativity (e.g., Diamond; Dolan), the excentric
spaces of performing social potentialities (Munoz), and aesthetic practices of re-
reiterating sociocultural moods, structures and relations (Spry; Madison My
Desire, Staging Fieldwork; Pollock, Memory), the more we trouble without
really investigating the categorical imperative for empathy. Within Performance
Studies, for many good reasons, empathy remains pretty much iconically secure. And
yet scholars like Harry Harootunian have begun to question its invariant value.
Reflecting on the close relationship between Asian studies scholars and their
primary informants, Harootunian indicates one paradox in some preferences for
empathy:
This relationship revealed a deeply embedded hermeneutic that had always
promised to promote empathic immediacy and identification as the most
appropriate and authentic mode of studying Japan and, I suspect, Asia. It is for
this reason that so much emphasis was placed on translation, which apparently
produced access to a transparent reality. This epistemological assumption betrays
its own racist conceit in the belief that only natives are able to stand in the place of
the native. (3940)
To the extent that empathy in any way reflects desire for unmediated identification, it
may be implicated in the rank nativism it, hermeneutically, hopes to combat. It may
in turn foreclose on critique by holding the researcher and his/her audience close, or
as close as desire for unmediated knowledge will permit. Whether because of the
possibility of perpetuating racisms, limiting critique, or generating more productive
relationships between ethnographer, field, subjects, and reader/viewers/participants,
it seems worthwhile to investigate and potentially to intervene on the presumed value
of empathy in performance ethnography (e.g., Berlant; Shuman).
As a last gesture, then, Id like to qualify the instrumentality we often associate with
activism. Performance ethnography involves going in to a social field at risk of going
under. Ideally, ethnographic work folds back on the researcher-subject, catching her
 328 D. Pollock

in surprising, even disarming, processes of transformation. In so doing, it gives the lie

to fantasies of activist instrumentality, as if we were in possessive charge of
the knowledge produced, rather than dispossessed and charged by it. We tend
to ask, with the best of intentions: now that we know this, what are we going to
do with it? The question might become, even as it seems to be right there, on the
tips of tongues speechless with beauty and terror: now that we are unknown
and deprived of knowingness, unlearned and learning, what are we going to do
about it?

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