Performance Ethnography

Performance ethnography is a melding of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic practices (the immersion in another culture for purposes of describing that culture and the treatment of one's own story as an expression of a culture) with postmodern performance theory. For curriculum studies, performance ethnography offers a specific orientation toward doing curriculum research on both curriculum artifacts and curriculum practices (designing, developing, etc.) in which the researcher is profoundly implicated in the “outcomes” of the research.

Performance theory for social scientists comes out of the work of theater scholars such as Richard Schechner and is extrapolated to everyday life. Performance theory points to “performance” in two ways. There is “performativity” in which the actual process of undergoing our lives is a performance, similar to the work done by Erving Goffman analogizing social interactions to theater. “Performativity” is the present tense of social action as we perform ourselves, presenting aspects of ourselves selectively with both intention and unintention. Our performance is always mediated through culture and politics. There is never an innocent, pure self that is free of culture. Auto-ethnography's contribution to performance ethnography lies with that premise, building a research practice around narratives of self that are linked to the cultural context in which the self is becoming a self. Linked to this is “performance,” a finished product of performativity, completed and ended. “Performance” references the looking back at per-formativity as memory. When people engage in stories about the past they are engaging in describing, discussing, and locating meaning through examining performances of self. Both performativ-ity and performance are perforce features of how people actually live their lives. We are always performing our lives rather than presenting them innocently and purely.

Performance ethnography presents a view of research in which the researcher is deeply implicated in the final expression of the research (the conclusions made, the articles, books, presentations of all sorts shared with others) and in the actual unfolding of the research. This “actual unfolding” is performativity itself. In performance ethnography, the researcher recognizes the performative character of asking research questions, setting up research opportunities, seeking out informants, actually gathering information from the field, thinking through and analyzing what is [Page 638]“learned,” and organizing all of that for sharing with others. In the performative situation, there are no firm conclusions because the act of interpretation for the purposes of organizing and carrying out research are always ongoing, evolving performances of what is occurring. Through the auto-ethnographic character of performance ethnography, the researcher recognizes that he or she is performing culture through his or her own specific cultural or social location. The researcher often will tell performance stories of his or her experiences within the setting as a way into the situation because the researcher already recognizes that he or she is seeing through his or her personal sociocultural resources that preinterpret the scene. Performance ethnography draws from standpoint theory in this regard. Performance ethnography rejects the standard Western modern notions of distanced research objectivity in favor of this deep presence of the self of the researcher. In doing so, performance ethnographers see a need to present the actual research in new, aesthetic forms that are more capable of both revealing the performativity of the researcher and of engaging the recipient of the research in ways that implicate the receiver (so that he or she also experiences the performativity of encountering the research). For curriculum studies scholars, performance ethnography presents possibilities of encountering curriculum artifacts and practices through the self as the conscious tool of understanding. The “self” is seen as an experi-encer and interpreter of culture through the personal and immediate (performativity). Thus, if the curriculum studies scholar is studying a curriculum design practice or studying curricula as experienced by those involved in living the curriculum design, he or she will study his or her responses (as cultural) to the situation and how the situation situates the researcher, rather than studying the practice as an outside, distanced, disinterested eye observing what others are doing. Performance ethnography, with the willingness of its practitioners to use alternative forms of research and research presentation, offers curriculum studies scholars new ways of performing and presenting this research (forms such as poetry, narratives, theater work, visual art, dance and performance art, to name a few).

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