Performance Ethnography

Performance ethnography describes a set of interrelated and still emerging qualitative approaches that bring together ethnographic methods and theoretical concepts from performance studies. As a field of inquiry that bridges communications studies and drama and theater, performance studies considers performance broadly. Performance includes cultural activities deemed theatrical or self-consciously constructed performative works of art such as play productions, performance art, or educational drama inclusive of any performative or dramatic form—storytelling, dance, music, street theater, video, and so on. Performance studies provides insights into the nature of social relations by examining performances in real life, such as public gatherings, rituals, games, or sporting events that are seen as performative. Performance ethnography also investigates social dramas or dramatic moments in everyday life, such as moments of conflict, and inquires into everyday interactions, which include culturally conditioned behavior of the performance of social roles—roles as father, daughter, employee, and so on, as well as roles associated with gender as discussed by Judith Butler or roles with race, status, age, and so on—and communicative or speech acts that are performative—as J. L. Austin suggested, words that do something or have an impact in the world. The notion of performativity, associated with performance studies, is a way of conceiving of an activity or action as similar to a theatrical event in form and/or effect and to describe the potential of language to be performative. Performance studies is a broad area of inquiry that draws on theory from various fields including anthropology, sociology, psychology (psychoanalysis, psychodrama), literary theory, linguistics, postcritical and poststructuralist philosophy, and theater studies.

As a research approach, performance ethnography grew out of the so-called crisis of representation. Critiques of meta-narratives, truth claims, and the production of knowledge legitimized other ways of knowing, alternative approaches to doing research, and new forms of representing research. New paradigm researchers acknowledged the fallacy of objectivity, the oppressive dominance of the written word, and the colonizing effect this had for the “other” as the object of investigation. In the fields of anthropology and communication studies, performance became regarded as a legitimate and an ethical way of representing ethno graphic understanding. For Dwight Conquergood, performance was an ethical act; it addressed the crisis of representation by offering an embodied, empathic way of knowing and of deeply sensing the other. As such, performance ethnography developed alongside other [Page 608][Page 609]alternative qualitative or new paradigm methods, such as Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly's narrative inquiry, Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner's autoethnography, and Elliot Eisner, Tom Barone, and others' arts-based ways of knowing and representing research.

An exploration of performance in qualitative research indicates that performance ethnography has emerged as a collection of interrelated methods that can be employed at any or all stages of the research process—for generating or gathering research material, for interpreting or analyzing material, and for representing research.

Performance ethnography as a method for generating research material—for gathering participant responses—may take various forms. The primary methods in ethnography are observation or participant observation, along with interviews, focus groups, fieldnotes, and the like. Correspondingly, performance ethnography employs ethnographic methods in the observation of and/or participation in performance as understood from a performance studies perspective. Performance ethnographers find or create opportunities to observe and/or participate in performances in the broadest sense. As such, performance ethnography involves inquiry into performance in any or all of its cultural or social contexts—in theatrical performances and/or in everyday life performances.

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