For the first week at MAIP our task was to read and reflect on our choice between a series of 5 texts.
The text I chose was:
Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics, Dwight Conquergood.
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Here are My notes.
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Critical Theory: Commitment to unveiling the political stakes that control and anchor cultural practices and research.
Critical theorists are committed to the excavation of the political underpaintings of all representation, including the scientific.
Ethnography: A branch of Anthropology that deals with the description of specific human cultures by observing, interviewing and documenting.
The subject of characteristics of the human family.
Ethology: A branch of Anthropology that analyses human cultures and social structure.
(The science of the races of man, history, customs, institution, religion).
Ethnographers started to doubt “OBJECTIVE SCIENCE” since the collapse of colonialism.
Now its about unmasking the imperialist underpinnings of anthropology.
The fall of scientism and imperialism is a “Felix culpa” for Ethnographers.
Ethnography now PRIVILEDGES THE BODY.
The patriarchy created a mind > body hierarchy.
Body and flesh are linked with irrationality and are inferior to reason and logic.
female ≠
body
emotion
subjective
feminine
sensuality
open air hands on research methods
male
mind
reason
objective
masculine
rationality
cerebral research methods
Ethnographers do field work, which requires getting your body IMMERSED and PARTICIPATING in a culture in order to document and understand it.
ETHNOGRAPHY IS AN EMBODIED PRACTISE.
Practitioners experience at a bodily and intellectual level. You are subjecting yourself, your own PERSONHOOD to another way of life.
Bodily participation is recommended by Ethnographers in order to achieve a cultural understanding. You are encouraged to put aside the camera and join the people you are observing.
When we prioritize theory and analysis over experience and field work, we turn people into FLAT summaries, “SUBJECTS”, impersonal and dehumanized. Mere informants.
Radical Empiricism means prioritizing monologue DIALOGUE over MONOLOGUE
COMMUNICATION over INFORMATION
In order for Ethnographers to not be complicit with imperialism they need to think of themselves as communicators, not merely scientists.
Communication is about creating SHARED TIME. Instead of comparing DEVELOPMENT ≠ UNDERDEVELOPMENT
MODERNITY ≠ TRADITION
Sight and surveillance are dependent on detachment and distance.
We have to go from authority to vulnerability in order to truly explore a culture.
Contemporary GEO-POLITICS, (including de-colonization and multinational corporations) require thinking about boundaries not simply as barriers but as bridges and membranes.
The consequence of denying the idea of borderlands and zones leads us to the RETHINKING OF IDNTITY AND CULTURE AS CONTSTRUCTED AND RELATIONAL.
——THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE——
Capturing the struggle, PRAXIS and passion of a villages life.
Victor Turner used the language of drama and performance.
People are actors who represent roles and scripts. (culture is performative?)
Humans are culture inventing, social preforming, self transforming creatures.
Performance rendered research takes the BODY ( and its experience in time, place, and history) as both the Subject AND Method.
The Ethnographer must be a co- performer. Not a mere director and camera man (observer).
CULTURAL PERFORMANCES ARENT JUST REFLECTIONS OR EXPRESSIONS OF CULTURE.
THEY THEMSELVES ARE ACTIVE AGENCIES OF CHANGE REPRESENTING THE EYE WITH WHICH CULTURE SEES ITSELF.
Cultural performances aren’t simply epideictic spectacles (investigated historically within political contexts). They are profoundly deliberative occasions.
Rethinking the approach of documenting the world as text to the world as performance.
Conlcusions.
The performance Paradigm will be mosgt useful IF IT DECENTERS RESEARCH FROM MERE TEXT WITHOUT DISREGARDING IT.
The best is a balanced co-existence of the two.
Ethnography = Rhetoric.
Our current re-defining of Ethnography has been empowered by rhetorical critique of anthropological discourse.
Getting peoples LIVES onto paper ( or any other method that aims to REPRESENT them) has turned morally, politically and epistemologicaly DELICATE.
-PRODUCES KNOWLEDGE.
-POWER AND KNOWLEDGE DIRECTLY IMPLY ONE ANOTHER.
-AND REPRESENTATION IS POWER.