Blog 18 First Response, Courtney

The question of what the benefits of ethnographic approaches to performance are first requires an exploration of what an ethnographic approach can be. To explore this I’d like to look at examples from both the Kealiihohomoku and Conquergood readings. Kealiihohomoku provides a reading of ballet as an ethnic performance, revealing the ways that certain images, movements, and themes of ballet are representative of the larger culture in which the dances take place. This reading allows for a relational rather than an essentialist reading of the meanings therein. Conquergood introduces the ethnographical model of Clifford Geertz, who sees culture as a text and fieldwork as reading. This model reinforces the ethnocentrism of textocentrism, which is, for Conquergood an academic model that is unable to take into account many different peoples and many different forms of expression. A proper ethnographic approach, for Conquergood, would explore various forms of expression both as subject matters and as participatory ways of knowing and presenting knowledge. In these two articles, the benefits of enthnographic approaches are laid out. A few of these benefits could be: the possibility for relational analysis as opposed to essentialist analysis, a participatory form of knowing, a refinement of terminological definitions based on complications posed by cross cultural differences, and possibilities for learning new methods of knowledge acquisition and knowledge dispersal that lie outside of one’s own cultural bounds, to name a few.