Writing Out Writing?: Kealiinohomoku and Conquergood (Whitney)

It seems to me that the main pitfall of ethnographic approaches can be summed up with a quote from the Conquergood article (apologies for the excessive cropping, but I didn’t want to put the entire paragraph in since we’ve all read it):

“There is an emergent genre of performance studies scholarship that epitomizes this text-performance hybridity. A number of performance studies-allied scholars create performances as a supplement to, not substitute for, their written research. These performance pieces stand alongside and in metonymic tension with published research….To borrow Amanda Kemp’s apt phrase, they use ‘performance both as a way of knowing and as a way of showing’…Several of these performance pieces have now been written up and published in scholarly journals and books.” (Conquergood 152).

I, unfortunately, did not have the time to look at any of the sources Conquergood lists as references of the “performance pieces” that have been “written up and published,” so I am only grounding my thoughts about this quote within the limits of his article. On those grounds, though, it seems hard to reconcile a fervent call for hybridity between “both written scholarship and creative work, papers and performances,” and a gracious nod to recent, specifically performance work (supplementing written research), that is able to embrace this hybridity, with the final line of this quote (Conquergood 151). How do we “record” and maintain sustained and productive conversations about things/people/events/etc. without relying on writing? Surely there are other ways to do it. But the academy as it currently stands – in essentially every field – relies on writing to “bridge the gap.” And I’m using “bridge the gap” here in the broadest possible context – even, literally, to “bridge the gap” between a scholar in Moscow and an academic in San Francisco who are eager to converse with one another about a particular topic.

It seems to me like the kind of study and analysis the ethnographic approaches in these articles call for necessarily omits writing from every part of the process. In their article on kinesthetic empathy, Reason and Reynolds are searching for a way to grab hold of “natural,” “instinctual” physical reactions we have as spectators to other bodies’ movements. But in their attempt to grab hold of these reactions, all they can do is work to articulate, in writing, what these reactions are – let’s find a way to quantify or describe them. And, as seems evident by our class discussion on Tuesday, these reactions seem to elude articulation all together.

Similarly, writing seems to intrude in Kealiinohomoku’s argument as well, although perhaps at a slightly different level. Kealiinohomoku doesn’t adamantly cry out against “textocentrism” in the same way that Conquergood does, but she does argue that current existing texts on dance do an incredible disservice to those cultures and dances that have been categorized as “ethnic.” She speaks out quite forcefully against these current texts: “The readings are rife with unsubstantiated deductive reasoning, poorly documented ‘proofs,’ a plethora of half-truths, many out-and-out errors, and a pervasive ethnocentric bias” (Kealiinohomoku 33). In light of these grievous errors, Kealiinohomoku seems to call for new texts that correct the problems and, perhaps, a shift in focus for anthropologists and ethnographers from a mistaken “world dance” scope to a more local or narrow scope in which expertise can be much more nuanced. She critiques the scholars of the current texts as being, “not interested in the world of dance…really only interested in their world of dance” (Kealiinohomoku 35). But, ultimately, even though Kealiinohomoku’s method seems to leave open a space for more nuanced writing to record reactions and analyses of dance events in any culture, she mistrusts writing to a certain extent. Definitions are nonexistent or glossed over as “we all mean the same thing anyway” and descriptions are substituted for definitions, “which are a different matter altogether” (Kealiinohomoku 38). So, in the end, I’m not sure writing finds a comfortable place in Kealiinohomoku’s methods either.

I’m sorry to only have really touched on one pitfall of the ethnographic approaches presented in these articles, but I think it’s an important one. And it circles back to our conversations earlier in the semester on the tension between the archive and the repertoire. It seems like the ethnographic approach might be on the cusp of providing an interesting way to create a flexible permeability between these two categories of knowledge, but it seems to fall short in the same way the repertoire does when it comes to sustained records for the future that can be reused or, at least, discussed.