Thursday, November 1, 2012

Class Notes 11.1.2012


Ellen: Depart between 8 – 8:30 and stay until 1 p.m. (Will be going to Advanced Visualization Lab)
            Crowd-sourced review: The dance performance is on Sunday, so we all have to be there – I want each of you to offer 300 word reviews (short – a capsule review) – I want you to try to be cognizant of what is true, meaningful, and subjective in what you’re talking about. (These are all overlapping categories). The reviews should go up by midnight on Monday. Before we meet (on Thursday) I want you to sweep through the flight of reviews by your cohort and pull out what you find most true and meaningful, and from that I’m hoping we will pull together a crowd-sourced review. I will also write something to this effect up on the blog. We will talk with these reviews in light of Kirschenblatt-Gimblett.
            We don’t convene until the 8th – we have two assignments: the previously mentioned dance performance. And then on Tuesday – document the lived performance of Election Day. Do a sort of ethnographic approach with an emphasis on whatever you run into in your day. You’ll probably need a camera (this could be phone) since it will be important to document -- pictorially and in other registers --what you experienced.  We haven’t indicated how that’s going to look blog-wise, but Amy and I will have an account on the blog by Thursday. This isn’t due till November 13. The assignment doesn’t assume that we will go to the polls – it’s just asking you to approach the day as a heightened moment. There are many ways to filter such evidence.
            Today’s talkers were asked to come in with some methodological approaches based on our reading and the blog posts. What do you have?


Handouts: 1. Methodological questions from the beginning of semester.

Best practices discussion:  
Justin: We need to account for our own bodily experience and go in prepared to do that. If you’re not conscious going in, you won’t be capable of the kind of necessary observation.

Jennifer: I agree, based on the readings, we need to be aware of our self (our baggage) and other the cultural weight of the performance. If we don’t know going in, we should find out after this.

Justin- Andrea mentioned this. Also, we should be willing to open up out from the performance. We need to be cognizant of the total performance (you and your surroundings) and the difference between your locations.  Also, alongside Andrea – avoid textocentrism.  An example of this is the RSA Animate music video (Zizek) – as a hand draws out the theoretical discourse and describes the theory (“From Tragedy to Farce”).

Sara: I always I wish had empathy gnomes to keep track of my feelings while I’m doing this critical work. I’m constantly paying attention to thinking as opposed to feeling. Can you do both simultaneously? Thinking and feeling may/may not be separate, but they often seem to be.

Dorothy: These are challenges to ethnomusicologists, too. Writing field notes can be particularly challenging because trying to track both – there are some methods like using capitalization/bracketing to highlight these modes.

Whitney: This aligns with something Courtney mentioned – realizing new ways to acquire knowledge of that total experience, whether it comes from a field that does it better or a different way – reminds me of Ngai’s argument about stuplime being a new term for a new type of reaction.

Jennifer: I have difficulty finding the right terms to express the ideas. For example, Kealiinohomoku.

Ellen: Let’s look at the terms being used by Kealiinohomoku. From a political standpoint – if you take the ethnic off the table – or any category that references a stance that is not dominant – are you doing a favor to that performance by placing it in a whole? To do away with these terms because of their sloppiness/hegemonic history means also to forget the consequences of that linguistic history, and that there are people with varying degrees of vocality. To allow difference to exist is also to bring terms into the visible foreground. I don’t mean “ethnic dance” specifically, but I’m thinking of critical race studies in the 90s. Should we be holding on to terms to keep the idea in the forefront, or abandon it because of the weight of it? Need to powerfully reflect on the categories and then be critical of their use.

Dorothy: Isn’t the concern that “ethnic dance” doesn’t exist? Period. There isn’t an “ethnic” people. This is the problem with terms like “ethnic” in general – we have a right word, but we just don’t want to use it.

Jess: Saying “ethnic” means “not us.” It groups everything into a muddled us vs. them system.

Sara: There is certainly folk dance, one that represents a people’s nationality. The problem isn’t in thinking it doesn’t exist, but in thinking it’s fixed. We may need an asterisked word in some way.

Dorothy: This may be why people have shifted to more complex terms.

Whitney: Kealiinohomoku addresses it explicitly in her article at the end. We need to be careful with terms.

Dorothy: Even with her well-written article, people are still not going to think of ballet as ethic dance. So this doesn’t deal with the problem in general. I don’t know how that changes the discourse.

Sara: I don’t know enough about her to know if this project is sincere – if she’s just using ballet as an example.

Jennifer: I wonder if that’s why the article is so front-loaded, and we don’t get to ballet until the last fifth. 

Ellen: This is a polemic – a kind of first shot over the bow in an effort to reassess the Western relationality to other cultures regarding these terms. So this is a bit of a gambit, but is there any context added to it?

Justin: I was more surprised about her description about what was put in/left out – swans and alligators – that defined who we are.

Ellen: The list of Western symbols is significant – a refresher.

Jess: She kept using the term “primitive”  - is that a current term? It seems insulting.

Ellen: Is this a critique of how Western society sees itself?Whole societies get sequestered into the past. This is a teleological move in order to get the conception of Western history to work.

Dorothy: Modern dance has done a lot of work on the term “primitive” – it can be used in a positive way to mean closer to primal nature – free, non-stiff-backed movements. The word has history.

Ellen: Modernity makes flattering use of the primitive, but nevertheless, it’s a use that always maintains within it these connotations that are very loaded.
            This essay seemed very tricky on the question of expertise: who can watch performance and understand it correctly? What is the best mode of apperception? One inconsistency is that the article begins (2nd paragraph) anthropologists’ hesitation to deal with what is outside their competency, but at the end, she says she’s critical where western dance scholars have stepped outside their authority. The sequestering of dance into unbroacheable categories is problematic. How do we deal with this? [Provides a handout about a seminar at ASTR] One of the reasons we’re sending you to opera and dance is that there will be some of you who don’t feel you have the authority to understand these performances. There is a very strong sense in these two fields that one cannot have anything to say without great authority/background – an idea I reject.
            Conquergood – discussion of how to solve this problem. How can we make claims about this? Conquergood is an anthropolgist doing ethnographic research at one of the leading institutions (Northwestern). Does he offer any solutions?

Jennifer: How can we have text+ systems? (Systems that involve text and non-text, as he recommends.)

Dorothy: Using videos alongside is one way. Using formatting choices within the text is another. Another way that I’ve seen is to run the Western-focused information alongside the transcription of the story. I really feel that video and audio are not saviors, they are mono-directional, but they are helpful.

Justin: Conquergood is using Frederick Douglass’ first-hand experience as an example – but we can’t necessarily do this when talking about performance.

Jennifer: Doesn’t this take us back to the problem of not being able to talk about the repertoire because once it’s been performed, it’s gone?

Ellen: One option I can think of is EVIA – an annotated video system developed by IU anthropologists uploading fieldwork.  Text and performance can run simultaneously. This is on the continuum. It is a way to get more information and extra-linguistic performance. How does this relate to Phelan, perhaps?

Dorothy: Phelan’s method is challenging. It relates to how to do a report on a given performance. A performance is a discrete event – we must be answerable to that particular one. We can’t meld all the various performances together and make a statement.

Whitney: This reflects on the problem with the event. Not being present, using video and photography – this changes how we talk about the performance.

Jennifer: Won’t using these technologies make our work even less accessible?

Ellen: That’s a constant issue, but this is an interesting question because we do have the potential of  answering Conquergood’s challenge because of the technology we now have. What about his ways of knowing – serious/non-serious ways of knowing? Any thoughts?  

Dorothy: I find Geertz ridiculous – especially his way of phrasing ideas such as “thick description.”

Sara: But he has a beautiful, transcendental way of describing. His is an interesting intervention into Conquergood.

Ellen: But can’t we read that in reverse as well?

Dorothy: Isn’t making it so beautiful (referencing his article on Balninese cockfighting) – a problem? To those people this may just be a normal event.

Justin: What’s beautiful about the cockfighting article is actually the communication between Geertz and the people. That’s what Conquergood is looking for in the Douglass example as well. I don’t see the animosity between the two.

Whitney: I wonder where appreciation for another culture comes in here, though. Does realizing how normal an event is in another culture …Can the Western gaze have at least one benefit – of appreciation of a different understanding?

Ellen: I think you raise the question of “whose body” gets to be the body that gets to do this alternative kind of knowing. What kind of experiences authorize that body?

Dorothy: That’s a big controversy – can you do this kind of ethnographic research on a culture from which you are a part? Can you only (America Perettez reference *notetaker note: I can’t find the right spelling for her name) go to somewhere else to do such work? Sometimes if you go to a different culture, you may not know what is serious/a joke.

Ellen: It does seem that in the case of performance there might be an opportunity for misunderstandings to be productive. For non-immersed spectators to take a gander and offer a description of what they see. Reference to last quotation in ’91 Conquergood article. (Foucault “power produces knowledge…”) According to Foucault, at any point in which understanding is being offered, there are power relations in play, and there’s no happy power relation between equals. This brings us back to Foster’s point and textuality. Let’s look at the number of performance writers who talk about performance in terms of a different language (Foster/dance notation). There’s something that happens with the postures of the body in space that’s full of content/contextualization, but it’s not fully translatable. As soon as we try to make use of Linnean categories of posture, it becomes problematic, but could we think about Artaud’s prompt on language on the stage (handout) or about hand language from the medieval stage (Bulwer handout) as trying to clarify what each movement means – coming partially from Roman oratory?

Courtney – read out p. 246 in Artaud reading – section on the language of the stage.

Ellen – Bodies in movement, bodies on the stage, connote more than what their official movements signify, and there is an impression made on the audience by this extralinguistic expression, and there is a desire to capture and categorize it in a Linnean fashion. There’s some glimmer of opportunity if we talk about – not a trade in knowledges – but if we pay attention to the response of individuals to these movements. They may be shared, they may not, in terms of the particulars, but I  think that that’s an arena in which performance is always traded. That’s why we see plays instead of reading them and go to dance instead of reading descriptions of it. The contemporary desire to pay attention to that which lies outside the analytical (Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick refererence) – allows for a non-expert audience to have some say, to open up the possibility of a broader spectrum of an audience finding meaningfulness. Reason & Reynolds emphasized this: audience members said they didn’t understand or couldn’t empathize. I think this wasn’t necessarily true – I think it’s the result of our being told that we shouldn’t read what we don’t know. One of the things I kept feeling in response to the ethnographic approach is that you can never know enough to be a good spectator, which forces the narrowing down of the object of study to such specificity that you can feel full responsible. Having as much info as possible is great, but making that information contingent on any pleasurable/experience of that cultural experience sequesters that experience. There are all kinds of ways of posing the questions that allow us to value paralelleded experiences.

Dorothy: Who is saying we can’t pose questions about different cultural productions having relationships?

Ellen: As an instructor, I have had to pull back students from doing such projects if they don’t have context or won’t be able to gain the context in time. Cognitive science, the stuplime, feeling historical – these aren’t solutions, but they are steps in the way. What do you think?

Dorothy: I don’t see why we need such levels of analysis in a spectator-to-spectator, seminar setting.

Ellen: I think you’re describing exactly what we’re going for  - this spectator-to-spectator relationship. Conquergood sees performance as a panacea for the questions we’re raising and the dissemination of scholarship as performance is one way to undercut the specialization of the academy. We need to find ways of accounting for performance that still accounts for text but offers up our bodies in a subtler way. I’m thinking back to Kelly’s description of his toes crunching up as a way to discuss his experience. I’m also referencing to Sara’s opening concern and Dorothy’s discussion of the performer who seems slightly off because of a specific gesture. We shouldn’t ignore our bodily responses when watching ballet/opera. It is meaningful. Does anyone have the same hesitation around scientific methods? Conquergood’s divide between map (official, objective, abstract) and story (popular). Mapping becomes a way of registering the body in its least knowable to us.

Jennifer: I had issues with his limitations on a map – it can evoke a bodily response as well (reference to the short story “A Map of the World” by Elspeth Davie).

Sara: It’s valuable to have a map of a country isn’t the same as visiting the country, but it can be useful.

Dorothy: I feel averse to science, but I understand as an academic why it’s useful to go back to it. But on a visceral level I’m more attracted to the record of your experience.

Sara: What we feel and what we think – these seem different things – and I think science may help us overcome these things. I think cognitive science may help us get outside these systems. Belief in scientism can also become another trap out from which we cannot escape.

Ellen: The more sites of receptivity we open up the more receptive we will be. Now we will venture forth into the realm of modern dance. My only prompt is to try to put into your response as much of that extra-analytical as possible. 

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