Identities

identity performance

Identities

• performance ethnography– how do symbolic behaviours actually

perform/challenge cultural values, traditions and customs that make up our community?

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Identities

• graffiti consists of symbols that reflect the values, issues and identities of particular ‘small’ cultures

• graffiti performs by making statements• graffiti (per)forms values, identities, politics

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Identities

• ethnography– a method of interpreting actions in a manner that

generates understanding in the terms of those performing the actions

– Geertz: thick/thin description– Conquergood: ‘instead of speaking about them

one speaks to and with them’ (1985)– participant observation

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the hermeneutic circle: rendering thick description

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Distance-experience meaning, in which theethnographer tries to understand thebehaviour using concepts removed from the context of study

near-experience meaning,in which the ethnographerprogressively gains appreciationof behaviours from the point of view of those behaving

translation of near-experiencemeaning into distance-experiencemeaning for outsiders whilstpreserving the near-experiencemeanings

behaviour observed by peoplewho are outside the ethnographersculture or social community

Identities

• personal narratives– we all tell stories about who we are, what we’ve

done, what we believe in, and how we operate in the world

– some performance ethnographers are interested in collecting and performing such stories

true voices

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Identities

• is this an objective representation of experience or identity?

• what are the effects being achieved in the telling?

• what are the intentions in the telling?

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Identities

• what are the risks of telling?• what are the risks of listening?• what makes a story true or false?• can an experience become true in the telling?• can it change in that process?

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Identities

The truth of stories is not only what wasexperienced, but equally what becomesexperience in the telling and its reception

(Arthur Frank, 1995)

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Identities• Can performance ethnography accurately represent

others and the experience of others in their own terms?

• ethnography as a critical self-reflexive process and performance

• self-reflexivity enables ethnography to recognise the limits of subjectivity and the dangers of misrepresentation in ways that methods claiming ‘objectivity’ do not.

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Identities• Giddens and reflexivity

– a self-defining process that depends upon the monitoring of and reflection upon, psychological and social information about the possible ways that we can live.

– ‘The reflexivity of social life consists I the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those practices, thus constitutively altering their character’ (Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. p. 28)

• The project of the self is ‘accomplished’

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Giddens on marriage

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Summary

• stories and their performance are at the heart of many performance ethnographers

• reflexivity helps to understand the human propensity to story tell

• reflexivity and the stories we tell constitute the project of the self

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Giddens

Conceptsare used to create

Theoriesare used to create

Explanations

• Reflexivity in the post-traditional society

• We make sense of social life and our place in it through the stories we tell. These stories constitute our autobiographies.

• Identities are autobiographical projects which we negotiate with the cultural resources at our disposal.

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