Can Research Become Ceremony? Performance Ethnography and Indigenous Epistemologies

Abstract

Pioneered by Victor Turner and further developed by Dwight Conquergood and Norman K. Denzin, performance ethnography foregrounds the experiential, reflexive, intersubjective, and embodied dimensions of performance. Moreover, performance ethnography proposes to integrate the Indigenous critique of Euro-American research, and supports collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. How, then, might Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies rooted in traditional cultural practices contribute to the future(s) of performance ethnography? Decolonizing performance ethnography necessarily entails redefining both ethnographic research, shaped by the contested discipline of anthropology, and performance practice, linked to Euro-American conceptions of theatre. Drawing from the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Manulani Aluli Meyer, Shawn Wilson, and Floyd Favel, the author asks whether performance ethnography, informed and possibly transformed by Indigenous perspectives, can become a way of engaging in research that contributes not only to our survival, but to the survival of all living species and of the natural world which we co-inhabit.