Talking Circus, Not Culture: The Politics of Identity in European Circus Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the production of circus talk as an ambiguous, even eccentric, form of identity formation. By situating this talk within the larger contexts of the ironies of representation, especially the given authoritative discourses concerning the invention of culture, I discuss how a circus artist, Luciano Bello, and an ethnographer, me, struggled over the production of meaning and the uses of circus identity concepts. The course of this struggle organizes itself around the vocabulary of the cultural impositions and appropriations, the practices of dialogue, and the mutual parodies of meaning production and the power dynamics out of which the ethnographer's and the circus artist's identities are perfarmed.