The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork I have been arguing for some time now that ethnography is going to change or is changing by the same means that it already has within it-not by obsessing over its political efficacy with the text-cultures it invents-but by opening ethnography to its own performance and performativity. -Abdel Hernandez, September 17, 1997.1 I set out to make the case that is, or should be regarded as, art. I wound up instead making the case that there is an art to and art it, but that does not make Art of it, at least an everyday sense... We need to introduce or reintroduce a more dramatic contrast between and data... The label ought to be reserved for research circumstances when depth is a reasonable trade-off for breadth... Fieldwork is ideally suited to the study of culture, but one does not have to be committed to the concept of culture to do fieldwork. There are other terms and ways to conceptualize and study the social contexts which humans interact. -Harry Wolcott, The Art of Fieldwork, pp. 241, 247, 248; emphases added. This article is a conceptual exploration of what Hernandez calls the and Wolcott the of fieldwork. By these two terms I refer to the very actualization, conduct, realization, and corporeal of the activities and practices that comprise and constitute ethnographic fieldwork. It has become an increasingly common view among anthropologists that ethnography must move away from the debates of ethnographic representation and theorization of culture. From this position, some anthropologists have sought a return to the more scientific business of ethnography, while others have turned decisively toward the politics of cultural production. Another, however short-lived, response was the emergence of experimental ethnography anthropology, which remained focused on ethnographic representation (versus turning to per se) and, specifically, writing/literary representation (versus other media beyond the literary and audio-visual text). Unlike that movement anthropology, symbolic and interpretive interactionisms sociology have pushed for new ways of conceiving ethnography as both and representation by engaging the performative dimensions of both and the communication of ethnographic reporting. This article allies itself with this third set of scholarship. The goal is to analyze the performativity or of order to identify basic ontological principles. These turn may be useful to rethink the very conception and design of ethnographic research. Wolcott distinguishes between two types ethnography. Doing fieldwork are activities and practices that are based immersion while gathering data in the field are research activities that rely upon rapid, extensive, and comprehensive investigations of the of phenomena on relatively large (or larger) scale with methods such as surveys, questionnaires, sampling, that can be applied without the intensive immersion and situ dwelling of fieldwork. In this article, we retain and rename the analytical contrast as a distinction between being fieldwork (Wolcott's fieldwork) and doing fieldwork (his gathering data) order to enable an ontological interpretation of the performative nature (or performativity) of fieldwork, whether this research is based immersion or surface methods. To state the obvious, both of Wolcott's types of research, the researcher conducts, does or performs the research; thus, the distinction between being fieldwork and doing fieldwork becomes an analytical distinction that identifies two facets of research and allows for an analysis of the ontological performativity of fieldwork. The goal of this article, which is, however, primarily concerned with the doing of fieldwork Wolcott's sense, is to open up a space and a perspective by which to rethink through a new understandings of its basic ontologicalthat is, performative-principles. …