Abstract
Some think of ethnography as a journey, others see it as a destination. With Ellis and Bochner, I want an autoethnography that shows struggle, passion, an embodied life that embraces a social justice agenda. Critics want to tame ethnography, categorize it, place it under the control of reason and logic. I want an unruly ethnography fractured, a mosaic of sorts, layered performance texts, messy, a montage, part theory, part performance, multiple voices, a performance with speaking parts: a critical performance ethnography that makes a difference in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Speaking parts, marked by named persons (Terry Tempest Williams, interlocutor, security, traveler, park service officer, observer, wife, grandson, etc.) and indented texts, rotate through speakers.
- 2.
His blanket term for auto, performance, post-structural ethnography.
- 3.
These words are written on 7 November, 2008, 2Â days after the U.S. presidential election of Barak Obama.
- 4.
The play has been performed over 2,000 times. The Tectonic Theater Project collaborated with Home Box Office (HBO) to make a film based on the play. It starred Peter Fonda, Laura Linney, Christina Ricci and Steve Buscomi. It opened the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for 4 Emmys.
- 5.
It can be deployed in specific disciplines, from social welfare, health care, nursing, medicine, public health, social welfare, counseling, communications, to anthropology, sociology, and the humanities. It can underlie social policy discourse.
- 6.
This text draws from a performance by Urmitapa Dutta, a doctoral student in my advanced interpretive methods seminar, fall 2008.
- 7.
See Denzin (2007, pp. 20–21).
- 8.
History is a moving target, but returning to this sentence 4 months later (April 6, 2009), it is clear that Obama is systematically dismantling the spectacles of fear and terror that propped up the bush administration. Obama’s odyssey is amazing: his mother, an anthropologist, born but never lived in Kansas, the land of Oz, and Jesse James; his father an African intellectual trained at Harvard; Obama, a childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, also Harvard trained; Chicago community organizer, Muslim and Catholic schools, Land of Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, northern racism, the Daley Machine, President. Who are his ancestors? Who are our ancestors? (see Bob Dylan on Obama, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts and http://entertainment/music/arstsicle6064331.ece)
- 9.
This paragraph draws from a draft document for training qualitative researchers in public health prepared by Fernando Penaranda, Universidad de Antioquia.
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I thank Carl Bagley, Michael Giardina, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Denzin, N.K. (2014). A Critical Performance Pedagogy That Matters. In: Rinehart, R., Barbour, K., Pope, C. (eds) Ethnographic Worldviews. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6916-8_17
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