[Re] Constructing Meanings: the Dance Ethnographer as Keeper of the Truth

Abstract

The issue of representation in both its epistemological and political dimensions has resounded throughout theoretical literature on ethnography. Yet in spite of Williams’s pioneering consideration of reflexivity and objectivity in 1976, the problematics of representation have been slow to percolate dance scholarship. In common with most mainstream anthropologists, dance researchers have been stimulated by the oft-cited collection Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) and the more scattered writings of feminist ethnographers published in the 1980s (see Abu-Lughod, 1990). Studies by Sklar (1991) and Ness (1992, 1996) are indicative of the trend to situate the researcher in relation to the people interviewed and observed, to the fieldwork process and to the act of writing. Yet the impact of that writing on the communities and their researcher after publication remains underinvestigated in dance scholarship.¹