Introduction: From Ethnography of Performance to Performance Ethnography

As always, I arrived late for a plenary session of the PSi 16 conference in Toronto, 2010, and the only available seats were in the balcony. The session had the daunting task of charting “performance studies” as a research field in Canada.¹ It was an opportunity to introduce the work of key Canadian researchers identified with this field; it provided a sense of the diverse research and institutional affiliations under which performance work occurs; and it reminded participants of the depth of performance practices that predate scholarly attention to the subject. What remained to be voiced were contributions folklore/ethnology and ethnographies of performance made to a Canadian account of performance studies. Although the links between folklore and performance are well documented (Kapchan), this special issue is a preliminary effort to broaden the narrative about performance work in Canada, and also to suggest connections with what is now more commonly referred to as “performance ethnography.”

In 1975, as part of Thomas Sebeok’s book series on semiotics, Mouton & Co. published Folklore: Performance and Communication (Ben-Amos and Goldstein). Occasioned by linguistic and ethnographic work identified with Dell Hymes, John Gumperz, and others, editors Dan Ben-Amos and Kenneth S. Goldstein added fuel to what was being identified as the “contextual” approach to the study of folklore. More than a decade earlier, Hymes had introduced a special issue of the American Anthropologist on the topic of “the ethnography of communication” in an attempt to anchor divisive approaches to language in the speech practices of particular communities (13). By the decade’s end, implications of this approach had travelled beyond anthropology and linguistics. Ben-Amos and Goldstein understood the contextual approach as shifting folklore scholarship from archival and literary activity to the socially emergent qualities of performance.

The contextual approach was implicitly theatrical: performance was a special category of cultural activity, one “for which a person assumes responsibility to an audience” (Hymes, “Breakthrough” 18). Ben-Amos and Goldstein included essays by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Richard Bauman. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett had done dissertation fieldwork in Toronto and some of Bauman’s early fieldwork was situated in Nova Scotia (Bauman, “La Have”). Two years later, Bauman consolidated the contextual approach under the rubric of “the ethnography of performance.” His collection Verbal Art as Performance identified important constituents of performance contexts and developed frameworks for their analysis. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ Marxist analysis of residual and emergent culture, Bauman saw the approach as providing a “unified point of departure” (48) for folklore research, and noted the dialectical role of “performance to transform social structures,” and its potential “for subverting and transforming the status quo” (45).

Looking back, Bauman and Charles Briggs identified “three critical reorientations” achieved by the ethnography of performance: understanding performance as offering “an alternative, socially constituted linguistics” focused on the everyday ways people use language; understanding performance as a lived relationship between performer and audience, one that involves a creative, emergent, and critical relation with tradition; and finally “an understanding of performance as socially constitutive and efficacious” (78). A fourth accomplishment often implicitly understood by folklorists is the increased awareness of otherwise marginalized and subjugated forms of expressive culture.

Goldstein became head of Memorial University of Newfoundland’s folklore department in the year following the publication of Folklore: Performance and Communication. Notions of performance were already shaping folklore scholarship there. The 1969 publication of Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland, edited by Herbert Halpert and George Story, offered history, description, and interpretation of these “living folk traditions” (3). While they located mumming in relation to residual traditions of festival disguise and folk drama, their volume was grounded in the local expression of mumming and explored the informal house visit as a context. This sense of performance was also evident in scholarship on music performers’ negotiations of repertoire (Casey, Rosenberg, and Wareham) and debates about performance style and authenticity (Rosenberg, Transforming). Neil Rosenberg’s reflections on his academic development make it clear that doing fieldwork with people who identified as performers and his own performance knowledge, his “bi-musicality” (Rosenberg, “Picking” 278), facilitated his role as participant researcher.

Sheldon Posen, one...