Performance and Ethnography | Reading List
Revised 9/21/07
A. Performance readings:
1. Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1981. The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence, pp. 3-20. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2. Babcock, Barbara. 1987. “Reflexivity.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion. Mircea Eliade, ed. Vol. 12, pp. 234-38. New York: Macmillan.
3. Barber, Karin. 1997. “Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa.” Africa 67(3):347-362.
4. Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
5. Brecht Bertolt. 1957 [1936]. “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.” Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett, pp. 91-99. NY: Hill & Wang.
6. Bruner, Edward M. and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 1994. “Maasai on the lawn: tourist realism in East Africa. “ Cultural Anthropology 9(4):435-70.
7. Hymes, Dell. 1981[1975]. “Breakthrough into Performance.” In "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, pp. 79-141. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
8. Irvine, Judith T. 1979. “Formality and Informality in Communicative Events.” American Anthropologist 81:773-90.
9. Schechner, Richard. 1981. "Restoration of Behavior." Studies in Visual Communication 7:2-45.
10. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. “Performance and the cultural construction of reality.” American Ethnologist 12(4): 707-24.
11. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications.
B. Ethnography Readings:
12. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy.” In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Pp. 27-47. University of Minnesota Press.
13. Briggs, Charles. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research, pp. 1-6, 39-60, 102-125. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
14. Briggs, Charles. 2004. “Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic.: American Ethnologist 31(2):164-187.
15. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Selections:
A. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” Pp. 1-26.
B. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Fieldwork in Common Places,” pp. 27-50.
C. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory,” pp. 98-121.
D. Tyler, Stephen T. “Post-modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,” pp. 122-140.
E. Marcus, George. “Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System,” pp. 165-193.
F. Fischer, Michael M. J. “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory,” pp. 194-233.
G. Rabinow, Paul. “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” pp. 234-261.
H. Marcus, George. “Afterward: Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers,” pp. 262-266.
16. Farnell, Brenda and Laurie Graham. 1998. “Discourse-centered Methods.” In Bernard, Russel H. (ed.), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
17. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. "Thick Description." In The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books. Pp. 3-30.
18. Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California.
Selections:
A. Ginsburg, Faye. “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media.”
B. Turner, Terence. “Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Point and Kayapo Examples.”
C. Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Egyptian Melodrama? Technology of the Modern Subject?”
D. Mankekar, Purnima. “Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India.”
E. Wilk, Richard R. “Television, Time, and the National Imaginary in Belize.”
F. Mandel, Ruth. “A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera.”
G. Ganti, Tejaswini. "And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian:" The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood.”
H. Himpele, Jeff D. “Arrival Scenes: Complicity and Media Ethnography in the Bolivian Public Sphere.”
I. Spitulnik, Debra. “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture.”
J. Pinney, Christopher. “The Indian Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Or, What Happens When Peasants "Get Hold" of Images.”
19. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Selections:
A. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. “Discipline and Practice: `The Field’ as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology,” pp. 1-46.
B. Weston, Kath. “The Virtual Anthropologist,” pp. 163-184.
C. Clifford, James. “Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel and the Disciplining of Anthropology,” pp, 185-222.
20. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
21. Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham: Duke University Press.
22. Narayan, Kirin. “How Native Is a `Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 671-686.
23. Mannheim, Bruce and Dennis Tedlock. 1995. "Introduction." In Tedlock, Dennis and Bruce Mannheim, eds. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
C. Foundational Theoretical Readings:
24. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
25. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 217-252.
26. Roberts, Graham (author) and Pam Morris (ed.) 1998. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London and New York: E. Arnold.
