Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis

by Dwight Conquergood, E. Patrick Johnson (Editor)

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries. Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies. The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

Genres: Academic

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from thesis:

Actually these notes are from RETHINKING ETHNOGRAPHY:

Putting labels on identity creates rhetorical distances between people, but identity is not stagnant. It is ever-changing and re-creating itself; it is “invented and contingent, not autonomous” (Conquergood, 1991, p. 184).

Being in a given space, at a given moment, could be the premise upon which one experiences certain aspects of “becoming” an identity. As Conquergood (1991) points out, the act of being-on-the-go, in and of itself, creates something while it is passing.

[Hillary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually can't remember if I finished this book or not, but in my mind I've finished. The attempt to depict the studies of cultural performance without assuming a colonialist, white-man-centric, appropriation-esque influence. Not sure if it accomplishes that, but has lots of interesting theories.