Performance and Ethnography (methods

SS 103 (also 107) Performance and Ethnography  Music, dance, and theater may be viewed as performance arts, but they are also situated in social, economic, and cultural contexts. This course both explores social science frameworks for analyzing performance, and introduces students to qualitative ethnographic methods. The course will explore approaches that address performance as embodied experience, as ritual, as a product of economic relations, as a site of symbolic meaning, and as a site of contested power relations. Students will conduct limited fieldwork and develop a research paper on a related topic of their choice. Through this process they will consider questions of power in the ethnographic setting, develop interviewing and transcribing skills, and explore qualitative and interpretive anthropological methods.