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 research methods 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 students will consider questions of power in the ethnographic setting, develop interviewing and transcribing skills, and explore interpretive anthropological methods. MCP, PRJ, REA, WRI