Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom

Engaging the Legacy of Edith and Victor Turner

Pamela R. Frese, Susan Brownell, Pamela R. Frese, Susan Brownell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030419943
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030419950
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

The contributors gathered here revitalize "ethnographic performance"—the performed recreation of ethnographic subject matter pioneered by Victor and Edith Turner and Richard Schechner—as a progressive pedagogy for the 21^st century. They draw on their experiences in utilizing performances in a classroom setting to facilitate learning about the diversity of culture and ways of being in the world. The editors, themselves both students of Turner at the University of Virginia, and Richard Schechner share recollections of the Turners' vision and set forth a humanistic pedagogical agenda for the future. A detailed appendix provides an implementation plan for ethnographic performances in the classroom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Foundations of Experiential Performance Pedagogy
• 2. Points of Contact Between Anthropology and Theatre, Again
• 3. Performing Ethnography
• 4. Revisiting the Past for the Present: The Wedding Ritual Performance in the Turners’ Seminar
• 5. Structure, Anti-structure, and Communitas in the Classroom: Notes on Embodied Theory
• 6. Bridges to the Ancestors: Engaging Students with Ethnographic Performances in the Classroom
• 7. The Smell of Smudge, the Work of Smoke: Reenacting Native American Ritual in an Anthropology Course
• 8. Grotto Water and Potato Chips: Turnerian Ethnographic Performance as Pedagogical Resistance
• 9. Dance Lessons: Performance as Engaged Experiential Embodiment
• 10. Pedagogies of the Imagination: Toward a New Performative Politics
• 11. Cultivating Empathy by Performing Migration
• 12. Moving Forward
• Back Matter