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Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood

Article  in  Theatre Journal · January 2014

DOI: 10.1353/tj.2014.0102

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Theatre Journal, Volume 66, Number 4, December 2014, pp. 646-647 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/tj.2014.0102

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646 / Theatre Journal
out as “society,” never ragged, redundant-utopian
“community”: a fighting embrace of “communism
. . . made up of multiple conversations” (ibid). A
radicalized, irony-laden talking shop perhaps.
One overall outcome is that Ridout’s admirably
consistent focus on capitalist/communist binaries
works strongly to expose their critical fault lines
via splendidly copious, data-diverse bibliographic
support, resulting in appropriately high levels of
mostly transparent analytical reflexivity. Yet, one
hazard of that is an often edgily cautious prose style
that might be student/curriculum averse; a second
is an abstraction of “the theatre” from the riot of
living diversity in actual performing environments.
These are relatively minor quibbles beside the fre-
quent insights of Passionate Amateurs, such as: “If
you can serve the man while convincing yourself
you are really fucking the man, then you can count
yourself really fucked” (114).
So what about that cliff-hanging final chapter?
Ridout switches to theatre criticism as a professional
academic spectator of three twenty-first-century live
events: by Slovenian company Via Negativa, Italian
group Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, and UK theatre-
maker Chris Goode. This remarkable miscellany is
held together by introducing “solitude in relation”
(153), a refinement of the first chapter’s “experience
of intimacy in public” (28). Through this liberal the-
atrical fix, the capitalist coupling “of work and lei-
sure is undone,” which occasions this observation:
“To have such a feeling of liberation . . . in, say, a
wilderness would be one thing. To experience it in a
theatre is quite another, especially as a professional
spectator” (153). Ridout evokes Nancy’s notion of
“literary communism” (ibid.; see also 10–11) as an
effect of that affect, constituting a wonderfully tact-
ful transfer of far-Left radical action to the proverbial
boards. Yet, his inferred retreat from the “natural
world” is curious, given the intense embrace of
“real world” theatre ecologies in earlier chapters,
as if Passionate Amateurs were inadvertently echo-
ing David Riesman et al.’s 1950s concept of the
suburban-community-conformist “lonely crowd.”
But think of that as a latent function of post-
cyborg post-humanism, where maybe it will not
be entirely redundant to posit an actually existing
“community” of all Earthly organisms (and more).
So could Ridout’s audacious text justifiably be as-
sociated with such a crucial eco-political tendency,
if only for the lonely planet’s sake? After all, in pro-
ducing this acutely testing and thought-provoking
book of hope in creative abandon, surely he has already
done it no small radical service.
BAZ KERSHAW
University of Warwick
Cultural Struggles: Performance,
Ethnography, Praxis. By Dwight
Conquergood, edited by E. Patrick Johnson.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2013; pp. 344.
As literary executor of Dwight Conquergood’s
work after the author’s death in 2004, E. Patrick
Johnson has pulled together a valuable collection
of articles by one of the founding fathers of perfor-
mance studies. The introduction provides a thor-
ough overview of Conquergood’s professional ex-
perience and theoretical contributions, and describes
the interdisciplinary background that was instru-
mental in forming his methodological approaches.
Johnson’s admiration for Conquergood is evident,
and he puts great care into describing exactly how
Conquergood worked not just on, but also with the
people, and how he helped to popularize performance
as an effective conceptual tool. Cultural Struggles is
an important archive of a prominent scholar who
passed away at a young age. Critical commentaries
conclude the book and explain how Conquergood’s
ideas have influenced scholarship: how performance
as a theoretical concept and as social action relates to
political economy and class, vulnerability and social
responsibility, politics of the disenfranchised, sub-
versive spaces, and artistic advocacy. Johnson and
his contributors aim to demonstrate how Conquer-
good’s work has “withstood the test of time long
after his passing” (13), but the collection is most
valuable in that it brings together a large selection
of works by Conquergood that are otherwise very
difficult to find.
The volume contains four astutely arranged sec-
tions: 1) Performance, 2) Ethnography, 3) Praxis, and
4) Critical Responses. Although there is repetition in
Conquergood’s writing, especially in sections 1–2, it
would have been difficult for Johnson to cut any of
the selections, since each presents particular theoret-
ical thrusts that mark Conquergood’s contributions
to the field. Conquergood is perhaps best known for
analyzing the essential relationship among creative
practice, theoretical analysis, and research methods
(ethnographic, performative, dialogic). He alliterates
them as the three “C”s of performance studies: cre-
ativity, critique, citizenship; the three “A”s: artistry,
analysis, activism; and the three “I”s: the work of
imagination and object of study, pragmatics of inqui-
ry as model and method, and tactic of intervention
and alternative place of struggle (41). Conquergood
situates his theory “on the ground”—based on eth-
nographic data—and stresses the need for ethical
research. “Both performance and field research are
public, embodied, vulnerable, and risky ventures,”
he writes, wanting to instill the value of creating a

“performance community” and also a “community
of fellow fieldworkers” (5).
Section 1, “Performance,” delineates the founda-
tions of Conquergood’s approach. With a nod to
Victor Turner’s groundbreaking interest in perfor-
mance and process in the field of anthropology, he
explains the “interpretive turn” in the human sci-
ences, and describes cultural performance as both
a unit of analysis and a methodology, not just the
“thing” to be studied. Writing of the complex rela-
tionship among “co-actors” in a research setting,
Conquergood includes interactions with outside
researchers, such as himself (17–18). Research must
be “dialogic,” he asserts, since “the relationship
between ethnographer and native is not a natural
one: it is absolutely constructed” (20). Conquer-
good’s ideas return to the notion that “what keeps
the performative nature of culture as enlivening
energies in perpetual motion is that people con-
tinuously enact—perhaps it is more fitting to say
‘transact’—culture” (17). He focuses, finally, on the
ability of performance studies as an interdiscipline
to move among structures, and considers (follow-
ing Homi Bhabha) how the notion and activation
of the “performative” may interrupt and decenter
powerful master narratives. By continually stressing
the differences between the “view from above” and
that “from below,” Conquergood ethnographically
examines “ways of knowing,” “subjugated knowl-
edges” (via Foucault), counter-hegemonic discours-
es, and legibility (33). He critiques the “hegemony
of textualism” and proposes methods to dislodge
the trend, stressing the effectiveness of both written
scholarship and creative work (35).
The second section, “Ethnography,” further expli-
cates participant observation as a powerful research
method and also as performance itself. Conquer-
good argues that researchers have unavoidable
subjectivities that should be put into play, asserting
that sensitive engagement is unavoidable. The obli-
gations (and the performance) do not simply stop
when the research does, says Conquergood, but
must continue into dissemination of the results. In
this section, he contrasts the ideal of “dialogic per-
formance” with four potential shortcomings: “The
Custodian’s Rip-Off,” “The Enthusiast’s Infatua-
tion,” “The Skeptic’s Cop-Out,” and “The Cura-
tor’s Exhibitionism” (71). These articles focus on the
movement of ethnographic methods from its first
colonial applications into more contemporary inves-
tigations of embodiment, borderland crossing, and
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rhetorical reflexivity, drawing on slave narratives
and working-class histories to “excavate a hidden
history and radical tradition of elocution and oral
interpretation” (105).
“Praxis,” the third section, tests these theories,
as Conquergood describes his in-depth work with
particular “vulnerable” populations, each misunder-
stood by society and the official powers that steer
their lives. “Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee
Camp” is one of Conquergood’s most well-known
studies, where he describes the role of cultural per-
formance in a refugee camp in Thailand. Entering
the field as a health worker, he lives with residents
and uses popular theatre to raise awareness about
sanitation and camp survival, hoping to “break the
pattern of importing the knowledge of experts and
distributing it to refugees, who were expected to be
grateful consumers” (134). Other articles describe
survival strategies in low-income Chicago tenement
housing; gang culture, communication, and group
(“nation”) loyalties; boundary transgressions, and
social-performance strategies. His final piece on
“Lethal Theatre” analyzes the performance rituals
of state killing, the “effusive power of the effigy,”
and society’s sense of “justice” (278). The great
successes of the articles in this section are the de-
scriptions of process, cultural interactions, and the
complexities of collaboration. Ethnographically, they
may no longer be unique in method or depth, but
they are especially useful for Conquergood’s inser-
tion of performance theory—new in social science
and communication studies at the time—and his
often controversial arguments for scholarly activ-
ism and advocacy.
While making Conquergood easily accessible,
the collection also will, I hope, reinvigorate the
art of ethnographic research in performance stud-
ies, since the field seems to be moving away from
ethnographic methods and into more disembodied
and decontextualized critical theory–based modes
of analysis. Johnson, an innovative artist, perfor-
mance studies scholar, and ethnographer himself,
presents this volume in tribute to a colleague he
describes as a “fierce intellectual and an even fiercer
ethnographer and activist” (3). But importantly, he
seeks also to directly (re-)introduce the scholarly
community to some of the foundational ideas and
research methods of an increasingly diversifying
interdisciplinary field.
LAURIE FREDERIK
University of Maryland, College Park