Performance as Methodology: Embodied Archives and Fabulation

Abstract

The discipline of anthropology is one of the foundational stones for performance studies, to the extent that it provided one of our most common methodologies for research: ethnography. However, in this essay, I am interested in what anthropology can learn from performance studies methodologically, namely, looking at performance as a valuable research method, especially for an intersectional feminist practice. Following Saidiya Hartman's scholarship, and Tavia Nyong'o's and Consuelo Pabón's readings of Gilles Deleuze, I use the concept of fabulation to explore and interpret the potency of performance as methodology. Through an analysis of a performance piece by the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi (EKTA), I argue that performance offers the possibility to enact a register of the past (based on an embodied archive) at the same time that it has the potential to produce ephemeral visions of a future of liberation. In the end, I argue that moving beyond looking and writing about embodied practices, which anthropologists have done extensively, toward the purposeful creation of performance in the context of anthropological research can serve as a fruitful tool to practice feminist positionality.