Performing Ethnography: From Dissonance to Resonance in Teaching Anthropology in China

In the Gender, Culture, and Society undergraduate course at a mainland Chinese university, an instructor had her students perform Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body (2001) to engage their own embodied experience in an anthropology class. To clarify the epistemological significance of this pedagogical innovation, the instructor engaged in a three-year dialogue with her Chinese collaborator regarding her teaching experience. This collaboratively written article drawing on one author’s classroom ethnography and extensive discussions on pedagogical innovations, examines how dissonance –defined here as readers’ interpretative gaps when engaging with an ethnographic text –can be transformed into resonance –readers’ embodied engagement with the text –through a dramaturgical approach to teaching anthropology inspired by the work of Victor and Edith Turner, (e.g. performing ethnography). In mobilising Chinese students to perform ethnography, the frictions between the sociocultural context of the text and their own experiences were made apparent. By engaging with the text in an embodied manner, the students experienced a transformation from dissonance to resonance, and their subsequent discussions fostered reflexivity and empathy. Inspired by the Turners’ theoretical framework and dramaturgically oriented pedagogy, performing ethnography constitutes one of several pedagogical innovations that are urgently needed to re-evaluate anthropological education. We posit that students’ dissonance with ethnographic texts provides a foundation for pedagogical innovation. By transforming the classroom into a theatrical space –an experimental site for both ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical as well as methodological reflection –this approach contributes significantly to anthropological knowledge production.