Ithaca College

  The paper, titled, “Learning to embody the radically empirical: performance, ethnography, sensorial knowledge and the art of tabla playing” was part of the panel “Ethnography, Performance and Imagination” at the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) 116th annual meeting (Anthropology Matters!) in Washington, DC on December 2nd.

 Nuttall’s paper focused on how cultural anthropology has privileged ethnographic text and inscription over the act(s) of fieldwork or the ‘performances’ of ethnography. While anthropologists have made some improvements toward a different kind of anthropology, one which is embodied, the investigations of the body and performance have ultimately remained on the margins of the discipline. Drawing from her ethnographic-participant fieldwork with North Indian tabla players in India and around the globe and the teaching of ethnomusicology labs at an American University she argues for a turn to what Sarah Pink (2009) has called sensory ethnography and Paul Stoller (1989) termed as sensing ethnography.

Most of the presenters of the panel are affiliated with the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography (CIE), a transnational cyber-collective, committed to engaging in critical, embodied, reflexive, and collaborative ethnographic practices that draw on anthropology, ethnography, and the creative arts. The panel presenters will publish in an upcoming special issue of the international Canadian journal Anthropologica on Performance Ethnography and Imagination in 2018.