Representing Practice: An Assist from Dwight Conquergood, Part 1

I am just now learning about the work of ethnographer, performance theorist, and activist Dwight Conquergood. A friend who was one of his students at Northwestern University referred me to an article he wrote that she thought might intersect helpfully with practical theology, and I think it does.
The article is “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance” (published in Literature in Performance 5:2 (1985), pp. 1-13). Conquergood writes about what he has learned by performing material from the lives of the participants in his research, participants whose lives were usually on the margins of social power or propriety: “For three and a half years I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Lao and Hmong refugees in Chicago. The performance of their oral narratives is an integral part of my research project and a natural extension of the role of the ethnographer as participant to that of advocate.” (p. 2)
His reasons for taking on this work of representation, in front of a wide variety of audiences (which reminded me of the work of Anna Deavere Smith), include that of being an “uninvited stranger who depends upon the patient courtesies and openhearted hospitality of the community,” making him “compelled by the laws of reciprocity and human decency to intervene, if he can, in a crisis.” “The stories my Laotian friends tell,” he writes, “make claims on me.” (pp. 2-3)
Practical theology, of course, has made a substantial turn to ethnography over the past decade, making an experienced teacher and theorist like Conquergood a potentially instructive conversation partner. My own and my students’ forays into such work have me curious about creative ways of doing that work that do not too quickly fall into grids for perception inherited in either theology or social science, ways that help communities figure out what they are and might become, and that are a force for social change. Also, as a white man doing this work, I stand to potentially learn from Conquergood’s exploration of ethics and ethnography in performance across complex fields of difference, similarity, and ambiguous alliance. (This is not to prejudge or theorize out here how Conquergood himself understood his own role in researching. This is just a blog post, after all, and I’m new to his work.)
In Conquergood’s mentions of the stranger, hospitality, reciprocity, and decency, I hear echoes of the accounts practical theologians give for our own ethnographic work, which is sometimes presented in theologically signficant terms related to respect and dignity, particularity, solidarity and justice. And I can imagine tentative potential areas for future overlap or dialogue for a multireligious and multisecular approach to ethnography.
Do practical theologians perform their ethnographic research? Not usually in the way Conquergood wrote about, where a set piece is performed “theatrically” drawn from the research, embodied by the performer who somehow inhabits their own and another reality simultaneously. On the other hand, theologians in academic settings are performing such research regularly, in teaching and conference presentations, for example, as well as in and through writing. In religious-community settings, such research makes its way into innumerable teaching and learning events, where knowledge of the “other” is performed in story, song, prayer–and silence.
(I’ll never forget going to Catholic Mass once, with a Jewish relative, and hearing Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 1:22, proclaimed with gusto: “Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom.” Not that this particular assertion was based on what we would count today as research (!), but it was still a report about the other performed in a way presumed to be edifying for the assembled. My relative turned to me, confused: “Jews do what?” Actually, Conquergood’s theory has something to say about this moment…)
In the next post, I’ll briefly summarize Conquergood’s learning about the ethics of performing other people’s stories/lives.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York