Theorizing the personal.

Summoning intersubjective awareness.

Not to mine it or use it. Not to appropriate it or reduce it. But to creatively, feelingfully, critically position what is relevantly personal and interpersonal. It might seem at first that theorizing and the personal are at odds, and that intersubjectivity is unknowable. There is a legacy—an affliction— that asserts these binaries. But once we understand how the personal infuses everything we know whether or not we show it or even recognize it, and once we allow for embodied, empirical ethnographic scholarship to also be intermodal, contrapuntal, and co-present—to become creative nonfiction, performance art, and collective creation—the false dichotomies evaporate. What is unapologetically human then exposes and expels the stifling pedant in our midst. Released, we can stride ahead baring our gaps and mistakes. Embracing our stumbles and bumbles, we can delve into vulnerable and open questions—tumbling into the unplanned lessons we most urgently need.

the conceptual setting

ethnography and its double(s)

In The Theater and Its Double (1938), the genius madman Antonin Artaud articulated a socioaesthetic vision of performance that challenged the complacent bourgeois theater of those perilous times. Here, in our own perilous times, I extend Artaud's “double” to encompass performance, ethnography, and academia more broadly. More specifically, I propose that we identify an avant-garde approach to ethnographic research and writing; some may call it radical but really it's just human. It leads to poetically grounded description/ evocation and interactive reiteration of musicking, dancing, and social and spiritual practices. This approach can be (and has been) vital for generating empathic intercultural bonds for healing across smoldering neocolonial and other divides. Ethnographic intercultural exchange, like metaphor, offers us a perceptual clearing as we expand and enter new domains. Intangible vulnerabilities that render all parties open to being changed are required. But without vulnerability we get instead a regressive mirror image—a deadening double—of what would have been a vital process.

To understand the dynamics of this double is to learn to distinguish the endeavors and enactments that dismantle oppressive forces from those that uphold oppressions.