Virginie Magnat

Conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of performance studies, experimental ethnography, and indigenous methodologies

While advocating interdisciplinary research, the field of performance studies has yet to integrate the epistemological and methodological revolution that has taken place in qualitative research over the last two decades, a revolution that was significantly informed by what Norman K. Denzin identifies as the performance turn in the social sciences. Moreover, the recently published Handbook of Critical & Indigenous Methodologies (2008), edited by Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, calls for a strategic alliance between critical theory, indigenous research, and performance ethnography. For Native Canadian, Hawaiian, Maori, and American Indian scholars, the ?increasingly virulent relationship between human beings and the rest of nature– lies at the heart of our world’s current spiritual crisis. They respond by proposing a respectful performance pedagogy [that] works to construct a vision of the person, ecology, and environment — in accordance with Indigenous worldviews (13 -14).

While Indigenous decolonizing research methods are designed by and for Indigenous scholars and activists working within their own communities, Cree scholar Shawn Wilson remarks in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008): So much the better if dominant universities and researchers adopt [Indigenous research principles] as well (59). Since Denzin, Lincoln and Smith acknowledge that the limitations of the Handbook include their inability to locate persons who could write chapters from a number of perspectives, including arts-based methodologies and Indigenous performance studies, I examine the relevance of Indigenous research epistemologies and methodologies for the field of performance studies.