ABSTRACT
This essay argues that the heuristic practice of bifurcating the narrator in Chamber Theatre adaptations of literature offers the performance ethnographer a strategy for identifying narrative tensions in ethnographic writing. I review arguments establishing the literary fictional nature of ethnographic writing and the subsequent use of metafiction by scholars to address the concerns brought about by “the crisis of representation.” I identify invention, convention, and recognition as narrative perspectives at Burning Man that are useful to performance ethnographers navigating the tension between chaos and legibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).