Performing Ethnography: The political economy of water

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Notes

¹Metaphysics of presence is the idea of a fundamental origin or true origin – essentialized authority based on being alive and present.

²‘R’ here refers to the ethnographer as a ‘Recorder’. As a theatrical device for Water Rites, two performers more effectively provided the particular dualisms, competing sensibilities and layered inquiries that are characteristic of fieldwork, and certainly of my experience in Ghana. The two Recorders provided more of a texture of contrasts and punctuation points to the otherwise monologic voice of the ethnographic narrative. Staging two ethnographers made more explicit and dramatic the internal dilemma of the ethnographic positionality that consistently enters my own work in relation to ethics, responsibility and intention. The two performers are referred to as ‘recorders’ to underscore the fraught and fundamental role of the fieldworker as a recorder or translator.