In his essay, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Dwight Conquergood discusses the morals surrounding and potential of ethnographic performance. He speaks on the potential power of embodying other cultures via performance, describing “empathetic performance as a way of intensifying the participative nature of fieldwork, and as a corrective to foreshorten the textual distance that results from writing monographs about people with whom one lives and studies” (2).
He moves to discuss four ethical pitfalls that performers of ethnography often come across (i.e., the Custodian’s Rip-Off, Enthusiast’s Infatuation, Curator’s Exhibitionism, and Skeptic’s Cop-Out). The Custodian’s fault is that they experience simultaneously strong attraction toward the Other and extreme detachment–the Custodian acquires and fails to genuinely inquire. The Enthusiast trivializes the Other by making the assumption that they and the Other share an identity–they generalize the Other and fail to notice what makes the Other distinctive from the Self. The Curator, on the other hand, is committed to recognizing the Difference between Self and Other, but focuses on astonishment over understanding. Finally, the Skeptic is committed to Difference and is detached, assuming the Other to be “irremediably inaccessible” (8).
As I read about the four pitfalls, different aspects of the pitfalls resonated with me: paradoxically, those being the Enthusiast’s “quicksand belief, ‘Aren’t all people really just alike?’ ” and the Skeptic’s perception that they are unable to empathize with the Other (6). Thus, I think I might be more susceptible to the Custodian’s pitfall: I am curious about / attracted toward the Other, but I feel detached, like I won’t ever be able to understand the experiences of the Other. I will never be the Other; I don’t have the same life experiences as the Other; thus, I’ll never be able to empathize with the Other. That said, what is acting if not “becoming” Others whom you are not? You pretend to be someone else. You don’t have to be that someone else. If people were only limited to playing themselves, then we wouldn’t have theatre or cinema.
Later in the text, I developed a new way of looking at empathy. I like to now think of empathy not as a full understanding of the Other, but an approach to full understanding. Empathy is an asymptote that can never be reached, but rather, can be approached. Conquergood references Clifford Geertz who describes “ethnographic understanding” (which I will equate to empathy) as such: “ethnographic understanding is more like… reading a poem–than it is like achieving communion” (11). The goal of the ethnographer, ultimately, is to bring “the enormously distant enormously close without becoming any less far away” (2).
This is the goal of “dialogical performance,” which Conquergood describes as bringing the Self and Other together, while holding them apart. Dialogical performance keeps the dialogue between (a) the text/interlocutor and performer/ethnographer and (b) performer and audience open. The Self and Other speak to each other and work WITH each other. The Difference between Self and Other is (a) recognized without being used as an excuse for an inability to develop empathy, and (b) used as a tool to reflect upon the Self’s preconceived assumptions about the Other. Conquergood compares the relationships generated in ethnographic fieldwork to those that are personal: “…as in personal relations, the illusion of fusion is sweet, but it is an illusion, and its end is bitter, to recognize others as others permits loving them better…Dialogical performance celebrates the paradox of ‘how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different’” (10).