Performance Notion: Malinowski’s Diary

I used to keep my ideas for future devised pieces hidden safe in a little black notebook, scrawled in big excited letters, waiting for the day when I had the time and resources to manifest them. Not sure where that book is today, and given that we live in an age of over-sharing, I’ll record them here. Feel free to steal them if they appeal to you.

An ensemble show using as source material the writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influential Polish anthropologist from the early 20th century who was well-respected for his thorough research on indigenous Melanesian culture. Malinowski was a major supporter of enduring, in-depth participant observation, and as such got very involved in the lives of the people he studied. While a contemporary reader may be suspicious of the colonialist tone and the firm belief in the possibility of objectivity, his work is still taught in anthropology courses today.

His personal record of his time doing fieldwork was recently published. Titled A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, the text reveals the disturbing thoughts, feelings, and desires previously hidden under ostensibly-objective descriptions of the world around him. He lusted after indigenous women, insulted his closest native informants, and mocked the very cultures he was there to study. Overall, the diaries paint a picture of a narcissistic, judgmental westerner with a fetishistic fascination for people that he sees as different.

This piece would be about how hard it is to understand difference and how thrilling it is to try. It would be about the potentially annihilating gaze of the so-called-objective observer, and about how any time you attempt to describe something else, you always end up describing yourself. I have a hunch that taking the time to reflect, 100 years later, on the blind spots of early anthropological discourse would result in a timely, urgent and engaging piece of theatre for contemporary audiences.

Conscious Spectatorship

Yesterday I woke before the sun to attend the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, an annual sunrise gathering that honors the traditions of Native American tribes as well as indigenous people the world over. Blessed with a gorgeously clear morning, the event, which included guest speakers, musicians, drumming, and dancing, was a powerful way to celebrate an ever-problematic national holiday.

The event made me very aware of my own spectatorship. Descended quite literally from settlers who appropriated land from indigenous people, my participation in the ceremony is colored by a sad awareness of my own implication in our current cultural scenario. As an ally to oppressed cultures, I watch and listen with reverence, bearing witness to the traditions that remain vibrant in Native communities. My gaze is attentive, appreciative, and also, I hope, ultimately generative. Rather than watching with the hungry eyes of a tourist or the analytic eyes of an anthropologist, I try to watch in a way that is simultaneously aware of the past yet looking imaginatively towards the future. How can my work as an artist and scholar contribute to the flourishing of intercultural dialogue? Can I, through conscious spectatorship, learn from and help further the vibratory movements of embodied knowledges of cultures that are not my own?

As the sunlight hits the crumbling barracks on the top of Alcatraz, I can't help but think of the rise and fall of cultures. Despite the attempts of the dominant power to control and subordinate any elements that threaten that power, nothing that is built by human hands lasts forever. Sometimes I feel comforted remembering that everything, given enough time, crumbles.