Magiczny ironista. O "Szamańskiej chorobie" Jacka Hugo-Badera

The Magical Ironist. On "Shamanic Disease" by Jacek Hugo-Bader The purpose of this paper is to analyze Jacek Hugo-Bader’s novel reportage “Shamanic Disease” ("Szamańska choroba") understood as a blend of reportage and the conventions of magical realism. By utilizing ironic self-creation of the narrator in the reportage, Hugo-Bader’s discussion of belief in terms of problematization and thematization rather than as a fact-finding process through research does not violate the referential pact. The case study is a part of the discussion on both the literary reportage, which boldly combines the elements of journalism with licentia poetica, and on Melchior Wańkowicz’s “extension of the convention” of the reportage genre in Poland. In addition to the categories of realistic fiction and fantastic fiction – understood in the context of non-fiction – this paper will discuss a third element: magical fiction, which will be related to contemporary theories of performative ethnography. Celem artykułu jest analiza "Szamańskiej choroby" Jacka Hugo-Badera, rozpatrywanej jako reportażowa realizacja konwencji realizmu magicznego. Problematyzowanie i tematyzowanie wiary (a nie faktów i prowadzącego do ich poznania researchu) nie powoduje zerwania paktu referencjalnego dzięki ironicznej autokreacji podmiotu reporterskiego. Studium przypadku wpisuje się w dyskusje na temat literackiego reportażu, śmiało łączącego dziennikarskość z licentia poetica, oraz postulowanego przez Melchiora Wańkowicza „poszerzenia konwencji” tego gatunku. Uruchamiane w kontekście literatury faktu kategorie fikcji realistycznej i fikcji fantastycznej uzupełniam o element trzeci: fikcję magiczną, odnosząc się m.in. do współczesnych teorii etnografii performatywnej.

Experimental recreation practices: Restaging Constança Capdeville’s musical theatre work Don’t, Juan

The recreation or re-enactment of twentieth-century avant-garde musical theatre works involves a set of epistemological and methodological issues that can be addressed through practice-based procedures informed by archaeological, ethnographic and experimental perspectives. This article presents a discussion about the relevance of integrating these perspectives, departing from their application in a specific case study, the recreation of Don’t, Juan (1985), an experimental musical theatre work by the Portuguese composer, pianist and percussionist Constança Capdeville (1937‐92). This research proposes the blending of archaeology with the living experience of performance as an approach to a reconstruction project, with methods such as performative ethnography, experimental practice and embodied knowledge through performance operating as effective tools.

The Starling’s Tale: A Performative Ethnography Showing Deaf Children’s Schooling in the Republic of Ireland

The ways in which we approach children and childhood as variables of social analysis has undergone profound change in the last quarter century in the Republic of Ireland. This performative ethnography inquires into the secret lore and language of deaf children’s lives in one residential school. Out of sight of the community of the other, children willfully embodied a transgressive, liberatory, and decolonizing sign language of their own. Medium and message come together in this performative ethnography through a clutch of theatrical devices associated with the “epic theater” of the German playwright and theater director, Bertolt Brecht, including loosely connected scenes, storyline turns, political placards, and addresses to audience. Techniques associated with “found poetry,” or the literary equivalent of collage, are combined with pentimenti or a painting within a painting to fuse image and word and bring forward a critical and political aesthetics of deaf children and deaf schooling and new media for encouraging alternative social imaginaries and possible actions.

Gifts of grief: performative ethnography and the revelatory potential of emotion

After participation in the funeral of a beloved friend in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, I was drawn to contemplate the revelatory potential of emotions such as grief. With reference to literature on the anthropology of emotions and the concept of empathy, I consider the relationship between ethnographic knowledge and deep emotional responses in the context of fieldwork. I argue that moments of intense emotional engagement, which many researchers record as having experienced during fieldwork, have the potential to lead to rich ethnographic understanding, particularly when such moments productively draw us into participatory cultural performances that help mediate the conceptual divide between meaning and feeling, observer and observed.