How to Perform Field Encounters

The anthropologist does not enter a pre-existing social reality but through their performative interactions in the field creates the conditions for certain kinds of expression, including speech, knowledge and action. As such, the anthropological presence establishes a new social relationship and performative context in which people describe and reflect on a broad range of experiences, subjects and events, including those they might not articulate in their habitual social interactions. A key challenge across the social sciences is how to understand the unarticulated realms of experience, memory and imagination that constitute people’s social lives. As conventional social–scientific methods may be too static to understand the fluidity of perception, this ‘how to’ piece explores how performance can be used to craft ethnographic contexts – specifically in relation the emergent realms of experience, emotion and memory among people living with illness – but with general applications for ethnographic research. A primary intention is to use performance to establish a field of inquiry that is relevant and of interest to the people we work with, rather than being directed by disciplinary theories and presuppositions.