Ballet folklorico presentation

Ballet folklorico presentation

All:

Please read and respond (via "Comments") to at least 3 of the following observations/queries arising from this presentation. Both team members and other class members should comment, and should particularly focus on ways in which insights from this presentation reflect, nuance, or contradict insights from your own fieldwork. Make sure your comments address this latter point.

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1. Good description of original research construct and how that evolved, and good articulation of necessity of scaling-down scope. In what ways might the (necessary and inevitable) scaling-down of a project’s original parameters help to focus that presentation’s goals? Give examples from your own team project

2. Did language skills or ethnicity play a role in this research? Do language skills or ethnicity (or other markers of group identity) play a role in various teams’ research? What roles do they play? Please make specific reference to various “markers of identity” which you observed your informants to be using towards you the fieldworker. In other words, how were your informants identifying you, and what impact did that have on the nature of your work together?

3. Nice comment: in presenting research, fieldworkers can choose to “go through our individual experiences”. Excellent observations about the differing (but complementary) perspectives of 2 different fieldworkers. What does this make possible? ALG spoke in an earlier comment and presentation of the ways in which having both (or all) fieldworkers present in a situation enriched their observations. It would seem that threads of both continuity and discontinuity might emerge from different fieldworkers’ accounts. How can you allow for this and exploit those threads to aid your analysis?

4. Good observations about evolution of insights, observation of patterns, and the way they shaped subsequent research and fieldwork. Please articulate how the interaction of these factors shaped or evolved your own team research.

5. Good observation about overlap between informants: that is, different fieldworkers encountering the same informants in different environments. Did this occur for your team as well? What was the impact of this overlap? Did it enrich your team’s insights? How?

6. Good observations about presumptions w/ which fieldwork began, and how they changed (especially about the target community’s desire for outreach versus lack of such desire). How do you do fieldwork with a group that doesn’t particularly want it done? How do you win over informants? Give examples from your own fieldwork.

7. Use of keywords: “family”, “heritage”, “authenticity”, “competition.” What would be the shortlist of your fieldwork’s “keywords”?

8. How/why is this idiom ethnically specific? Is there something about its function that tends to make it ethnically specific? Please express an opinion backed up by comments made by the presenters.

9. What are the implications of informants’ self-identification as “insider” versus “outsider”? How might that impact the fieldworker’s assessment of that informant’s insights? Give examples from your own fieldwork of informants supplying these “insider versus outsider” constructions, and articulate possible motives.

10. Does this contrasting self-identification reflect informants’ contrasting perceived roles as “historian” versus “teacher”? Might these two roles entail different agendas or goals? What methodology would let you investigate, model, and interpret these agendas or goals? Who were the “historians” in your team fieldwork? Who were the “teachers”? Who got more respect? Why?

11. What is the relationship, in this idiom or others, between “authenticity” and “place”? Does place confer authenticity? Must one come from that place? Merely visit that place? Own (physical or communicative) artifacts of that place? Unpack this in light of your own fieldwork.