Affect Ethnography - by Cristiana Giordano & Greg Pierotti (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories we tell as ethnographers, this book contributes to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. It departs from other studies in the field by proposing a unique and easily followed methodology that brings together theatrical devising practices and anthropology. The practice described in the book, Affect Theater, also emphasizes embodied and affective approaches to empirical research and defines a process for rendering this type of material into imaginative academic writing, collaborative performance, and other inventive forms, applicable across a range of academic disciplines"--

Book Synopsis

Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories we tell as ethnographers and theater makers, this book contributes to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. It departs from other studies by proposing a unique and accessible methodology that brings together theatrical devising practices and anthropology.


Through its theoretical exploration and performative script, the book bridges the relation between ethnographic writing and performativity, and simultaneously troubles conventional narrative practices in theater and anthropology. The practice described in the book, Affect Theater, also emphasizes embodied and affective approaches to empirical research and defines a process for rendering this type of material into imaginative academic writing, collaborative performance, and other inventive forms, applicable across a range of academic disciplines.

Review Quotes

"In my own experience of research and teaching ethnography, there emerges in every fieldwork project a repository of creative ideas that lacks modes of sharing, validation., and implementation. Giordano and Pierotti, recognized artisans of this ethnographic craft in theater arts, now provide the much needed practice/technique bridge to excavate and implement these dramaturgical impulses embedded in every experience of ethnographic research." - George E. Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Director, Center for Ethnography, University of California

"This book presents a radical empiricism of theatrical composition on stage and in forms of living. Side stepping explanatory rhetorics, it catches itself in the elemental resonance of a play of light, sound, props, bodies, words, gestures. A fictionalizing real that incites experimentation in an associative swing through the allusive, fragmented, and accented." - Kathleen Stewart, Professor Emerita, University of Texas, U.S.

About the Author

Cristiana Giordano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA.

Greg Pierotti is Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Collaborative Playmaking at the University of Arizona, USA.