Body, Self and Society. Epistemological and Methodological Reflexions between Phenomenology, Ethnography and Ethnomethodology

The paper methodologically discusses the (self-)ethnographic research I have been carrying out for 28 months on dancers' world. Apart from structural data concerning field's quantitative dimensions, data include 23 in-depth interviews and fieldwork material (fieldnotes, videorecordings, etc.) regarding two Italian companies and related schools. Moreover, in order to better understand how dance training affects the (sense of one's own) body, I enrolled in dance courses, explicitly putting at the centre of the research my practical, theoretical, moral and aesthetic learning, my initiation to a social world, and consciously, knowingly and reflexively exploiting my lived experience as an heuristic tool.
I discuss the process of acquiring - as an adult ethnographer - embodied competence(s), an habitus, paying attention to analytic opportunities offered by teaching/learning contexts. Secondly, I address the epistemological problem of the invisibility of common sense knowledge, claiming for the acknowledgement of the embodied nature of sensemaking and understanding, and for research methods aimed to socialize ethnographers not only to new beliefs and narratives, but also to new habitus and ways of being-in-the-world. Finally, since ethnographers' work also consists of making explicit - through the practical everyday work of writing/reporting - the details of their own lived experience, I focus on techniques and strategies for writing (self)ethnography.