Learning to (be a) dance(r). On "becoming the phenomenon" and writing/reporting ethnography

The paper discusses advantages, challenges, epistemological foundations and methodological peculiarities regarding practice- and body-based ethnography, and focuses in particular on the research method(s) variously called "self-ethnography" [Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Alsop, 2002; Anderson, 2006], "complete participant observation" [Adler and Adler, 1987], "storied research" [Markula and Denison, 2005], "observing participation" [Wacquant, 2000], or "becoming the phenomenon" [Mehan and Wood, 1975].
The paper is based on the ethnographic research on the Italian field of dance that I have been carrying out as a basis for my PhD dissertation and as a part of the PRIN 2006 research on professions and semi-professions. Apart from the basic structural data concerning the quantitative dimensions of the field and the boundaries of the occupational community, data include 23 in-depth interviews to different types of professional dancers currently working in Italy, and various materials resulting from fieldwork. In fact, I have been observing, for an overall period of 28 months, the daily activities of dance schools and companies differently placed in terms of artistic- professional advancing and differently situated in the national scenario, in terms of core/periphery. Throughout fieldwork I have gathered and transcribed about 70 hours of video-recordings concerning the everyday work going on in the dance practice room as well as in the theatre and on the stage.
Moreover, for the first time in my life, I have been attending classes and stages of modern and contemporary dance and I have been part of shows, as an active participant of the considered world, so as to start from personal experience and understand the meaning of becoming and being a dancer, to acquire a practical mastery, a visceral knowledge, and to explain the agents' praxeology [Wacquant, 2009]. It is not "simply" about putting oneself, one's own body, personality, social situation, etc. in the midst of the set of contingencies [Goffman, 1989] of a particular social (and phenomenological [Merleau-Ponty, 1942; Garfinkel, 2002]) field. It is also about (a) to explicitly put at the centre of the research one's own practical (as well as theoretical, moral, sensuous, discursive, etc.) situated [Lave and Wenger, 1991] learning, one's own initiation to a social world, and (b) to consciously, knowingly, reflexively and "sceptically" [Wright Mills, 1959] exploit one's own lived experience as an heuristic tool.
Starting from my research and considering other relevant work [e.g. Sudnow, 1978, 1979], I firstly discuss the advantages of studying the process of acquiring - as an adult, "reflexively reflexive" [Bourdieu, 2001] ethnographer - a practical, embodied, (set of)
competence(s), an habitus, and I pay particular attention to the specific analytic opportunities offered by the participation in a teaching/learning context [see Crossley, 2007; Wacquant, 2000, 2005].
Secondly, I address the epistemological problem of the so-called invisibility of common sense practical knowledge, resulting from its being both an explicit topic of analysis and an implicit tool of research [Zimmerman and Pollner, 1971] - something that we could state for the habitus as well [Wacquant, 2009] - and I present self-ethnography as a strategy for avoiding the un-reflexive and un-observed use of membership knowledge [Have, 2002] as well as the mis-interpretation and imaginary-driven analysis [Becker, 1998] arising from the researcher's being a "stranger" [Schutz, 1944] to such a knowledge. In particular, I propose a sort of radicalization of the ethnomethodological principle of unique adequacy [Garfinkel and Wieder, 1992], consisting of the acknowledgement of the embodied nature of sensemaking and understanding, and of a method aimed to socialize the ethnographer not only to new beliefs, narratives and social discourses, but also to new practical abilities and know-how, to a new habitus and, especially, to a new way of "being-in-the-world" [Merleau-Ponty, 1945].
Finally, I discuss different types of self-ethnography, claiming for a self-reflexive but not self-referential one, which does not renounce to analytical purposes in the name of an absolute subjectivism [see Anderson, 2006; Hughson, 2008]. In doing so, I maintain a specific focus on methods, techniques and strategies for both fieldwork and writing ethnography [Van Maanen, 1988], both in terms of fieldnotes and scientific publications. The work of the (self-)ethnographer, in fact, consists not only of accessing the tacit understandings of practical knowledge through practice itself [O'Connor, 2007], but also of making every day explicit - through the practical work of writing - the details of his/her own lived experience about socialization to a new social world and learning of new ways of bodily and sensuously inhabiting it.