TY - JOUR
T1 - Dancing with children in the field
T2 - on the relevance of embodied knowledge and its methodological consequences
AU - Jiménez, Livia
N1 - info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/FCT/5876/147236/PT#
UID/EAT/00472/2013
SFR/BDP/87653/2012
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - In contexts where dancing proves a relevant daily practice, dancing with children may provide an extremely interesting strategic option for education ethnographers. Drawing from my empirical material, I describe how dancing was accidentally introduced as a role in the field (dance teacher) before later becoming an unexpectedly great ethnographic tool. Through a series of different breakdowns, I found this constituted the key to gaining better access to complicated domestic fields and thereby also attaining a closer cultural intimacy with participants, getting more easily integrated into educational contexts, overcoming communication problems and issues with reluctant informants. From this methodological insight, I here reflect on the theoretical aspects involved: should we overlook practices deemed irrelevant from the school agent point of view but essential to domestic contexts, we risk reinforcing symbolic violence through research. Therefore, I conclude by stressing the importance of focusing on apparently ‘irrelevant’ forms of domestic embodied knowledge transmission.
AB - In contexts where dancing proves a relevant daily practice, dancing with children may provide an extremely interesting strategic option for education ethnographers. Drawing from my empirical material, I describe how dancing was accidentally introduced as a role in the field (dance teacher) before later becoming an unexpectedly great ethnographic tool. Through a series of different breakdowns, I found this constituted the key to gaining better access to complicated domestic fields and thereby also attaining a closer cultural intimacy with participants, getting more easily integrated into educational contexts, overcoming communication problems and issues with reluctant informants. From this methodological insight, I here reflect on the theoretical aspects involved: should we overlook practices deemed irrelevant from the school agent point of view but essential to domestic contexts, we risk reinforcing symbolic violence through research. Therefore, I conclude by stressing the importance of focusing on apparently ‘irrelevant’ forms of domestic embodied knowledge transmission.
KW - Breakdown
KW - Cultural intimacy
KW - Dance enculturation
KW - Embodied knowledge
KW - Reluctant informants
KW - Symbolic violence
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85043305953&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/17457823.2018.1447386
DO - 10.1080/17457823.2018.1447386
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85043305953
SN - 1745-7823
VL - 14
SP - 498
EP - 511
JO - Ethnography and Education
JF - Ethnography and Education
IS - 4
ER -