Practicing Bio-Ethnography in South African Township: Prospects and Predicaments of the Ethnographic Method
Abstrakt
The paper summarizes the main findings of the author's recently finished dissertation 'Mapping the Individual Musical Experience in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Bio-Ethnography of Township Dweller Lesiba Samuel Kadiaka' that examines possibilities of writing a biographically focused reflexive ethnography of an 'average' musician. The main aim was to move beyond production of cultural difference and the obsession with cultural identity and origin, so strongly present throughout the history of South African writing on music (Lucia 2005).
Drawing on 'practice theory' as developed by Sherry Ortner and on her understanding of 'subjectivity' and 'agency' (2006) the research ethnographically maps this man's multilayered musical experience, which is interpreted as part of his wider social and cultural experience, as a specific way of knowing and, ultimately, as a space for negotiating his wider position in 'deterritorialized' (Appadurai 1990) world of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.