Norbert Ross’s background in anthropology as well as his long engagement with the people of El Salvador inform this article’s perspective on Playback Theatre as “enacted ethnography.” The experiences and reflections that Norbert describes here invite us to consider the complexity–and richness–of telling, hearing, and enacting sometimes harrowing stories that do not permit resolution and yet call to be shared. Using Playback’s embodied theatre as research implicates “the tellers, actors, and audiences in each other’s stories.”

Norbert’s new book, The Migrant as Playwright: Playback Theater at the Border Wall will be published by Routledge in 2026.

“Enacted Ethnography” was originally published in the journal Human Organization and is republished here by permission. Human Organization, 83:4, 401-412, DOI: 10.1080/00187259.2024.2412564.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2024.2412564 

Enacted Ethnography: Stories, Affect, and Activism

Norbert Ross

About 50 people came to watch our Playback Theater performance. We had borrowed plastic chairs from friends and neighbors, the same people who were waiting now for the event to start. Our stage was an open space roughly demarcated by two chairs on one side, and a table for the musician on the other. The event took place in ‘our theater home’, an abandoned warehouse in the community Segundo Montes, where we, the theater group ACTUEMOS! (“LET’S ACT!”) practiced. The ensemble consisted of 10 adults (ages 18-52), all but me (a 52 German-born white male anthropologist/theater artist living in the US) living permanently in the community. Our audience consisted of people we interacted with prior to the theater event and long after the proverbial fall of the curtain. I am writing these lines five years after the event in my house, about half a mile from where we had set up the stage.

Playback Theater (PT) is a form of improvisational theatre, where actors play back stories told by audience members, with the support of a conductor guiding the overall event. Stories must be true and center the teller as main character. Playing back stories is meant as a gift to the tellers (Fox and Salas 2021; Ross n.d.a, n.d.b), indicating that their lives matter. A PT event consists of a succession of multiple ensemble-audience interactions, with several stories told and enacted on stage.  PT is built around the idea of sharing, empathic listening and the creation of community, with the audience constituting as an active part.

At the time, I didn’t imagine that PT would change my understanding of ethnography and community collaboration, leading to the development of what I call ‘enacted ethnography’. Enacted ethnography constitutes a performance-based research approach, using interactive improvisational theater as part of wider ethnographic engagements. Theater’s corporality creates a sense of intimacy and emergency, implicating the tellers, actors, and audiences in each other’s stories. The tellers ‘talk’ indirectly to one another, the ensemble, and the audience through their stories. Deep conversations emerge, weaving everyone together into ‘the play’. A larger story emerges through the relations and understandings that arise throughout the event. A (however tenuous) community develops.

Enacted ethnography consists of iterative horizontal interactions that lead to and build on such events. Interactions are multimodal, including individual conversations and other forms of ethnographic interactions, yet always centered around PT and other theater activities. In the process the anthropologist’s ‘interlocutors’ become collaborators and friends. Through its performativity the work opens a dialogue. It does so in ways that decenter both the researcher and the logocentrism of traditional research.

The event that day was part of the celebrations of el rotorno, ‘the return’, an annual commemoration of the community’s founding as Segundo Montes. During El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992), many families had sought shelter in the UN-organized refugee camp of Colomoncagua, Honduras, seeking protection from the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military. Upon their return, many families settled at what came to be Segundo Montes.

We had no interest or ability to control what stories would be told that day. The first story, told by a woman who had moved to the community only a few years ago, had no direct relation to ‘el retorno’. Her story told of another type of refuge and how Segundo Montes had become her home. In her early 20s, she did not hesitate to take the teller’s chair on stage. She had visited our rehearsals several times and knew what it meant to ‘tell a story’.  She narrated fleeing her home with her younger brother to escape constant abuse. At the time, she was eight years old, and the two children sought shelter in an abandoned house at the outskirts of the village. They had hardly any food. When her younger brother got sick, the young girl sought help from a neighboring woman — to no avail. The woman refused. The story was not accusatory. It didn’t focus on the abuse experienced at home or the neighbor’s refusal to help. Instead, her story focused on the guilt she felt for not being able to help her brother. It was a difficult story to conduct or enact — and it surely was even harder to tell in public and on stage. The young woman stopped several times. Worried about her well-being I suggested several times that she stop the storytelling. Yet each time she only grew more determined to continue, insisting on telling her story to her friends and neighbors and to watch it performed.

The performance captured the essence of her story well. The actors did not put a positive spin on the story yet placed the young woman’s feelings of guilt and powerlessness within the context of her being a child. Some actors already knew her story, and all participants were familiar with the context of poverty and rampant child abuse. It would have been easy to focus on the multiple ways the two children were abandoned, standing in as metaphors for how a nation neglects to support her children. However, while this formed part of the wider context, it would not have captured the story told that day.

Everyone was moved. The combination of having the courage to share her story and watch it being enacted somewhat loosened the grip of the woman’s feelings of guilt and shame – feelings frequently related to trauma (Lee, Scragg, and Turner 2001). To be sure, our PT event constituted only one part in this transition. Stepping forward as a teller already implied a certain determination on her part. We simply provided her with an outlet to share her story. Seeing her narrative — her life — treated with care and compassion allowed her to gain a different perspective, to move forward with her life, and to reposition herself in the present. Re-storying and restoring her past allowed her to forgive that little girl and to seek help in dealing with her trauma.

PT work is not therapy, yet it can be therapeutic (Fox and Salas 2021). It might lead tellers to reframe ideas and concepts, including reaching out to others. The young woman talked for the first time in public about this part of her life. PT offered her a safe space to do so. Her trust, however, implicated the ensemble members and the audience beyond the theater event. Having been transformed into a ‘public good’, the story triggered further conversations among audience members of their own experiences. The young woman, too, wanted to continue talking. We met for several months on a weekly basis, until eventually she was ready to seek professional help to deal with her multiple traumas.

This is where PT seamlessly fuses ethnography, activism, and being into enacted ethnography, a collaborative, horizontal set of iterative interactions among participants. The topic was initiated by the young woman, triggering wider and continuous interactions. At no point was I a researcher. Nor was I a therapist. Instead, I became a friend. Lending support and an empathic ear, I became part of an emerging community.

Enacted Ethnography is a community endeavor. It is neither about nor for others. There are no timelines, and the work does not end with the curtain fall. Instead, enacted ethnography is an ongoing process. While the stories narrated during a PT session deal with the (however distant) past, enacted ethnography and the PT events are about the present and the future: the storytelling, the acting, and the resulting conversations and actions.

Performing arts and the social sciences have a long-shared history. In anthropology the collaboration is usually attributed to Victor and Edith Turner and Richard Schechner (Turner and Turner 1982; see Schechner 1985). This account ignores the earlier work by Dunham and Neale Hurston. These two anthropologist-artists explored different forms of knowing, creatively engaging forms of representation with an activist sense of ethics (Dunham 1994/1969; Neal Hurston 2022/1926; Boyd 2003; Chin 2014).  More commonly, anthropologists use theater activities as icebreakers in focus groups (Blatner 2007), to provide stimulation for reflections (McLachlan 2019), and to support creative emergence (Vidali 2020). Theater plays are frequently also employed for educational messaging or as an alternative form to present research findings, an approach known as performance ethnography (Beck, Belliveau, Lea and Wager 2011; Ackroyd and O’Toole 2010; Bird 2020).

Moving away from the constraints of the written word toward including the body as a site of knowledge is no small accomplishment. However, limiting performances to data presentation misses the opportunities theater provides with respect to methods, epistemology, and overcoming power differentials of traditional research (who carries out what research, and why?). Performance ethnography opens new possibilities with respect to understanding and representing a diverse body of knowledge. Yet it fails to integrate these issues into the actual research, maintaining instead a separation of research and presentation, research team and interlocutors. It simply changes the end-product to a dramatic play.

This has important implications for any efforts to decolonize academic research. Some 50 years ago, Asad (1979) already lamented the reluctance of many anthropologists to critically consider the power structures within their work (see Zenker 2018). This directly relates to what Bejarano Alonso and colleagues have described as the “coloniality at the heart of the anthropological project” (2019:2), marking the power inequality within which ethnography continues to be conducted, whereas the scientist explores, contemplates, and writes about others.

“Can the subaltern speak?,” Spivak (1988) rhetorically asked us, expressing her concern with the politics of representation and how scientists produce their interlocutors as invisible others, raw data to be extracted and written about.[1] This othering (usually of racialized and gendered others) takes away their humanity, creating objects of studies to be spoken for and spoken to.

Collaborative efforts are a first step (see Bejarano Alonso et al. 2019), yet they do not guarantee decolonization, especially if the collaborators consist of a small group of trained field collaborators. Training collaborators in the ‘correct’ method of data gathering simply extends the coloniality of the scientific project beyond the small circle of researchers. The power structures inherent in who is observed, what questions are asked, and what counts as data remain largely untouched.

Here, performance ethnography falls short. First, it maintains the separations of researcher/research subjects and research/data presentation. Consequently, it maintains a distinction between reality and the (scientific) representation of it, with the scientist taking the position of an outside observer. Viewed from this angle the plays of performance ethnography represent just another form of data presentation without decentering the research process. Second, when theater is intended to make research findings more accessible to research participants, we potentially continue a long history of ‘speaking down’ to our interlocutors, separating them somehow from us and our writing. This becomes especially clear, when performance is used for educational purposes, e.g. to deliver a message to the audience. In these cases, researchers enact a clear hierarchy, taking on the role of the educator vis-à-vis the audience / research participants / students[2]. Third, restricting theater to simply perform our research findings not only limits the types of knowledge that we allow to enter our data, but also fails to harness the creative-analytical power theater can bring to research.

Another woman stepped forward. She approached the teller’s chair with a nervous smile. Her narration, too, focused on her childhood, when she lived in the already mentioned refugee camp in Honduras. The community Segundo Montes is in northern Morazán, one of the poorest areas of El Salvador. The inaccessible mountains make agriculture difficult and less profitable, resulting in a lack of government interest and support. In fact, interest in the area was so low that until 1992 the exact location of the border with Honduras was unknown (Hernandez Rivas, 2006). Only one paved road existed in the entire area, making it an ideal insurgent holdout during the civil war.

From colonial times onward the Salvadoran government was aligned with the interests of export-oriented agrobusinesses. Any efforts for land reform or to increase workers’ rights were regarded antithetical to the nations interest. Poverty became dangerous and entered the cold war discourse of communist threat (Ross and Ross Sanchez, 2017; 2018). To counter support for the insurgency, the military’s special forces applied scorched earth campaigns against the civilian population, committing several massacres. The most infamous of these took place at El Mozote about 30 minutes distance from Segundo Montes. Here the Salvadoran military gathered and killed in December 1981 approximately 1000 civilians, men and women between the ages of 1 and 80 years (Binford 2016) [3].

Between 1980 and 1981 approximately 9000 Salvadorans left Morazán to the UN-organized refugee camp of Colomoncagua, a Honduran border town (Cagan 2016). Refugees lived in constant fear of military raids, abuse by local law enforcement, and aggressions from the Honduran military – itself stacked with US-advisors (Bonner 1981). The Honduran government regarded the refugees as insurgents and pushed for the camp to be dismantled. All this made for a dire life in the camp. Living in constant fear in overcrowded makeshift shelters with only limited material support created a notion of surviving rather than living. Time was suspended and consisted of waiting. Life was unpredictable yet never advanced.

Basic chores, parental fears, and the fence of the camp limited the freedom of children such as the teller. Amidst this chaos and instability, the woman’s story focused on the one steady feature helping her focus her mind and find some reprieve: Every morning she observed a neighboring woman’s ritual of sweeping the dirt floor in front of her shelter. This small act of care created a feeling of home and belonging, propagating a sense of stability and hope, all things the girl lacked at the time.

While the narration ended there, the story didn’t. After the enactment the woman identified the neighbor from the refugee shelter in the audience. Surprise gave into tears and laughter. The former neighbor never realized the hope and support she had provided to this young girl. The teller’s story extended from the past into the present, weaving new relationships, while forging a new chapter of (hi)story into the future.

The story spoke to the preceding one, offering a different idea of childhood and community. It actively drew attention to seemingly meaningless acts of care and tenderness, countering the abuse and lack of empathy our first teller had experienced. The fact that the first teller grew up in a post-war context, became part of the post-performance discussions when we jointly contemplated the effects of war on families over sweet bread and coffee.

None of these interactions were scripted or planned, and we had no questions filed for the discussions. Yet without doubt knowledge was created, some of it expressed in words, other through tears or hugs. More stories emerged during the gathering, including us ensemble members sharing our own experiences, asking questions, or commenting at times, including volunteering the perspective of my scholarly world. A truly horizontal collaboration ensued, followed by individual meetings in the weeks and months thereafter.

Our discussions also interrogated the enactments and the overall performance. What did it mean to be on stage as a teller? What did it feel seeing one’s story enacted? What aspects triggered what kinds of emotions or memories? were some of the issues the tellers and audience members talked about. Ensemble members reflected on what it meant to hold the different stories, and what parts were specifically meaningful or hard to enact. Actors reflected on specific scenes, their dramatic choices, and the emotions that caused them. Words were sometimes hard to come by, yet this didn’t undermine an emerging understanding. A new reality was forged.

The goal of enacted ethnography is not to unearth newsworthy stories, or to entertain an audience with stories. As ensemble members we also do not seek attention as performers. Instead, the goal is to pull different positions and viewpoints into a conversation, creating an understanding that supersedes and interrupts the linear accounts of traditional research. It also seeks to disrupt the sole reliance of logocentric accounts, affecting the here and now of all participants. Hence, the stories that are enacted during the theater events form only one part of the project – and not even the most important one.

Enacted ethnography builds on spontaneous group interactions. We never know who will tell what kind of story, what understandings emerge on stage or in the post-performance discussions, and what further interactions ensue. Hence, enacted ethnography harbors the possibility for contingencies, lending a kind of indeterminacy to the evolving interactions and the realities that get forged in the process. It provides for horizontal knowledge production, harnessing affect and group spontaneity within the creative and transformative processes of joint world-making. Its indeterminacy undermines individual ownership of the process, disrupting assumptions of a linear research process aimed at representing reality in a detached way. At the same time, the corporality of the acting moves the work beyond the limitations of logocentrism, registering sites of embodied knowledge, both in terms of the actors and the audiences, creating affectations and implications. This, in turn, transforms and implicates us in each other’s lives (Massumi 2017). Distinctions such as researcher/interlocutor, reality/representation vanish, intimately fusing the work with engaged scholarship, and activism.

This is what the Brazilian philosopher / educator Paolo Freire meant when denouncing the hierarchical division of teachers and students in favor of the co-production of knowledge (1993). For Freire, regarding teacher and student as separate entities with different objectives (teaching/learning) undermined the shared objective of comprehending and transforming reality (ibid).

Freire’s work must be understood in the context of the Brazilian dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. It is here that he developed his concepts of critical and individual consciousness. The former describes a critical understanding of the oppressive social conditions with the goal of their transformation. With voting rights tied to literacy, teaching people how to read and write must be regarded as a revolutionary act. For critical consciousness to arise, individual consciousness liberated from oppressive hegemonic structures is required.

Freire continues to inspire countless fields including anthropology. His breaking down the student/teacher divide parallels the questioning of the ‘4^th wall in theater’ (Ross 2024), while also echoing the already discussed anthropological interrogations of the role of the researchers vis-à-vis their interlocutors (Zenker 2018). Given its transformational power, it is not surprising that during Brazilian military dictatorships Paolo Freire was confined to a life in exile. It might be more surprising that still in 2012 Freire’s work was banned from Tucson’s Unified School District (Rodriguez 2012).

Brazilian theater director Augosto Boal closely followed Freire’s idea when he staged real life scenarios for audience members to explore possible different outcomes (1985). For Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (TO) represented a rehearsal for the revolution (ibid.), where audience members – Boal’s spect-actors become active participants in forging new futures. This kind of theater no longer seeks applause, nor is the goal to entertain or represent reality. Instead, TO participates in the transformation of reality. Boal too, spent many years in exile.

This links enacted ethnography to the educational concept of authentic cariño, ‘care’ (Bartolomé 2008). Authentic cariño focuses on the need for mutual respect between teachers and students as well as a joint framework addressing inequitable social structures. Bartolomé describes the condescending and patronizing care teachers frequently harbor towards minority students, sheltering rather than helping them succeed amidst difficulties in their learning environment (2008:3). Bartolomé doesn’t question those teachers’ intentions, yet nevertheless describes their behavior as racist and oppressive (ibid.). She argues that when we include co-explorations of hierarchy and oppression, authentic cariño, akin to Freire’s concept of “armed love” (Freire 1998:42), emerges as a liberating force. Truly caring educators become co-producing activists, engaging with their students in critical analysis.

Enacted ethnography uses PT (and other approaches) as a medium for reflections and explorations, while strengthening community ties and providing a basis for social transformation. It facilitates complex processes of listening and being listened to, of being able to affect, and letting ourselves be affected by others. In enacted ethnography, the theater practitioners are neither educational promoters nor are they simple vessels for people’s stories. They are active participants in horizontal reflections and dialogue.

While enactments focus on the tellers and their stories, ensemble members participate in the construction of these stories via the conductor’s questions, the actors’ interpretations, and the various interactions surrounding the overall event. These different involvements indicate the multiple creative forces that come together in this collaborative and horizontal production. This creates certain exigencies for the ensemble. Aside from acting skills and the knowledge of PT’s ritual, ensemble members must have prior engagements with the audience members and the topic of the PT event, to understand both the emerging stories and the context of storytelling. This knowledge feeds into the event (via the conductor’s questions and dramatic choices), while being affected and transformed itself by the stories told and the post-performance discussions. Enacted ethnography explicitly seeks these kind of feedback loops, fostering an iterative process of multiple and multimodal engagements.

A couple of weeks after the commemoration of el retorno, we were asked to perform at La Guacamaya, a small hamlet of about 20 families, 40 minutes driving distance from Segundo Montes. I had worked there with the children and knew most of the families, hence the invitation. They knew about our theater work and asked us to perform at their annual commemoration of family members who had been assassinated by the Salvadoran military in October 1980. The massacre preceded the one at El Mozote mentioned earlier. While far fewer people were killed, the numbers still amounted to about half of the community members.

The fact that fewer people were killed does nothing to alleviate the pain of losing family members. It also does not diminish the atrocity committed by the Salvadoran military or the injustice felt by surviving community members. El Mozote is only about 10 minutes away, and the two communities share a cemetery. In neither case has justice been served. However, in El Mozote three large memorials at least allow families to publicly honor their murdered kin. An annual commemoration brings government officials, NGOs, and tourists to town, and in 2012 the government finally apologized to the community. Support for community projects is comparatively large, including the establishment of a small cottage industry of handicrafts that caters to the few tourists who find their way to the community (mostly for its dark history).

None of this exists at La Guacamaya. While material support would be helpful in an area of extreme poverty, what pains inhabitants more is the public silence that they perceive as lack of respect. Many have left the community and even the country. Yet some return for the annual commemoration, sharing stories with their children and grandchildren, resisting the silence and invisibility.

The commemoration brought the memories and the grief onto the stage. However, the joint performance also became an act of defiance, denouncing and opposing the silence and the ongoing injustice, demanding public acknowledgement. The stories, the audience’s reaction, and the post-performance discussions made it clear that we cannot limit victimhood to the people murdered. A need emerged to recognize the suffering of children, who never got to know their grandparents, and of friends and neighbors who lost their community that day.

All of this represented a huge responsibility for us. We felt honored to join the community in its pain, supporting its claim of recognition. We felt privileged to be included in and to be affected by their stories, their hurt, and outrage. Our task was not to unearth the massacre: all attendees had some idea of what was commemorated. Our task was to listen with empathy, to be affected, and to lend our bodies for reflections. That day my scholarly work on trauma received some grounding. It helped me better understand what happens to families during and following a war, and what it means to grow up in a post-war context. This too entered my post event conversations with community members.

On this day, our work was to provide a space of reflection not only of the event, but of the people killed, of what was lost, and who everyone became in the process. Our performance was less about the past than about the people present that day. Individual stories differed, new voices and stories gained attention. They all wove together the past and the present, connecting those participating in the commemoration. Helping to keep these stories alive, continuing to denounce the injustice, and weaving the community members closer through enacting their stories, was more than we could have aspired. Knowledge was created in the process.

Being woven into people’s lives and stories is maybe the best way to describe how I think about enacted ethnography. If taken seriously, this experience is truly transformative. It overcomes the false neutrality of the participant observer, making clear that in the light of poverty, injustice, and oppression, neutrality doesn’t exist. Allowing ourselves to be affected by our characters, to become implicated in participants’ lives via the multiple interactions surrounding enacted ethnography, must have a lasting effect on us. These interactions[4] create deeper understandings because they go beyond a simple language-bound logic.

A year after our work in Morazán, I received funding to travel with the ensemble to conduct PT in refugee camps in Tijuana, Mexico (Ross n.d.a; 2021). This was at the height of Trump’s anti-migration policies and his opposition to the Central American migrant caravans heading toward the US border. The US had signed international agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries directed at stopping the influx of migrants. Mexico promised harsher controls on its southern border, and accepted people seeking asylum in the US to be pushed back into Mexico, where they had to await their hearings.

Thousands of people camped out along the border with little support from either the US or the Mexican government. This situation must be understood as an extension of the US strategy of prevention through deterrence (de León and Wells 2015; Lytle Hernández 2010); hostility in the border region is designed to deter migrants from trying to enter the US. Separating children from their parents was part of this strategy; so were the racist comments and threats made by then President Trump (see Ross 2021). In this context, Mexican NGOs and churches offered shelter to refugees along the US border.

Our work was directed toward the refugees. No outside audience was invited. Our goal was not to uncover new stories of migrants. Anyone can easily access stories of people having to leave their families, homes, and countries, traversing half a continent of hostile territories, only to be mistreated and rejected at the US border. None of this was news, and especially not to people who just did this journey themselves. Our focus was on listening and participating in the emerging conversations.

Over two weeks, we performed multiple times in four different refugee shelters. One of the actors had lived as a child in the above-mentioned refugee camp in Honduras. Another had migrated as a teenager to the US, from where he was later deported. Decades earlier, I had been deported from Mexico. We shared our stories too. We did not provide a theme for the events. However, coming from El Salvador to refugee shelters along the US border provided sufficient context. Everyone (but us and the staff) was here for a similar reason. Some waited for their asylum cases to be resolved; others tried to enter the United States by any means possible. Only a few were planning their return after having been rejected at the US border. Stories of parting from home, the pain of leaving loved ones behind, the dangers, scares, and violence experienced during travel and at the border, and the desperation of living within a refugee camp, echoed throughout the different events.

Events were distinctly different from our earlier work. In El Salvador, we always interacted with members of a community, friends and families, people who cared for one another already prior to our theater work. People came to our events because they cared for one another. They had done so prior to our work and continued to do so afterwards.

This was very different in the refugee camps. The shelters usually restricted how long individuals could stay. Hence, most audience members didn’t know one another. This was not a community in any sense. It became clear through our conversations that people were often afraid of one another. Stereotypes ‘advised’ people to be careful around one another. Central Americans were feared for ‘their gang violence’, while Mexicans were usually associated with drug cartels. Central Americans were usually suspicious of the Mexican refugees living in refugee camps in Mexico.

It is here that emerging conversations had a direct impact. Through different stories, individuals came to empathize with one another, overcoming some of their misconceptions and fear. A Mexican woman told of having to give up her comedor (a small restaurant providing cheap food) and flee from organized crime extorting ever-increasing fees. Her story echoed with Central Americans and their experiences in their home countries. A Salvadoran woman volunteered her story of fleeing from her violent husband, fearing for her and her daughter’s lives. Her story of domestic and sexual violence and the lack of state protection was all too familiar to other women, no matter their origin. A feeling of shared vulnerabilities emerged across our performances.

Of course, there were differences, yet the similarities were far greater. Suffering caused by poverty and multiple intersecting forms of marginalization and violence within the neoliberal politics of Mexico and Central America provided for vastly similar experiences. Refugees also shared their travels through hostile territory as well as the racist treatment at the US border. All of this rendered the national differences rather meaningless. After all, none were able to live safely at home, regardless of their country.

The stories affected all participants. One shelter organizer described a noticeable difference in how individuals interacted with one another after our performances. She described the tenuous formation of trust and care.

This was exemplified by one incident during a PT event. A young girl had attentively watched different stories unfold. During a particularly harrowing narration, she stepped onto the stage to simply sit next to and hug the teller. She represented what enacted ethnography strives for: listening empathically, letting ourselves be affected, and responding by acting naturally. The affect was so powerful for her that she couldn’t stay silent. She had to act and continued to do so for subsequent narrators as well. Following her performance, she started to greet people each morning with a hug. A new story emerged, enacted empathy continuing after the PT event, creating a sense of community.

Enacted ethnography seeks this kind of weaving of the past, the present, and the future. Given our limited time and the transient nature of the shelters, our interactions with individual refugees were limited. Still, clear transformations occurred, including among the ensemble members. For almost two years, we had prepared for the trip to Tijuana to hone our PT skills. Through personal experiences, work, readings, and the PT work in El Salvador, we had a good understanding of why people migrated, what the trek north meant, and how dangerous it was. We were aware of the pain migration caused — mothers having to leave their children behind, or children traveling alone, with no clear understanding of why and where they were going.

None of the stories were news to anyone who wanted to listen. Yet playing back the pain of a desperate Honduran boy, who had to leave his beloved dog behind, takes on a different form if one becomes that child or the dog, on stage. It meant understanding what it feels to separate from a loved one. This understanding is not an intellectual exercise but resides in the body. It affects, implicates, and transforms.

This kind of empathic listening contrasts with communicative impotence (Berlant 2018), whereas silencing others represents a refusal to become implicated, taking away from them their power to affect us. It’s not that we aren’t listening in a technical sense. It means we are unwilling to be changed by what we hear. We can’t bear to cry. The story of the grieving Honduran boy is a good example. Initially his story created some chuckles in the audience and among the actors (of the ‘aw, how cute’ variety). These chuckles undermined the participants’ ability to be affected by the child’s pain, while preventing the boy from feeling heard. As a conductor, I pointed this out during the event, asking everyone to think about loved ones they had left behind.[5] The resulting enactment brought tears to audience members, and in the post-performance gathering, several adults talked to the boy, while others discussed his hurt as both deeply personal and structural, including the age discriminating violence of not being taken seriously at his initial sharing of the story. New worlds were imagined and practiced.

The stories we heard and enacted affected us deeply as ensemble members as well. In enacted ethnography, we strive to participate in the emerging stories and much of our training consisted of opening ourselves up to being vulnerable and affected by people’s stories. This made for troubling experiences. On many nights, we contemplated the stories and how they affected us, sometimes while cleaning beans for dinner. What responsibilities and consequences surged from this newly gained understanding? What responsibilities emerged from our privilege of having traveled of our own volition and by airplane to Tijuana, staying in the comforts of an Airbnb?

No single answer arose. As individuals, we were affected differently. We had to learn to attend to our stories as well. At times, we cried together or accompanied one another in our silence. New stories emerged. Our sharing created an understanding that cannot be achieved through intellectual arguments.[6]  In fact, it is exactly the supposed intelligibility of the world that we need to disturb (Berlant 2018). Enacted ethnography is not about intellectually understanding what effects migration has on people. It is about joining the stories, the feelings, asking ourselves, what it would feel to have that thought or that experience. Sometimes it is simply about being implicated and cry.

These questions push anthropology toward the humanism envisioned by Ruth Behar (1997), related to Massumi’s concept of affect (2002; 2017). For Massumi affect does not describe an interiorized individual state. Instead, it is located between individuals, constituting the transformations that emerge in encounters with others. New realities surface when we allow us to be affected by others. Romero Fernández provocatively asks us “Why are we not crying when confronted with other people’s suffering?” (2021, 82). He pushes us to cease being spectators of and become participants in the lives of others, connecting with and letting us be affected by them (2021, 83).

New forms of being, new beings, and new communities emerge. To affect and be affected are capacities that give life the quality of a continuous motion across relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergence (Stewart 2007,1). Within this context enacted ethnography can no longer be about the written monograph or other forms of representing reality. It is about engaging in multimodal, horizontal conversations, jointly evoking new realities. The illusion of the ‘objective researcher’ is replaced by a community of knowledge, of co-producers and co-conspirators in the creation of new worlds.

Of course, any encounter of individuals must consider the larger political context that implicates people in the lives of others. Such affect frequently remains hidden. Hence, we need to interrogate the different forms of (in)visibilities and how they relate to layers of privilege, allowing some to watch but not be implicated in, or worse, benefit from the suffering of others. Silence is frequently not about an inability to speak, but an unwillingness to listen (Berlant 2018).

Enacting migrants’ stories on a makeshift stage in refugee camps in Mexico during the Trump presidency implicated me in very specific ways as a white male US citizen. Similarly, flying from El Salvador to Tijuana with NSF funds positioned us as a Salvadoran theater ensemble in a very specific form vis-à-vis the refugees, who frequently walked or hitchhiked their way across Central America and Mexico. These implications must not be confused with guilt or blame, yet they do ask us to assume responsibilities in recognizing the conditions that brought us together and to make our mutual implications visible. Rather than storytelling, enacted ethnography is about weaving together stories, lives, and people.

Conclusion: Enacting Stories as Worlding Practice

In this article, I suggest replacing traditional research with horizontal collaborative conversations. I propose enacted ethnography, combining PT and other forms of interactive theater, with other iterative and multimodal interactions. PT builds on group spontaneity, broadening our epistemological framework by overcoming the logocentric limitations of traditional research. Employing PT in anthropology creates a horizontal approach that is open-ended. ‘Results’ are always only temporary understandings, providing feedback for further inquiry by everyone involved.

Enacted ethnography overcomes some of the hierarchies and power relations established in traditional research models. Fusing the role of researchers and interlocutors, the approach decenters research, abandoning the idea of representing or modeling reality. Enacted ethnography unapologetically participates in the shaping of new realities. It explicitly strives for affectively understanding and participating in emerging joint realities.

Enacted ethnography does not give voice to people (a rather patronizing posture). It simply provides an invitation and a space for sharing, compassionate listening, and to become affected and implicated in each other’s lives. Much like the young girl who stepped onto the stage, the goal is to act (beyond the boundaries of the dramatic event). Re-acting to what happened, the girl came to and became on stage. She did not pretend. She was affected and transformed, becoming a pillar of the newly forming reality. Her actions transformed the stage and the refugee camp at the same time.

There is a corporal knowing embedded in this acting, succinctly different from logocentric understanding, complementing not replacing the latter.

Being entrusted with other people’s stories is a privilege that comes with the responsibility of being truthful in the ways we let our bodies react. The young girl did just that. Shedding her role as audience, she became an (social) actor. This kind of affect comes with important transformations. Continuing to greet others with morning hugs, she linked all participants into the future. Rather than being about the stories told on stage, enacted ethnography is about the stories that ensue before, during, and after the events, including the resultant transformations.

I do not pretend that enacted ethnography doesn’t entail power imbalances. We had the privilege to travel to the refugee camps, initiating and structuring our initial interactions. While our long-term goal should be to erase such imbalances, it would be naïve to ignore their presence. In El Salvador, we were usually invited to participate in and contribute to community events. Yet even in these cases, one must not forget that being and becoming a theater artist (or a scholar) is first and foremost a privilege. Rather than ignoring such privilege, enacted ethnography embraces the responsibilities that emerge from it. This makes for a different collaboration, whereby our diverse knowledge and abilities enter horizontal exchange and collaborations. For me this meant bringing both my scholarly knowledge and my artistic background to the table. However, these were only two of many aspects of our interactions. We must abandon the idea of traditional research. The quest is not to collaborate by training community members to conduct research with (or for) us, but for us to become involved, engaged, and ourselves interrogated as part of the process of co-learning and co-producing knowledge. We become part of the new realities that emerge from these collaborations. Enacted ethnography is in part a moral project of acknowledging and becoming involved in the interconnectedness of lives.

The examples I have provided are not meant to highlight our theater work, but to demonstrate more theoretical points. I would like to believe that our acting helped in the different transformations that occurred during the events. Within the creative process, and beyond the confines of the theater space, we bring our own interpretations and experiences to the conversations. By implicating ourselves, caring and affect become transformative powers rather than short-term self-indulgent performativity. Said differently, enacted ethnography is activism. Being based on affect, enacted ethnography creates a field of emergence and under-determinacy, both on stage and beyond. While this under-determinacy should keep us humble, meanings still matter. It simply points at the complex forms that emerge from horizontal collaborations, as well as the openness that results when we give up the authority and control of academic scholarship.

This directly relates to the ethics and aesthetics of enacted ethnography. As an approach, it conceptualizes and harnesses the affective potential of stories and storytelling as political power. While affect registers at the individual level, it directly implicates everyone involved. It is here that PT’s aesthetics meets joint explorations and political activism. Art converts into arctivism, becoming engaged scholarship, triggering larger societal changes.

 

Acknowledgements

I thank Antonia Ross Sanchez for her extensive comments. I also acknowledge the contributions of two anonymous reviewers. Most of all, I thank the people of Segundo Montes and the migrants and shelter staff in Tijuana for their kind collaborations. The work was sponsored by a Fellowship from the Fulbright Commission, NSF grant 1829148, as well as a grant from the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at Vanderbilt University.

 

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Notes

[1] Spivak fails to address her own positionality vis-à-vis the people she writes about.

[2] Puppeteering and theater have a long history in applied work with indigenous people (Lewis 2011). Already Cortés and the Spanish conquistadores brought marionettes on their first journey to what was to become Mexico (Beezley 2011). Clearly, theater and the arts must be critically interrogated when it comes to power inequalities.

[3] Scorched earth campaigns were actively taught as a counterinsurgency measure at the ‘School of the Americas,’ the US military training ground for foreign cold war allies. The tactic was initially devised during the colonizing wars against Native Americans. During the Salvadoran civil war, US support consisted of military training, advising, and over 6 billion dollars in military aid. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, responsible for the El Mozote massacre, was a trainee of the School of the Americas and was in close exchange with US military advisors at the time. All this created a special context for me as a white US-based Anthropologist / Theater artist.

[4] In the case of the work in Segundo Montes and la Guacamaya the audience shared a common history and hence everyone was aware of the wider context. For the event in Segundo Montes this also included most of the ensemble members. Still, some of the wider implications only emerged during our discussions. Hence, within enacted ethnography proper preparation goes beyond theater training and includes learning about the events that come up in our interactions.

[5] My intervention was part of sharing and participating with what I had at my disposal. For conversations to be truly horizontal the point is not for anyone to hold back their knowledge and contributions, but to decenter previously centered discourse.

[6] Vidali (2020) refers to this as the alchemy of ensemble building.

Bio

NORBERT ROSS is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Theater at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA. He regards himself as an arctivist scholar, combining his anthropological work, art, and activism. His work focuses on marginalization and violence, especially as it affects children and youth, and he directs ACTUEMOS!, a Salvadoran NGO working in marginalized areas of El Salvador.

norbert.o.ross@vanderbilt.edu