ABSTRACT
Ethnography's long-standing interest in meaning-making cultural practices and the suasory function of symbols, recently coupled with a scrutiny of its own disciplinary discourse and epistemological and political alignments, intersects with the academic commitments of rhetorical and communication studies. Johannes Fabian sounds the keynotes of the new academic formation taking shape around the conjunctions of ethnography, rhetoric, and performance: "ethnography is, as the fashionable saying goes, 'rhetoric.' Fabian cautions that one of the connotations from which performance "should not be purified" is that of "putting up an act, of tricking and dissimulating. Performance studies is the new frontier for staking joint claims to poetics and persuasion, pleasure and power, in the interests of community and critique, solidarity and resistance. Ethnographers resemble trickster performers and wily sophists especially when they return from foreign worlds with other knowledge and use it to disconcert established premises and play with reality at home.
