ABSTRACT
This is a story of an ethnographic reconnaissance (Wolcott, 2008) to study dance and community in Assam. The chapter traces a journey with a small group of senior students from the University of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand, with their lecturer and an academic colleague. The journey took place in 2015, therefore the story is titled, “An impressionist tale” (Van Maanen, 2011, p. 116) as memories and sensations are recalled and re-woven from that time. In Van Maanen's terms, “Impressionist tales … allow fieldworkers to dump all sorts of odd facts and speculations into a shaggy narrative … fill[ing] in little details as the mood and moment strike” (p. 117). An account of the journey is drawn from occasional notes written in the field: reminiscences from the students and philosophical discussion regarding ethnography, trans-locational teaching and learning, and cultural exchange. Madison (2012) sees ethnographic fieldwork as a study of the “invisible theatre of life” (p. 65). As foreign ethnographic fieldworkers, this theatre included experiencing life in an unfamiliar place. Throughout the chapter, the author has adopted the performative “I” or “performative co-presence” (Spry, 2006), a writing style that recognises self in a participatory engagement with others.
