ABSTRACT
The task of this chapter is to provide an overview of the intellectual roots of contemporary performance anthropology with a focus on the reflexive and experiential anthropology introduced by Victor and Edie Turner. Intellectual descendants of the Turners have been addressing issues of ethnocentrism, social activism, embodied learning, empowering the subaltern, and reflexive/experiential anthropology for some time, especially through ethnographic performance within an educational setting. Exercises in experiential learning can be tremendously successful as a way to encourage students to enhance their understandings of themselves and of the very real people who are written about in ethnographic texts. Experiential perspectives can be intentionally reflexive, and may help to identify and eliminate ethnocentrism while supporting social justice for all through the lens of performance theorists who have refined the experiential anthropology of our forebears into a better, promising future for our research and teaching.
