Being an ethnographer of Indonesian background in Australia, and someone who has similar personal circumstances to my research participants, it has always been important to describe how my positioning, often considered as an ‘insider,’ created certain limitations and expectations. During my PhD, I employed the bodily praxis (activity) methodology, where the body is seen as lived reality (Jackson, 1983), by dancing and performing with a group of Indonesian migrant women in Perth, Western Australia (Winarnita, 2014). This enabled me to gain insight into how my research participants understood and interacted in their world, to experience bodily what they experienced. This chapter reflects on dancing and performing as a methodological practice, while acknowledging one’s multiplex identity and its particular and personal location as a limitation (Narayan, 1994). In other words, different aspects of my identity are at times highlighted more tangibly, either by being chosen or forced as a defining identity, depending on the context, situations, and relations of power. Therefore, through the intersectional lens of gender, ethnomusicology, and migration, and the methodology of dance performance among an Indonesian migrant community in Australia, this chapter questions the assumptions of migrant researchers as expert insiders doing ‘fieldwork’ within their own migrant communities.

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Dancing for the Community: Questioning a Migrant Ethnographer’s Insiders Position

  • Monika Winarnita

摘要

Being an ethnographer of Indonesian background in Australia, and someone who has similar personal circumstances to my research participants, it has always been important to describe how my positioning, often considered as an ‘insider,’ created certain limitations and expectations. During my PhD, I employed the bodily praxis (activity) methodology, where the body is seen as lived reality (Jackson, 1983), by dancing and performing with a group of Indonesian migrant women in Perth, Western Australia (Winarnita, 2014). This enabled me to gain insight into how my research participants understood and interacted in their world, to experience bodily what they experienced. This chapter reflects on dancing and performing as a methodological practice, while acknowledging one’s multiplex identity and its particular and personal location as a limitation (Narayan, 1994). In other words, different aspects of my identity are at times highlighted more tangibly, either by being chosen or forced as a defining identity, depending on the context, situations, and relations of power. Therefore, through the intersectional lens of gender, ethnomusicology, and migration, and the methodology of dance performance among an Indonesian migrant community in Australia, this chapter questions the assumptions of migrant researchers as expert insiders doing ‘fieldwork’ within their own migrant communities.