12. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality : A New Guinea Example

Abstract

It is not an uncommon experience for an ethnographer toward the end of the second year of fieldwork to realize suddenly that some issue or activity, long since thought to be thoroughly understood and laid to rest in his or her fieldnotes, had an unsuspected dimension that required its significance to be entirely reexamined. For me, the realization arrived while I was writing my fieldnotes the morning after attending a late-night spirit séance in a Kaluli longhouse. I had attended many of these performances before. The moment in question was not an unusual one for this kind of thing: the