Performing Peace-building –
Conferences, Rituals and the Role of
Ethnographic Research
Tobias Denskus*
Abstract This article explores performance and ritual theory in the context of anthropological research on
peace-building institutions and knowledge discourses, as well as the process of writing up an ethnographic
PhD thesis. Based on fieldwork in Germany and Nepal, the article’s aim is to expand the theoretical scope of
‘aidnography’ and apply it to knowledge management, workshops, global conferences and the author’s
performance in these spaces. The article analyses how a potentially critical and contested concept such as
liberal peace-building has been absorbed by an emerging ritual economy of indoor events, policy papers and
transnational actors. These strategies of organisational and professional self-promotion create depoliticised
action and products in the context of global aid chain management.
1 The rise of ‘aidnography’
The politics and relationships of aid have become
another thriving area of qualitative,
ethnographic research with ‘veterans’ of the aid
industry using anthropological writing to reflect
on their own institutions and practices. Mosse
and Eyben are two of the prominent voices and
their writings have sparked ethical and
methodological debates around conducting
‘aidnographies’ and the politics of critically
engaging with development projects and
knowledge management as anthropologists
(Mosse 2005, 2011; Eyben 2010). In short, as
Stubbs summarises, ‘aidnography’ ‘seek[s] to
situate aid and development “projects” and
“programmes” in the context of social, political
and economic relations and power imbalances
between “donors”, “implementing agencies”,
“recipients” and all manner of intermediary
actors and agencies’ (2005: 1).
Ethnographic studies have also been expanded to
other sub-fields of development, for example,
humanitarian aid (Marriage 2006) or electoral
assistance and democratisation processes (Coles
2007); although they have been largely absent
from the recent stocktaking and expansion in
both the anthropology of development and
organisations. Micro-level studies are available
and they often focus on local communities.
Hilhorst and van Leeuwen offer ethnographic
insights into the dynamics of local peace-building
through a women’s organisation in southern
Sudan (2005), Pouligny’s reflections on the role
of civil society in donor organisation’s peacebuilding efforts (2005) and Richmond’s
observations on the longer term impacts of
peace-building on Cambodia (2007) are three
examples that critical research on institutional
and organisational processes is becoming part of
peace research. However, ethnography still
seems to be largely confined to peace-building in
Southern contexts (cf. Goetschel and Hagmann
2009). My research was able to include Northern,
Southern and transnational contexts of peacebuilding activities, following the aid knowledge
chain through multiple sites which enhanced the
research significantly.
This article focuses on several stages of which
many development interactions are performed
nowadays, for example, indoor performances of
meetings, workshops, trainings and conferences.
Focusing on research and policy performances
highlights the potential of performance theory
and ritual approaches to enrich the
organisational anthropology of aid. The article
will be introducing short vignettes from my
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014 © 2014 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2014 Institute of Development Studies
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
18
research on conferences, meetings and workshops
in Germany and Nepal to establish a context in
which some of my key methodological, practical
and performative challenges are highlighted. The
article concludes by outlining initial findings of
an emerging ‘ritual economy of peace-building’
that is potentially relevant for other areas of the
aid industry where self-, organisational- and
knowledge-marketing go hand in hand with on
the ground development work.
2 The role of performance and rituals in
ethnographic research
The following section introduces the two core
theoretical elements for my analytical
framework, performance and rituals.
According to Hymes, performance is a special
subject of conduct in which one or more persons
‘assume a responsibility to an audience and to
tradition as they understand it’ (Hymes quoted
by Carlson 1996: 12). Presenting my doctoral
research in a thesis (tradition) to the reader
(audience) can be regarded as a performance,
because as Carlson notes ‘there has been general
agreement that within every culture there can be
discovered a certain kind of activity, set apart
from other activities by space, time, attitude, or
all three, that can be spoken of and analyzed as
performance’ (ibid.: 13).
Methodological reflections and personal learning
with a qualitative concept such as ‘performance’
may evoke associations around ‘play’ or actions
that were happening on a ‘stage’ and involved an
‘audience’; such an approach may also expose my
research to criticism as it may appear that I did
not take the challenge seriously by putting the
quest for a perfect research performance before
paying attention to the flow of events. I wish that
I had already come across Goffman’s wise words
that he shared at a seminar in 1974 before I
embarked on my fieldwork:
But you have to open yourself up [during
fieldwork] in ways you’re not in ordinary life.
You have to open yourself up to being snubbed.
You have to stop making points to show how
‘smart assed’ you are. And that’s extremely
difficult for graduate students. (1989: 128)
I was confronted with my attitudes, behaviour
and beliefs throughout my research. But the
performance metaphor also hints at the core
challenge of conducting ethnographic research
as an activity and reflective process at the same
time, because it is not an innocent or
transparent process, but another way of how
knowledge is created and legitimised, as Carlson
points out (1996: 207–8). In other words, critical
reflections on ethnography not only should have
an auto-ethnographic component, but need to
bridge the notion of a ‘perfect performance’ with
the complicated nature of performativity that
‘points to the impossibility of separating our life
stories from the social, cultural, and political
contexts in which they are created and the ways
in which performance as a site of dialogue and
negotiation is itself a contested space’ (Holman
Jones 2005: 774).
Performance is also an important and useful
concept when it comes to the production of the
final ‘perfect’ product, the thesis. Performance
may evoke ideas of a physical environment, a
stage, audience and activities, but the creative
process of writing (up) ethnography becomes its
own stage of the performance because time,
temporality and events are (re-)structured in
order to create a coherent narrative. My article
is one attempt to highlight the paradox of
narrative closure that a successful PhD writing
process and bound thesis requires whereas many
debates and reflections on the ‘backstage’ of the
experience will only become public afterwards.
My research focus on workshops and conferences
emerged during fieldwork, but it only became a
central theme of my thesis during the writing-up
process. In some ways I have been trying to
address the challenge of linking history and
action by not subsuming ‘the eventness of being
by narrative closure’ (ibid.: 14), but the task of
writing a thesis in an academic setting makes
narrative closure necessary to prove the
successful completion of the academic
requirements. Therefore, I cannot make the
claim that the fieldwork performance necessarily
led to performative writing in a way Holman
Jones understands it: ‘when we invite an
audience into dialogue as we write, speak, and
perform the words on the page, in our mouths,
on our bodies, and in the world’ (2005: 774).
However, by outlining some of my challenges,
shortcomings and understandings of the research
process in this article I am able to lift the
‘curtain’ of the backstage and can acknowledge
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014
19
the performative nature of ethnography and
shine light on the non-linear evolution of
fieldwork, writing and learning.
Closely linked to research on performance is the
research on ritual theory, for example, Bell
(1992), Rothenbuhler (1998) and Knottnerus
(1997). They not only provide a historical
overview over the evolution of the concept, but
also provide a comprehensive review of relevant
theoretical elements.
Rothenbuhler defines ritual as ‘the voluntary
performance of appropriately patterned
behaviour to symbolically effect or participate in
the serious life’ (1998: 27). Bell’s insights into
the relationship between ritual and power
highlight important theoretical elements for the
analysis: ‘[R]itualization is very much concerned
with power. Closely involved with the
objectification and legitimation of an ordering of
power as an assumption of the way things really
are, ritualization is a strategic arena for the
embodiment of power relations’ (1992: 170;
emphasis in original). When meetings,
presentations and conferences are organised and
take place it is necessary to explore the strategic
arena around them, and the different spaces that
make up the arena – from presentations to coffee
breaks – as well as the preparation or
dissemination of findings.
A key aspect that Knottnerus’ theory stresses is
what he calls ‘strategic ritualisation’ ‘in which
actors utilize or manipulate a system of
ritualized practices in order to realize certain
outcomes [that] can have profound consequences
for members of society’ (Knottnerus 1997: 275).
After initial reflection on doing fieldwork in
Germany and Nepal, the remainder of my article
will unpack the research performance along two
core themes: first, data collection through
interviews and, second multi-sited ethnographic
research on and in different conference settings.
Additional reflections on my personal learning
and how I would have performed differently if I
had to start all over again will form the final part
of this article.
3 Familiar spaces as research sites: re-entering
Germany and Kathmandu
My fieldwork took place in three main phases and
at three different sites. First, I unsuccessfully
20
tried to negotiate a longer research internship at
the headquarters of a German Aid Agency (GAA)
during a training workshop I observed. Second, I
conducted field research in Kathmandu as a
visiting anthropologist at the offices of the
University of Heidelberg’s South Asia Institute.
Third, during the writing-up phase in the UK, I
attended two international conferences in
Belgium and the Netherlands. In addition, I
conducted interviews with a group of informants
in Germany, Nepal and globally via Skype.
During the completion of my first year of the
PhD that led to a University-approved research
outline, I decided to contact the GAA and discuss
the possibility of a research internship. I learned
from a consultant that she was organising a
three-day workshop at the GAA headquarters.
She offered to introduce me as her research
assistant and that I could spend one or two days
more after the workshop to introduce myself and
my research project as well as present my
research outline officially in a staff meeting.
GAA staff listened politely, mainly because of my
affiliation with the consultant, but declined my
request for a research internship mainly on the
grounds that my research was missing a clear
hypothesis and that it focused too much on ‘us
and our ways of working rather than the peacebuilding projects’. ‘We don’t need an outsider to
snoop around and criticise our work’, one middlelevel manager said, ‘because we don’t have the
time for such games’.
In this early episode it appeared as a conflict
between GAA staff and an outside academic
researcher, but during the course of my research
I realised that spaces are opened or closed based
on interactions that often involve a particular
performance by the researcher to keep them
open. Demanding clarity, hypotheses and
research questions, GAA staff made their
understanding of a ‘perfect’ research
performance very clear. In the end, granting an
anthropological researcher ‘all area access’ may
have threatened the power that the division
between performer and audience carries.
However, the main question that bothered me
after this episode was whether I could have
performed better, disguising my curiosity in the
‘back stage’ better and entering the stage under
the pretence of accepting the traditional model
of performance. I chose to be fully open and
transparent about my intentions adding to the
Denskus Performing Peace-building – Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research
performative aspects of my research project by
creating boundaries between ‘insiders who would
not allow access to a critical outsider’.
GAA staff made a clear distinction between their
organisational cultures and my approach towards
ethnographic research. Castañeda’s observation
on the ‘invisible theatre of fieldwork’ and the
complex roles members of the ‘subject
community’ play resonate well with my own
challenges conducting ethnography and how my
(failed) engagement was to some extent
determined by the (un)willingness of the ‘subject
community’ to let me ‘in’:
Members of the subject community exercise
their agency and control over the extent to
which they engage the fieldworker and
participate as subjects, distant/disengaged
observers, active or occasional participants,
collaborators, interpreters, critics, publicly or
privately vocal nay-sayers, assistants in or
enemies to the research process. […] However,
the assumption governing successful grant
writing […], and defense of dissertations is
that the researcher determines, controls and
imposes not only the definition of the research
project but designates who is involved as
subjects of research (Castañeda 2006: 84).
After my experiences in Germany, my fieldwork
experience in Kathmandu felt more ‘at home’
than the experience in Germany – even if it took
place in a situation of political instability and
transition.
When I arrived in Kathmandu in mid-April 2006
the political situation was fragile, even tense and
my first week there was marked by a curfew that
usually lasted for most of the day. The People’s
Movement (Jana Andolan-II) was in full effect,
demanding the return to a democratic process
after the King had dissolved the parliament and
peace talks with the Maoists. Only when the King
resigned did it become clear that Nepal was on its
way to a democratic transition from conflict to
peace and that this groundbreaking step could be
the beginning of the end of the ten-year long
conflict that had so far cost the lives of
approximately 13,000 people. After the
breakdown of previous peace initiatives, this was
an important step forward and it seemed that the
pressure from the people’s movement on the
streets had contributed to a similar landslide
political change as in 1991 when civil-society
pressure led to Nepal becoming a multi-party
democracy. Amidst the Nepali enthusiasm about
the peaceful future of their country, the
international donor community was caught by
surprise about the quick, peaceful transition;
shifting from a situation nearing a humanitarian
emergency to a post-war situation where
development assistance could resume and normal
development work would be possible again.
Within the first two weeks my initial research
proposal became obsolete as donors no longer
wanted to talk about peace-building strategies to
end the conflict or their organisational
approaches during the conflict. They quickly
embraced the new situation and started to plan
the post-war peace-building and reconstruction
work. To go with the flow of people, events and
discussions I had to adapt my field research and
it quickly became clear that an international
machinery had started to get into gear – sending
headquarter people, consultants and experts to
prepare Nepal for this transition phase.
As my thesis analyses in detail, the social,
cultural and political spaces in Kathmandu were
met with traditional approaches of the donor
community. Potentially open-ended discussions
about post-war development, a new constitution
or economic priorities were curbed by well-known
global performances of outside experts who
arrived in town in large numbers and in quick
succession to inform, but also to entertain the aid
industry inside the vacuum of political transition.
Rather than staging an ‘invisible theatre’ and
engaging the donor audience in critical debates
the visiting consultants reassured donors that the
transition could be managed based on ‘best
practices’ from other post-conflict scenarios. Due
to the focus of the article on fieldwork reflections,
a comprehensive review of critical debates on
liberal peace-building in general and the case of
Nepal is not possible. However, earlier articles
critically explore the peace-building change-ofbehaviour phenomenon in more detail (Denskus
2007, 2009).
On a practical level, the situation in Kathmandu
almost always felt more accessible and open than
my research in Germany. My previous work
experience in Nepal may have helped me to ‘play
the native card’ in the international development
and peace community a different way than I was
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014
21
ever able to do in Germany. Jacobs-Huey stresses
the limiting factors of ‘playing the native card’
approach as potentially ‘non-critical privileging of
[the anthropologist’s] insider status’ (2002: 791),
but I found it to be a more positive approach that
helped me to be regarded as authentic and able
to blend with the transnational community that
was used to visitors, researchers and consultants
as part of their professional experience as
expatriate aid workers in Nepal. In transnational
aid spaces many of the neat categorisations of
home and away or native and foreign are
constantly in flux and create new identities for
global researchers and practitioners with
different, new and accumulating understandings
of identity and positionality that also affect
narrative structures or the use of culturally
embedded concepts such as irony.
My approach evolved along the lines of Gusterson’s
notion of ‘polymorphous engagement’,
emphasising ‘interacting with informants across
a number of dispersed sites […] collecting data
eclectically from a disparate array of sources in
many different ways [such as]… formal
interviews… extensive reading of newspapers
and official documents… careful attention to
popular culture’ (Gusterson 1997: 116).
My ambitious assumptions about critical
anthropological work in large aid organisations
and the staff ’s willingness and curiosity about
‘reflective practice’ were abandoned very quickly
in the context of German aid organisations. A
major challenge that persisted throughout my
research was that I had chosen an inductive
rather than deductive framework for my
research that consisted less of hypotheses that
would be proved or disproved which often put me
at odds with the predominant paradigm in
German peace research and policymaking. My
field research was not simply a negotiation for
access, but elements of my performance played
important roles in how certain spaces opened up
or remained closed to me. Neither organisational
ethnography on the peace community in
Germany, nor the concept of self-reflective
research and writing are well known and
academically accepted in Germany and often the
research at home in my native country felt alien
and distant compared to the research experience
abroad in Nepal. I had envisioned more
openness, but the reality was that some people
did not want to be part of my project.
22
4 Multi-sited research on and in events
While limitations did exist, the following
paragraphs analyse key aspects of the research I
was able to conduct: by focusing on some of the
outputs of academic research, aid organisations
and thinktanks, I followed the flow of information
and knowledge to some of the key sites where I
thought knowledge and policy would be brought
together, discussed and negotiated – at events
where different groups regularly gathered. In
addition to the GAA workshop I attended five
more workshops and conferences during my field
research in Germany. Many of the workshops
brought together a core set of usual suspects as
participants, and my primary interest in them was
about the contents, what was presented and
discussed and only later on about how such events
were organised. It took me a while to treat these
events as fieldwork sites, but the large number of
them, the efforts in organising them and the firm
belief that they contributed to results and
influenced policymaking subsequently interested
me as vehicles to maintain an epistemic
community and facilitate knowledge in certain,
surprisingly unchallenging, ways. The workshop
space as a particular social space of a community
became important because of the value and
importance organisers and participants attributed
to it and to the ways in which it naturalised
debates and interactions as Hastrup points out:
A social space – be it a nation-state, a
university-conference or a construction site –
has no ontological status as a whole apart from
what is collectively attributed to it and made
manifest in action. Conversely, social spaces
are naturalised and allowed to exert physical
force over individual action (Hastrup 2005: 11).
I attended five workshops, two academic
conferences and one weekly donor meeting
during my fieldwork in Nepal. Additionally, I
organised my own workshop at the end of my
stay to discuss some preliminary findings with
interested colleagues who had contributed their
time and opinions during the research. In
addition to attending workshops officially, I also
spoke to junior staff or interns from various
organisations who had spent considerable time
on organising different events – mostly in one of
the half a dozen four- or five-star hotels in the
city. This was so much the norm that sometimes
I would just stop by one of the hotels in the
morning when I could see a variety of cars with
Denskus Performing Peace-building – Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research
diplomatic licence plates in the car park and ask
which organisation was coordinating what
workshop today. In the beginning, attending
workshops only seemed to be a convenient way to
meet potential informants in a less formal and
more direct way than contacting them by email,
but I soon realised that these events are a timeconsuming business for people and occupy a
larger space than simply the meeting room and
lobby in a hotel. Going to and from workshops
was part of the package and often consumed a lot
of time because of increasing traffic in
Kathmandu and frequent road blocks of
protesters on some of the main intersections.
Equally, writing a note about a workshop to
colleagues in the office, following up one or two
issues with a colleague who also attended and
wanted to share a document for example,
coordinating the organisation of a workshop of
their own organisation and numerous lunch
breaks, farewell drinks and coffee breaks
occupied a space that was an essential part of the
day-to-day routines of some staff. Given that very
little was decided on these occasions, very few
critical or challenging discussions took place and
many people acknowledged that most workshops
were not worth the amount of time and effort,
my interest steadily grew in these performances.
But it took me some time after my fieldwork to
figure out the centrality of workshops and other
day-to-day business in the ritual communication
of the peace-building community in Kathmandu.
The participation in workshops did not only
reveal rituals inside the workshop space, but the
supposedly liminal space of arrival, departure,
registration or (coffee) breaks was equally
structured, eliminating many surprising
encounters beforehand.
About a week after the International Peace
Research Association’s (IPRA) conference in
Leuven, Belgium a friend tagged me into a photo
he had just uploaded to a folder called
‘conference hopping’ on his Facebook profile.
The photo shows me in a seminar room of the
Catholic University of Leuven, standing in front
of a group of academic colleagues and presenting
my ethnographic research on the international
aid community in Kathmandu. The PowerPoint
slide in the background is entitled ‘about
ethnography’ to help me explain better what it
was that I was researching in Nepal. The
circumstances (an international academic
conference), the location (a seminar room
without any hint of the location and even without
daylight (the window blinds are shut) and the
performance of me standing in front of the
audience wearing a corduroy jacket to appear
more professional and academic provided me
with an interesting opportunity for reflection, in
the literal way that it felt like looking into a
mirror or watching the effect on television when
someone is looking in the camera and the picture
is duplicated on a screen in the background,
getting smaller and smaller in the eternity of
multiplication. Even if the contents of the slide
may provide some critical input into the debates
that we were having on the panel about the role
of external actors in building peace and states in
fragile environments, my performance as a paper
giver at this conference is essentially replicating
the expectations of presenting research and
engaging with colleagues from around the world.
The space for critical engagement had to be
constantly re-negotiated and I often chose a less
offensive approach for the sake of contributing to
a successful conference (their ‘perfect
performance’) in the eyes of the organisers – the
very medium of interaction that I was often
criticising in my thesis. Even though the IPRA
conference took place after the initial end of my
fieldwork it is an important example both in
terms of understanding the writing-up process of
my thesis as well as the complexities of the
performative nature of ethnographic research
inside the transnational community in which the
role of actor and spectator and insider or
outsider changes over time – or just for the brief
moment of being part of a conference panel.
After Germany and Nepal I was now on the front
stage performing my research findings in front of
an audience of ‘spectators’ – spectators of my
presentation who were at the same time actively
contributing to the research process, as I
mentioned at the beginning of every presentation.
These performances underline the complexity of
agency of a critical researcher who deliberately
took part in an expected performance, but at the
same time may have been able to influence the
audience’s attitudes or mindsets through the
critical contents of a traditional, ritualistic
PowerPoint presentation.
When I opened my laptop at Amsterdam airport,
inside the terminal building, next to the queue
of McDonald’s customers (where the only
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014
23
available power plug was situated), waiting for
my Easyjet flight back to London-Gatwick, I was
almost beaming with excitement: here I am
again, I thought to myself, at an airport, waiting
to return from yet another big academic
conference, this time from the World Conference
of Humanitarian Studies (WCHS) that took
place in Groningen, The Netherlands in early
February 2009. The WCHS conference was well
organised, but I knew from the moment when I
saw the programme with 68 panels that there
were simply too many. The amount of panels plus
the fact that weather conditions were generally
bad in large parts of Europe and a visa seemed
difficult to obtain for international participants
meant that most of the panels lost either
presenters and/or their audience. But it turned
out to be a fascinating experience. A colleague
and I had organised a panel on Nepal and we
were surprised by the fact that participants
seemed to take our call for papers seriously and
submitted personal stories of how they and their
organisations tried to engage in development
work during the height of the Maoist insurgency.
Moreover, we managed to bring together a range
of development practitioners and researchers
from and on Nepal and in the midst of this
conventional conference panel, a reflective space
opened up.
During my introductory presentation, which was
based on my previous IPRA presentation, I told
the story of an overworked international
organisation staff member who had to organise
all the meetings for the official delegations from
headquarters that descended on Kathmandu
after the signing of the peace agreement. Frank,
as I will call him, an international aid consultant
I had first met in Nepal before my doctoral
studies, joked about the fact that he had dressed
up for the occasion as an aid agency
representative with suit and tie although he was
a freelance consultant at that time who would
not normally dress up for a regular event.
Analysed with the understanding of rituals and
performances I have now, it is an interesting
example of what Castañeda describes as
‘emergent audience’ in fieldwork, because it ‘has
meaning and value for those who have allowed it
to happen in their midst’ (2006: 86). Frank
showed a remarkable amount of irony, because
he was the only participant wearing a suit. He
did not say whether this was his attire that he
generally found appropriate for the framework of
24
an international conference, but he referred to
his outfit as ‘wanting to represent a donor
representative’. He had prepared a presentation
about a project around fragile statehood, but
quickly abandoned his PowerPoint slides and
started to tell anecdotes and stories from inside
the donor and conflict adviser community of
Kathmandu. He had realised during the previous
presentations that this was a ‘safe space’ with
‘insiders’ who were not only interested in such
stories, but also knew the details of his stories,
the context and the actors involved. Frank’s
performance is a small, but powerful example of
how roles can change from ‘actor’ to ‘presenter’
to ‘reflective aid practitioner’ – all within the
course of a 90-minute panel.
Conferences as research sites display a range of
performative features on and off the physical
stage with presenters and panel participants.
Fieldwork in these situations ‘happens’ when the
community allows it to take place in their midst,
indicating how powerful such a community can
be to legitimise or de-legitimise the endeavours
of a researcher, how much agency individuals
have and how unpredictable performances can
be. My engagement with conferences and
workshops supplemented personal meetings and
additional observations; finding a suitable
framework to write these performances up
proved to be another challenge.
I will outline the broader significance of events
for development research and policymaking in
the following paragraph. Because what also
became apparent during my research was that
performative and ritualistic dynamics are not
limited to the discourse of peace-building.
Whenever I spoke to academics or development
practitioners about my research the reactions
were similar as they confirmed that these
dynamics were also visible in their area of
specialisation, whether this was ‘gender’,
‘participation’ or ‘nutrition’. Therefore, it is
important to understand workshops and
conferences in a broader context of a ritual
economy. In the ritual economic marketplace a
growing number of actors (from academics
advising organisations to large bilateral and
multilateral aid organisations, NGOs, local
organisations and multinational consultancy
firms) perform traditional outputs such as
research reports and simulate action and debate
Denskus Performing Peace-building – Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research
often to justify projects that are removed from
local realities and are likely to have very little
policy impact.
5 Towards a ritual economy of peace-building
performances
I have argued above that workshops and
conferences are central locations for
performances that are rehearsed in the
expanding capillary system of transnational
development work and lifestyles.
As I concluded for the workshop spaces in
Germany and Nepal, a potentially
transformational and active space is replaced
with an indoor theatre in which participants
often seem to be spectators, rather than actors
that are learning and engaging with critical
knowledge or have the power to shape
development policy or practice.
Ritual theory provides approaches to better
understand the agents of ritualisation and their
symbolic practices. The ritual legitimators,
entrepreneurs and sponsors that Knottnerus’
research (1997) identifies work inside the system
and use symbolic practices to increase their
social capital inside the peace community, but
also their economic capital through the
organisation of events and its interlinkages of
networking and follow-up projects, workshops
and additional conferences.
Ritual entrepreneurs take advantage of the
needs of transnational professionals and offer a
marketplace for material and immaterial goods,
(e.g. new policy papers or checklists) exchanges
or services (promoting consultancy services or
the availability for commissioned research) that
take advantage of the ritualised spaces that
indoor events provide. Peace-building workshops
and conferences often display intangible
products, for example, ideas, knowledge and
ultimately the vision of a better, peaceful society
that will be embedded in the liberal market
model of Western societies. Professionals may
offer their services, knowledge, gossip and
information in hotels and workshops and engage
in an ongoing ritual negotiation of expert status,
acceptable knowledge or unthreatening policy
recommendations.
The ritual economy is elusive and difficult to
grasp because it allows for pockets of agency
within a broader framework of liberal peacebuilding training and knowledge management.
But these dynamics go far beyond the peace
research and peace-building community. Wells
and Davis-Salazar’s foundation for a ritual
economy, based on anthropological and
archaeological research on ancient MesoAmerican Maya culture, highlights some of the
broader dynamics that can link ancient tribal
culture to contemporary development discourses:
The contributors to this volume recognize
three aspects of materialization whose
analysis is critical for building a theory of
ritual economy: acquisition (how ritual
structures provisioning and the motivations
behind procurement), consumption (how ritual
demands labor and social valuables), and power
(how materialization of beliefs and values can
be manipulated to manage meanings and
shape interpretations) (Wells and DavisSalazar 2007: 5; emphasis in original)
It is important to point out that there is no
overarching ritual authority that manages the
processes of acquisition, consumption and power.
Ethnographic fieldwork needs to engage
carefully with agency and resistance, but as my
case studies from the peace-building sector have
highlighted, the ritual economy follows
contemporary economic principles of selfmanagement and self-promotion. Thrift, with
reference to Foucault, makes an important point
about the connection between discourses,
identity and bodily conduct:
This stance means that I am not interested in
management identity as such […], but rather
in the means by which spaces can produce
identity effects, the ways in which spaces figure
as, to use that well-worn Foucauldian phrase,
‘technologies of the self.’ I am interested, in
other words, in how spaces can be used to
produce collective bodies and identifications
(Thrift 2000: 677).
The rituals of travel, physical attendance of
events, expectations of results (e.g. a conference
report) or conduct (experts staying in certain
hotels for only a couple of days) often create
economic activities, status and legitimacy as well
as a new form of pilgrimage. Wells and DavisSalazar’s analysis of pilgrimages and their role in
the ritual economy of pre-Hispanic Northwest
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014
25
Mexico sound familiar to the journeys of
conference participants or consultants:
Pilgrimages to sacred locales were – and still
are – important ritual institutions that
structure social, economic, and political
relations, often leading individuals outside
local communities to ritually significant places
on the landscape where pilgrims from different
regions gather periodically. The circulation of
material goods changing hands at pilgrimage
centers, and possibly at stops along the way,
often happens through the exchange of objects
that materialize social values and beliefs (Wells
and Davis-Salazar 2007: 9).
Although ceramic goods rarely change hands
these days, the ritual economy encourages people
to move to centres of activities as the examples
from Nepal show when international experts and
organisations arrive in post-conflict Kathmandu
to start peace-building activities. Today, virtual
goods such as knowledge, frameworks or
presentations are important and new
performative aspects emerge as laptops are
carried around for presentations and stories
from other post-conflict spaces are shared. Being
at the right place at the right time when the
‘ritual caravan’ of post-conflict experts, funding
and opportunities passes by is important as is the
willingness to present oneself at workshops or
conferences after field visits.
6 The PhD process as research performance
One aim of this IDS Bulletin is to provide a space
to reflect upon the process of completing a PhD in
addition to presenting some of the key findings. In
this paragraph I will therefore take advantage of
ritual and performance theory as an entry point
for self-critical reflections on my own
positionality and the expectations of the rite of
passage of obtaining a PhD.
‘Performance theory provides for reflexivities of
three kinds: self-reflection, self-discovery, and
self-commentary’ (Palmer and Jankowiak 1996:
230). Cultural anthropology, ever aware of the
nuances and complexities of the social theatres
around us, seemed to offer a gateway into my
doctoral research performance along the neat
categories outlined by Palmer and Jankowiak
above. A bound thesis, a viva without corrections
and accepted articles would be elements of a
successful and ‘perfect’ PhD performance.
26
However, as this article demonstrates, the flows
of research and the ebbs of writing up mark a
journey of changes, learning and reflections that
is often difficult to capture with the static nature
of a traditional output such as a thesis.
Even with the growing body of anthropological
research on reflective writing and development,
hardly anything is written about the institutional
context in which such ethnographies are written
up. In his thesis Wiltshire (2011) engages,
among other topics, with the publication
processes inside universities and how virtual
research is changing some of the writing
paradigms, but in my case the issues were more
about perfectionism and the real or imagined
pressure to be or become a reflective writer.
Dunleavy mentions perfectionism only once in
his well-known book on how to master a PhD
(2003: 227) and in my case the quest to find the
‘perfect’ reflective voice added time and energy
to the writing-up performance. In an academic
environment where critical, (self-)reflective
writing on development has a long tradition (e.g.
Grillo and Stirrat 1997; Crewe and Harrison
1998; Eyben 2006) this added to the pressure I
felt to ‘produce’ something special in this genre
in order to ‘compete’ with the academic
discourse around me. This was emotionally very
stressful as I equated my less-than-perfect
attempts at writing with personally and
professionally failing the challenge the
institution seemed to have laid out for me.
Maybe opening up the thesis output to
alternatives to the ‘one book’ thesis or thinking
completely outside the box of written material
(e.g. submitting a filmed documentary, blog posts
or audio files with the written thesis) could
enhance the performative quality for
anthropologists and their audiences.
Researching rituals of international development
communities, analysing performances and linking
it to the subject of peace research and peacebuilding can only be interpreted within a selfreflective framework of my own performances
and the rituals of academic research and thesis
writing. My research encountered divisions
between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ in
Germany and more complex and overlapping
stages within the international development and
expatriate community in Kathmandu. Finally, my
perspectives shifted again by becoming a
performer myself at international conferences.
Denskus Performing Peace-building – Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research
The article tries to make some of these key
challenges visible that are often hidden from view
in a neatly bound seven-chapter doctoral thesis.
My previous experiences as an undergraduate
student and peace researcher in Germany
encouraged me sometimes to project my own
criticism and ironic distance onto those who
worked in peace research and policy; the danger
is that my own performance took over in a
similar way as Carlson describes it for modern
politically oriented performance: ‘[it] is flexible
[…], slipping back and forth between claiming
an identity position and ironically questioning
the cultural assumptions that legitimate it’
(1996: 194). Another point is that I could have
worked closer along core anthropological
concepts such as ‘multi-sitedness’. ‘Going with
the flow’ inside the policy communities was a
legitimate choice, but it also meant that I had to
sideline other flows, for example, questions
around the (re-)presentation of Nepal in
Germany and vice versa. With the exception of
global conferences, the transnational element
turned out to be research at the starting and end
points of policymaking and implementation,
rather than looking at the ‘flows’ in between.
7 Conclusion
My analysis contributes to ‘aidnography’ by
employing performance and ritual theory to
identify an emerging ritual economy of peacebuilding with potentially larger implications of
how contemporary development discourses are
created and maintained in a ritual economy. My
doctoral research on peace-building events in
Germany, Nepal and the transnational
professional arena of conferences and workshops
analysed emerging rituals around knowledge
production and management as well as the
global professionalism that facilitates exchanges
inside the development industry. The article is
also a first inroad into broader issues on the
emerging ritual economy of peace-building: in
addition to working on ‘real’ social change, many
critical concepts such as peace-building seem to
have been absorbed by indoor rituals and events,
replacing contested, public spaces ‘out there’
with the power of arranging, or in a Foucauldian
sense disciplining, a group of professionals
around a PowerPoint presentation, scheduled
coffee breaks and a 25-page report.
A broader question emerges as to what extent do
well-managed, but depoliticised events have a
real impact on how development is
conceptualised, debated and ultimately
implemented. My research in post-conflict
Kathmandu suggests that Western and capitalist
concepts of liberal peace-building quickly filled
the void that the old royal regime left and that
there was very little time for more localised
discussions on the future of Nepal.
The article is also a reminder that anthropological
research is always a self-reflective endeavour and
that reflection on performance or rituals also
applies to the researcher. Meeting the
expectations of the academy with regard to
performing a PhD thesis is difficult in a complex
and fluid context of research that responds to the
flow of events, people and globalised ideas.
Last, but not least, becoming immersed in
professional communities is still a challenge for
researchers, despite increasing popularity of
ethnography in qualitative development
research, especially as informants have the
power and agency not to get as excited as the
researcher about critical deconstructions of their
professional life-worlds.
Note
* The author would like to thank Andrea Papan
and all the anonymous reviewers for very
helpful feedback on earlier versions of the
article.
IDS Bulletin Volume 45 Number 2–3 March 2014
27
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