A Bird Dance is a lovely ethnographic account of a magical evening of performance that Patrick McNaughton witnessed on a June night in 1978 in Doguduman, Mali. This evening haunted and inspired McNaughton over the ensuing decades as the deepest and most satisfying artistic experience of his life. A Bird Dance is a worthy testimony to this experience, a humble, eloquent, and richly grained account that demonstrates the potential of humanistic performance ethnography. The book is accessible and wise, and could only have been written by a scholar like McNaughton. An art historian by training, he has developed unusually deep relationships and knowledge of the art and culture of the Mande heartland. There is a depth of understanding and sympathy, an attention to nuance and aesthetics, possible only with his sustained cultural immersion, attention and care.
That A Bird Dance might be a truly great ethnography though, flows from the hard-won grace of his theoretical approach, an approach that insists on the irreducible plenitude of human cultural experience and the creativity and agency of those who make collective meaning through their ethical and aesthetic actions. McNaughton is clearly inspired by the notion that cultural meanings are emergent and that the complexities of a communication event can be almost fathomless. This work is theoretically informed, drawing on performance studies, critiques of ethnographic representation, radical empiricism, and praxis/agency theory, but thankfully, it is a terrific read, and uses this theory to clear the way for an informed and appreciative engagement in depth with human expression in context.
The work is organized in four sections. Part I may be the most powerful. In two chapters, McNaughton offers a deeply vivid, accurate, and thorough account of African performance in all its beauty and complexity. Weaving scene, actors, texts, sequence, and the complexities of artistry and relationships into a whole, he provides an initial presentation of the performance amplified by a probing and insightful exegesis of the significance of what went down that evening. It is hard to overstate his exemplary achievement in these passages; he shares the fullness of this experience in a manner only possible through years of study and extraordinary dialogue and collaborations with participants and co-researchers, particularly Kassim Kone.
Part II continues to deepen our understanding of this event through a look at master masquerade performer Sidi Ball?. For folklorists accustomed to recognizing individual artists, McNaughton’s effort is not unfamiliar, but it is still especially welcome to see representations of African culture honoring and valuing individuals and the complexities of their relationships to one another. Some of the most eloquent and important statements of the work are to be found in this section, as McNaughton articulates his approach to the consideration of the individual, art, culture, and society.
Part III amplifies and develops the importance of aesthetics in the processual hermeneutics McNaughton engages in. To see, to read, a masquerade or any other cultural act for that matter, with any insight, one must be aware of the aesthetic frames that render its coherence. Here McNaughton proposes a set of intersecting themes that scaffold and inform Mande experience drawn from emic categories and evaluative discourse: clarity, embellishment, goodness and tastiness, power, restraint, concealment, and badenya and fadenya, mother-childness and father-childness. His commentary on these themes weaves back into his account of the masquerade, and spins out to embrace the sweeping whole of Mande history and society.
Part IV begins with an extended and elegant symbolic exegesis of the bird in Mande culture. Again, McNaughton is generously inviting us to an appreciation of the plenitude of significance, the depth of meaning and artistry, that Sidi Ball? and his participants enacted. The work concludes by taking us into more recent developments in the Mande masquerade tradition, which happily McNaughton finds alive and well.
I have two critiques of the work. I believe it would have benefitted from media supplementation beyond the color photos it does include; I was able to locate footage of similar masquerades to supplement my engagement, but McNaughton’s guidance and resources would have been helpful. For work like this that attempts to share the fullness of cultural experience non-textual resources are key. Second, discussions of aesthetics in parts II and III were sometimes a little repetitious and could have been streamlined.
I used this book in an undergraduate seminar on culture and change in Africa and my students and I found it to be a great way to dig into the depth, beauty, and power of African performance. I recommend it for this purpose. With this work McNaughton fulfills the promise that has eluded many of us: to take the insights and breakthroughs of performance and praxis theory and use these ideas to illuminate rather than to obscure the human condition, and to fully honor the creativity and meaning of remarkable real individuals he respects.
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[Review length: 803 words • Review posted on September 7, 2011]