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••• Maggie O’Neill •••

Exemplar 1: Not all the time … but mostly …

This example involved collaborating across disciplines and genres drawing upon
ethnographic research with sex workers and performance art/live art. A video/live art
performance, Not all the time … but mostly … was developed by the team and per-
formed by Patricia Breatnach, choreographed by Sara Giddens, with soundscape by
Darren Bourne and video produced by Tony Judge. The video/live art performance
was a response to transcripts of interviews with women working in prostitution and
fuses dance, text, sound and video. A trilogy of work was eventually developed. Sara
and Patricia interpreted and created a live art performance that was captured first on
video with Darren’s soundscape; then a live performance emerged using the video
too; a second (and final) live performance was later developed and photographs from
this performance were later exhibited. 4
The research team involved two sociologists, a video maker, a sound artist, a
dancer/live artists and a performing arts lecturer and choreographer. The work was
shown to a sex worker project for responses and feedback. Following this, the team
organized public performances and the exhibition. Methodologically, the intention
was to run a pilot project in order to explore the possibilities for developing alterna-
tive re-presentations of ethnographic data as ‘ethno-mimesis’.
In a recent book, Emmison and Smith (2000) suggest that the problems in con-
necting visual research to social scientific enquiry lie in the tendency to use visual
materials as merely illustrative, archival, rather than giving them a more analytical
treatment. They argue that ‘we live in a massively visual society, and researchers
should become more reflexive about the visual; more methodologically skilled
within it; and indeed, that this should enhance the quality of our research’ (ibid.: x).
They claim that social science has privileged verbal forms of communication over
visual communication, despite the fact that the ‘visual’ is ‘a pervasive feature not
only of social life but of many aspects of social enquiry as well’ (ibid.: 2). This, they
argue, is largely due to the fact that sociology as a discipline has not encouraged
visual exploration of society and, with the removal of the body in social theory (see
Turner, 1984), so too went the eye (Emmison and Smith, 2000: 13). Emmison and
Smith’s aim in the book is to propose analytical frameworks for investigating visual
data that include: (1) the generation of photographic stills through ethnographic
work; (2) the analysis of media products; (3) the analysis of practices of visualization
(using diagrams, sketches in research and dissemination); and (4) video recordings of
‘naturally occurring social interaction’ (ibid.: 25).
I am most interested in their focus upon phenomenological analyses and use of the
visual. What I define as ethno-mimesis is a phenomenological, hermeneutic mode of
exploring, analysing and seeking to transform social and sexual inequalities through
artistic re-presentations of ethnographic research. Such an approach takes us beyond
the four major methodological frameworks outlined by Emmison and Smith. Ethno-
mimesis as performative praxis is reflexive and phenomenological but it is also criti-
cal and looks to praxis. The immediacy and directness of live art, its potential
to move and, in the words of Catherine Ugwu, its ‘resistance to categorisation and
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