Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will adopt an autoethnographic approach to discuss how the ethnographer is led to negociate her position and to handle relationships in a mindfulness-based somatic workshop named “Contemplative Theatre”.

Paper long abstract:

The series of workshops facilitated by Toshimitsu Kokido (an artist, actor and practitioner of drama and movement therapy), Chizuko Tezuka (a psychologist and researcher of ‘naikan’–i.e. introspection–therapy), and Yuki Imoto (an anthropologist and researcher of mindfulness practices), was first developed in the autumn of 2017 as part of Imoto’s class on Contemplative Studies and Mindfulness at Keio University. Since 2018, the three have also organized workshops for the general public. I joined as a participant in August 2018 and has been following the development of the Contemplative Theatre workshops until 2021. This paper aims for an autoethnographic approach based on my experience of being both ‘subject for experiment’ and ethnographer. Specifically, I question the uncertainties of relationships between participants.

As an ethnologist of the Chinese countryside, I found myself confronted with a number of new issues: collaborative research, the difficulties of negotiating one's place in the field and creating projects, how to handle interviews with people who themselves have a very elaborate discourse on their practice.

This experience raised several methodological questions that my anthropologist colleague also shared. We thus discussed how our academic work could take account of these introspective and contemplative experiences, which are, by definition, beyond words. The question also arose of the heuristic value of the Contemplative Theater workshops, of the "authenticity" of a field created to be a laboratory for experimentation. The proposed paper shall reflect on all these aspects of regimes of presence and communication.