Mad Ethnography: Rendering the World Through the Performative to Enact the Unsayable

Abstract

The intersections between ethnography and theater are not always explored, leaving a potentially fruitful method of representing the human experience untapped. In this thesis, I document the process of staging and designing a production of the ethnographic play Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill with Princeton’s Program in Theater. Additionally, I put the text, images, and ideas behind Mad Forest in conversation with anthropological texts in order to emphasize the special ability that a performative medium like a play has to enact the unsayable or unwritable, offering possibilities that may not be available to traditional ethnography.