| Summary/Abstract |
Tracing his encounters with one particular song during fieldwork on queer nightlife in Bangalore, the author argues for the usefulness of ethnography as a critical method for studying dance and other modes of fun, play and pleasure in South Asia. He argues that ethnography’s many modes (co-performance, interview, observation, auto-ethnography) evidence how expressive practices integrate into the multiple strata of everyday life and political-economy, and how these cultural expressions facilitate inventions of new selves and worlds. While popular, improvised and social dances are challenging to study given their ephemerality, ethnography deepens our understanding of them and allows us to engage in creative dialogue in fieldwork.
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