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Performance and politics: an approach to symbolic representation

ABSTRACT Building on my work on the Indian, South African and U.K. parliaments, the article argues that the symbolic is integral to the descriptive and the substantive; that the symbolic can be studied not only as the visual and the discursive but also through paying attention to its performance. The symbolic is also dialectical – it emerges through the interaction between the performer and the audience. Performance of representation can be studied through ethnographic and esthetic approaches. Ethnographies depend on close/thick description of the subject and sites of research and pay close attention to the value that is attached, promoted, reproduced through forms of performance of politics. As such ethnography is inductive in its approach to data collection and analysis. It is a dialogic and holistic approach which has the potential to co-produce meanings and to capture the context in which it sits. The contribution captures symbolic representation in these different registers.