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QRJ0010.1177/1468794114543400Qualitative ResearchDowney et al.

Article Q
Apprenticeship as method: R
embodied learning in Qualitative Research

ethnographic practice 2015, Vol. 15(2) 183200

The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1468794114543400
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Greg Downey
Macquarie University, Australia

Monica Dalidowicz
Carleton University, Canada

Paul H Mason
Woolcock Institute, Australia

Abstract
Apprenticeship, the process of developing from novice to proficiency under the guidance of
a skilled expert, varies across cultures and among different skilled communities, but for many
communities of practice, apprenticeship offers an ideal ethnographic point of entry. For certain
kinds of anthropological fieldwork, such as studies of bodily arts, apprenticeship may offer an
essential research method. In this article, three anthropologists discuss their experiences using
apprenticeship in fieldwork and consider the practical and theoretical issues of apprenticeship as
a site of ethnographic inquiry. As a channel for achieving social inclusion, apprenticeship offers
anthropologists opportunities to navigate and chart interpersonal power, access to emic types
of knowledge, first-hand experience of the pedagogical milieu, and avenues to acquire cultural
proficiency. Because apprenticeship itself includes mechanisms to socialize emerging skill, such as
disciplining the generation of variation that is inherent in each individuals rediscovery or reinvention
of skill, apprenticeship encourages our subjects to collaborate with us by allowing them to critique
the ethnographers performance and provide feedback in familiar, locally-meaningful ways.

Keywords
anthropology, apprenticeship, capoeira, dance, embodiment, kathak, martial arts, pencak silat,
physical education, skill acquisition

When Greg Downey first arrived at his field site in Brazil, he walked to the slowly dis-
integrating fort that housed several schools of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and
martial art. Eager to begin ethnographic research, Downey located the Pelourinho

Corresponding author:
Greg Downey, Macquarie University, Ryde, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Email: greg.downey@mq.edu.au
184 Qualitative Research 15(2)

Capoeira Angola Group, an organization he had learned about through Lowell Lewiss
(1992) ethnography. Finding the mestre, or teacher, who oversaw the group, Mestre
Moraes, and keen to explain his research, in part to fulfil his ethical obligations, Downey
started to describe the project. Moraes pulled him up short with a wave of his hand: To
me, you are just like every other student.
In fact, the savvy mestre was far less sanguine about researchers than his dismissive
response implied. Downey would later discover how adept Moraes was at generating
symbolic capital by hosting researchers, manipulating their intellectual agendas, and
even manoeuvring well-intentioned scholars into advancing his own projects.
Nevertheless, the exchange signalled that the fundamental relationship between ethno-
graphic researcher and subject was to be masterdisciple or teacherapprentice and set
the tone for their social relationship: Downeys project, like other apprenticeship-based
research, would be shaped by the demands of discipleship.
This article explores the social and pedagogical dimensions of apprenticeship-based
ethnography in bodily arts, arguing that close study of settings where people learn these
practices provides distinctive opportunities to perceive the mechanisms of enculturation.
Apprenticeship-based methods radically refigure the social relationships often thought to
typify ethnographic research: ethnographic observer and native object of observation.
Apprenticeship sacrifices detachment for a well-established role in a community of prac-
tice, even becoming a target of community activity. The masterapprentice relationship
intensifies the degree to which the ethnographer is an object of indigenous scrutiny, local
pedagogies, and community techniques for transforming less-skilled aspirants into
experts. That is, apprenticeship research emphasizes the participant dimension of field-
work, making ethnographers observing participants more than participant observers,
as Kath Woodward (2008) suggests.1 Our ethnographic practice parallels local pedagogi-
cal practices, instead of asking our subjects to do potentially unfamiliar tasks. This role
comes at a price: an apprentice is often constrained in ways that do not affect less deeply
embedded ethnographers.
All of the authors have done extensive apprenticeship-based fieldwork in communi-
ties of practice. Downey studied capoeira in Brazil, Monica Dalidowicz practiced kathak
in India and North America, and Paul H. Mason learned pencak silat in Indonesia (as
well as capoeira in Brazil).2 Although our cases are extreme, we believe that apprentice-
ship of varying intensities occurs in virtually all field settings, as ethnographers become,
even in some limited way, proficient in navigating social relations, solving problems,
participating in group activities, and otherwise functioning in day-to-day life in a new
setting. Field research usually requires that the researcher learn how to function effec-
tively in an unfamiliar setting because fieldwork almost inevitably immerses ethnogra-
phers into a world beyond their competence (Hastrup, 1995: 17). Ethnography through
formal apprenticeship, however, highlights in an exaggerated way the opportunities gen-
erated by participation, but also the limits that immersion and active engagement impose
upon our exploration of culture. Cataloguing the distinctive opportunities and constraints
of apprenticeship-based fieldwork helps us to appreciate how to do ethnographic research
in communities of practice and what distinctive forms of understanding arise through
apprenticeship.
Downey et al. 185

We are certainly not the first to claim that apprenticeship is a useful research method:
apprenticeship has been used in a range of ethnographic settings to study skill acquisition
and specialized fields of knowledge.3 Esther Goody (1989: 2545) and Michael Coy
(1989: 2) both suggest that apprenticeship is not only an excellent way to learn a skill; it
is also an ideal way to learn about it, and to learn about how one learns. Loc Wacquant
calls training pedagogical work, and suggests that, If you want to pry into habitus, then
study the organized practices of inculcation through which it is layered (2011: 86).
Where better to gain entry and to study what a particular cultural milieu demands than at
a site where others are doing the same thing?
We would also argue that apprenticeship is an ideal site to understand what cultural
learning actually is: this argument is theoretical, but with important practical and meth-
odological implications. Apprenticeship exposes the complexities and variability of
enculturation into a dynamic and changing skilled community. Observing apprenticeship
demonstrates that, if we are not careful, our models of a shared skill or art or other
constructs like habitus, tradition, embodied knowledge or even culture might
conceal from us the incessant active learning processes of re-discovery, variation, inno-
vation, inspiration, disciplining even failure through which individuals gain exper-
tise and the community of practice continues through time even though practices
themselves constantly vary (see Downey, 2010).
Close study and apprenticeship force us to recognize that skill cultivation is inher-
ently diverse and centrifugal: each novice becomes capable in his or her own way, albeit
in an environment of social interaction and with shared models for which to strive. At the
same time, community continuity is provided by centripetal forces, like teacher authority
and charisma, practical constraints (such as genre rules, the materiality of instruments or
even the human body itself), and disciplining institutions (like audience expectations,
group performance, and obligatory exercises). Teachers and students may sometimes try
to emphasize their fidelity to tradition, but we have to recognize that fidelity is an
achievement, sometimes extraordinarily demanding, not inevitable. Apprenticeship is
not simply the transfer of a body of knowledge or the acquisition of an implicit structure
in practice; rather, apprenticeship is the joint cultivation of greater and greater skilful-
ness, the pursuit of idealized practice, and the disciplining of errors. Communities of
practice vary in the degree to which they demand stylistic or technical conformity. Even
quite similar performances among different practitioners, however, mask the diversity in
the developmental trajectories through which they have achieved expertise.
The methodological implications are that recognizing the complex dynamic of enskil-
ment, to borrow a term from Tim Ingold (2000: 416), including heterogeneity among
skilled indigenous practitioners, may adjust our expectations for what we achieve as
ethnographic apprentices. We do not need to argue that we have the same or identical
expertise as our subjects; they themselves have developed varied ways of being skilful.
We also do not need to achieve mastery in order to speak with authority. In some skilled
communities, complete expertise will simply be impossible for an ethnographer given
the commitment involved. Rather, we seek through apprenticeship to put ourselves inside
the social and practical machinery that facilitates developing expertise. We hope to
achieve, not mastery, but a more intimate knowledge of the paths that lead to mastery.
Our errors and misunderstandings in the field, like those of all novices, bring into action
186 Qualitative Research 15(2)

local corrective mechanisms. By becoming an apprentice, the ethnographer becomes a

familiar sort of problem for his or her subjects and experiences intimately the develop-
mental forces that, in some cases, will produce expertise.

Apprenticeship as social inclusion

Anthropologist Michael Agar (1996) likened the ethnographer to a professional stran-
ger, highlighting that the occupation demanded closing the gap with the unfamiliar,
approaching new ways of life and entering a community as an outsider. One of the great
challenges to ethnographic fieldwork is the simple problem that non-participating
observer is not an appropriate role in some social settings. Ethnographers may face a
real challenge explaining what they are doing and then finding some acceptable position
in social interaction from which to conduct their research. Sometimes, the result borders
on the comical, as our subjects have to find ways of making sense of the incompetence
of what appear, at first glance, to be otherwise normal adults (albeit odd looking or
strangely dressed, in some cases). Apprenticeship settings are ideal contexts in which to
gain entry into a community and provide a meaningful position for the researcher and
research agenda, something that many ethnographic projects struggle to find (Downey,
2002: 490505; see also Wacquant, 2011; Wolcott, 1999). Bodily arts, Downey else-
where observes (2005: 205), provide sites where an ethnographers collaborators may
already be skilled at teaching apprentices to perceive and behave in culturally appropri-
ate ways.
For example, in her study of north Indian kathak dance, Dalidowicz found that she
was immediately accepted, even treated as a participant insider in her new field site in
India through her connection to her guru in North America, Pandit Chitresh Das; their
association promptly opened channels of communication. In an artistic community
where status derived from affiliation to a guru and lineage, training under a well-known
guru provided an instantly legitimate identity. Within the dance lineage, shared status as
students generated a kin-like relationship, denoted by use of dede or sister; fellow stu-
dents felt a duty to share their gurus teachings with the ethnographer-apprentice. In most
cases, the authors found that practical apprenticeship was the only means to gain access
to and participate in these communities.
As Wacquant (2005: 459) argues, in defending his own fieldwork on boxing against
critics accusations that he unduly generalized from the Woodlawn Boys Club, any
single intensive apprenticeship is a particular case of the possible.4 Although some
apprentice positions are chosen for their typicality, our choices were driven instead by
the sense Wacquant describes of targeting: a particular configuration of factors, rather
than any claim to representativeness. Atypical groups may be chosen precisely because
of their significance or another advantage they provide. For example, Downey chose to
embed primarily in the most ideologically sophisticated Afrocentric capoeira group; that
was the only way to access the wary, controversial organization, but affiliation also gen-
erated debate in the broader community of practice. His association with the unusual
Afrocentric group, coupled with his anomalous willingness to play at other schools
(anomalous for the closed group), provoked rival practitioners to engage with him; the
researcher provided a rare chance for outsiders to play against a group member and to
Downey et al. 187

debate their ideas directly. Downeys position as an apprentice, even to a rival teacher,
created a meaningful local identity with which his subjects knew how to interact (see
Downey, 2005).
The choice of a group, lineage or school in which to embed oneself, then, needs to be
both pragmatic and strategic. Access to a desirable target may mean that an apprentice-
researcher must be willing to endure hardship or curtailed freedom in order to get close
to a particular teaching tradition.5 Mason, for example, only used apprenticeship-based
methods in part of his research. In West Java, he accepted the conditions of apprentice-
ship to facilitate data collection (Mason, 2008). Specifically, Mason lived and trained
under the widely respected Pak Haji Uho Holidin, and the affiliation gave him a clear
role at pencak silat events. In contrast, when Mason moved to West Sumatra to continue
his research, the strict initiation rites required to work with a single guru there would
have been too limiting; in this context, attending performances of competing Minangkabau
pencak silat groups would have been met with suspicion and reticence.
Apprenticeship-based research can be de-contextualizing as its tight ethnographic and
analytical focus on skill acquisition may make it difficult to follow practitioners outside
the studio, gym, dojo or training setting. Relationships based on apprenticeship may be
circumscribed by the context of practice, and a community of practice may dissolve in
the intervals between training sessions or performances. Although we know our subjects
in practice settings, commenting upon their family lives, occupations or domestic worlds
may be much more difficult. Whole portions of the local population may be excluded
from the ethnography because the community of practice specifically insulates training
from outsiders. This tight ethnographic focus and social isolation can make certain kinds
of sociological or hermeneutical analysis particularly challenging. While linking the
empirical field of observation to macrosocial factors or institutions, like social classes or
political systems, is always a risky analytical leap, doing so when the environment spe-
cifically seeks to exclude them can be especially fraught.

Apprenticeship and interpersonal power

Apprentice-ethnographers assume social roles, at least partially, that are already estab-
lished in their respective communities of practice. But this fluid integration imposes its
own set of constraints. Participation through apprenticeship means social subordination,
especially at novice levels of expertise. All the authors were students, like any other, and
were dependent on our gurus and teachers for ongoing access to our object of study. At the
same time, we were subject to the local obligations of discipleship. Each of us became an
active player in the hierarchical relationships that constituted teacherstudent affiliations
and structures of legitimacy. Being foreign academics accorded relatively little privilege
in our respective communities of practice (paradoxically, having foreign students some-
times increased the status of the teacher in relation to his or her peers). In fact, because the
ethnographer depends so heavily upon the teacher for the viability of the project, the
apprentice-researcher may be more docile than other disciples, more vulnerable to arbi-
trary authority or unreasonable demands because ones research is at stake. Unlike the
conventional view of ethnographersubject relations as privileging the educated outsider,
or at least granting the ethnographer a degree of independence, the masterdisciple
188 Qualitative Research 15(2)

relationship necessarily constrains the researcher. For example, Downey found that most
capoeira practitioners demonstrated no interest in academic qualifications. On the con-
trary, legitimacy derived strictly from the capoeira roda in the community; practitioners
had long resisted outside authority, especially as a result of Afrocentric assertions that
foreign, white researchers were inherently disadvantaged in understanding black arts. One
informant intentionally sought to humiliate Downey in a training session only two weeks
after he arrived, leading to a broken wrist that severely hampered initial field research.
While competency did not guarantee access, demonstrating commitment to learning
certainly helped. The requirement meant not only steadfast dedication to practice and
technical improvement, but also devotion to our teachers. Limits on with whom we stud-
ied and where we could observe emerged out of our affiliations with particular masters
or schools. Dalidowicz, for instance, found initial research plans derailed by the require-
ments of the artistic tradition: the cultural particularity of the gurushishya (teacher
student) relationship in kathak precluded studying other lineages, effectively requiring
her to study a single guru. The pre-eminence of lineage meant that a broad survey of the
dance field was unacceptable. Loyalty to the lineage, norms of respect, as well as the
requirement of everyday training made it almost impossible practically to observe, let
alone study at other institutions.
In Downeys case, attempts to research at multiple schools were controversial though
not forbidden, but eventually proved unsustainable. Although he initially resisted the
social norms of apprenticeship, over time, Downey was disciplined into community
standards and achieved a compromise: although he played in other schools much to
the consternation of his teacher he abandoned training with any other figure. This
locally-specific arrangement was acceptable to his teacher and other mestres alike
although, in practice, he was still accused of insufficient loyalty when it was to his teach-
ers tactical advantage. Apprentice ethnographers must continually balance the require-
ments of loyalty with their own research agendas.
In all of our cases, the reciprocity of learning relationships meant that we all had to
fulfil a variety of obligations. Full membership often relied on service. We were expected
to assist with anything from set design, prop building, instrument making, archival work,
translating, and photography and audiovisual documentation to the most mundane
chores, such as cleaning the academy or teachers house, setting up for public events or
basic maintenance tasks. While Dalidowicz found her transition into the community
facilitated by her peers sense of duty to teach her, she soon discovered this obligation
was reciprocal: she was expected to teach novices without remuneration as a condition
of apprenticeship. This acceptance of our qualification to teach constituted a valuable
confirmation that our knowledge of the arts was growing all of us found the demand
gratifying but reciprocity meant that we were sometimes required to spend our time
transmitting the tradition that we would have preferred to be studying more deeply.
Reciprocity with host communities is nothing new for fieldworkers, but the requirements
of full membership as an apprentice often add heightened expectations or duties specifi-
cally ordained to remind us of our lowly status. An apprentice cannot choose how or
when to reciprocate. Although frustrating, even exhausting at times, these demands
helped us to more clearly see the comprehensive social formation of disciples, a process
that likely would have been concealed from us had we not become apprentices.
Downey et al. 189

Performing artists like Mestre Moraes, Pak Haji Uho Holidin and Pandit Das were
public figures, concerned about their images, especially about advancing their own
vision for their arts. Controversial figures in their communities, student loyalty was an
especially fraught issue. Downey, for example, exited the field before a wave of defec-
tions among Moraes students led to the formation of several new splinter organizations.
While we remained students, our masters knew we were also writing dissertations,
thereby creating a historical record of their work. They invested effort in seeking to influ-
ence our accounts. They suggested research topics, or sought to censor or direct what we
wrote. Put that in your dissertation, we were told repeatedly.
Deep inter-subjective entanglements in the field complicated what we were willing to
say and write. For example, the particularities of the gurushishya relationship, where
learning is predicated on complete submission, forestalled the possibility of commenting
critically on her guru for Dalidowicz. Downey had to steadfastly avoid discussing his
analysis of some dubious but ideologically important historical claims about capoeira or
risk precipitating an insoluble conflict. While these restrictions imposed a set of con-
straints on public expression, they also encouraged deep immersion in emic perspectives,
offering insights otherwise unavailable, including into the formation and preservation of
orthodoxy within these traditions. The social requirement to stifle scepticism and dissent
at an early stage likely forced us to more deeply investigate practitioners perspectives
with a kind of pragmatic agnosticism.
Each of us developed individual tactics for dealing with our teachers influence, overt
and implicit. All authors found writing in popular forums newspapers, magazines or
online provided a venue to advocate our teachers artistic or political visions. Popular
writing allowed us to leave scholarly pursuits to the side, in a sense, outside the field
relationship, and gave us flexibility to pursue a more independent scholarly agenda in
less public venues.
Not surprisingly, accountability to our teachers continued long after we left the field.
As future embodiments of the tradition, we bore a certain responsibility to maintain the
tradition and favourably represent the arts, not only in what we wrote, but also in perfor-
mance. We became living examples. Even today Mason still contacts Pak Haji Uho
Holidin to ask permission to perform Sundanese choreography in Australia. In addition
to writing about these performance arts, Mason also became a representative of Sundanese
culture in Australia. Research was not only documented in words, but also was per-
formed regularly as choreography.

Apprenticeship as practice, and practical issues

Recent discussions of ethnographic note-taking have highlighted the layered nature of
writing in fieldwork, with different sorts of notes and stages in the process of transform-
ing sociocultural field research into a public written representation (Emerson et al., 1995;
Sanjek, 1990). Apprenticeship poses an almost unavoidable obstacle to certain sorts of
note-taking practices. The difficulty of simultaneously being a practitioner and taking
notes was driven home for Downey when he discovered one evening after a training ses-
sion, exhausted, that his sweat-soaked practice clothes had smeared his notes, making
many illegible, and even warped the stiff cardboard cover on his notebook. The metaphor
190 Qualitative Research 15(2)

of the sweat-drenched commitment to participation erasing other forms of knowledge

and distorting the whole framework of ethnography was only too obvious.
The simple fact is that note-taking in apprenticeship-based research differs from note-
book-in-hand fieldwork. These variations occur within all fieldwork projects, as taking
notes while events happen is not always practical or desirable. The traditional methodo-
logical advice, to write down everything you see, as soon as possible, can be manifestly
absurd in the apprenticeship-setting, especially in practice-intensive environments where
the ethnographer may be considered in training for hours every day without interrup-
tion. Dalidowicz found that intensive periods of training with her guru, where students
ideally eat, sleep and breathe the art while living in the masters house, meant that every
minute of the day was viewed as an opportunity to learn. Finding opportunities to record
fieldnotes relied on craftiness, taking advantage of periods when the guru rested, extend-
ing bathroom breaks, and finding opportune moments to record key ideas. Apprenticeship-
based research demands its own sorts of rigorous, systematic, conscientious inscription
practices, often retrospective, sporadic, or otherwise opportunistic.
At times, our roles as ethnographic observers and practicing participants conflicted.
When they did, we usually set down our notebooks, tape recorders or video cameras,
opting instead to join in the action. We trusted that what was learned by participating was
more important and elusive than anything that could be recorded passively. This ten-
dency to privilege participation certainly reduced the volume of material that we col-
lected. Some days we lamented the missed photographs, unfilmed performances, and
absence of recordings from which to transcribe verbatim quotes; but joining in deepened
our relationships with other practitioners and our own understandings. Because some of
the genres we studied were already well documented, the choice to participate was easier
than in situations where a practice seemed particularly at risk or undocumented; Mason,
for example, shifted his research strategy when studying rural West Sumatran forms of
Indonesian fight-dancing, considered in danger from the growing dominance of national-
ist styles of the martial art, so much so that some performers were uneasy or even
retreated to partial secrecy to protect their local forms.
When we did opt to observe or to video, we also felt the lost opportunities and the
temporary distance it introduced into our relationships. Downey found it virtually impos-
sible to videotape performances, except at special events where other participants also
videotaped. On the other hand, Mason made use of two static cameras: one to film danc-
ers and the other to film the musical accompaniment. Static cameras limited the flexibil-
ity of the audio-visual documentation, but the footage facilitated recall and later analysis.
Viewing the footage in post-production created a new experience in its own right, one
that had to be framed by skilled analysis and description (see Pink, 2007). Despite short-
comings in filming, post-production in collaboration with local experts in the field per-
mitted initial analysis to be shaped by insiders; the researcher and experts were able to
discuss events while observing and editing the footage. Skilled use of audio-visual
recording was useful when note-taking was restricted.

Apprenticeship and types of knowledge

Perhaps the most important shift that occurs when the ethnographer adopts the role of
apprentice is that communication between researcher and subject changes.
Downey et al. 191

Various pragmatic channels of teaching and feedback open up between the researcher-
student and informants, now transformed into teachers. The incompetence of the
researcher-student becomes a shared problem, and a range of pedagogic intervention is
brought to bear on the ethnographers emerging competence. We are able to study what
Wacquant (2011: 86) called the pedagogical work because that work is being done on
and with us. When the researcher becomes an apprentice, he or she becomes a well-
defined local problem rather than a potentially unprecedented interrogatory challenge.
Teachers are called upon, not to explain or interpret what they usually do, but to put
their pedagogical expertise to work directly on the researcher, and indirectly on the
ethnographic project. When we ask our informants to teach us, rather than asking them
about their culture, we ask them to use their expertise in familiar ways (but see Rice,
1995: 268). We can see, hear and feel the workings of the social pedagogical machine
from within, noticing how demanding different portions of training are, recognizing
how practices come together to shape expertise.6
Apprenticeship inserts the ethnographer into a social position where being inept is
appropriate, as is striving for greater understanding. In fact, our ineptness as learners has
proven useful to elicit critical reflection from our informants. As students we were con-
stantly subject to the scrutiny of teachers and peers, reminded whether we were incorrect
and guided to greater competence. The demands on teacher, master and coach are often
so similar to performance analysis that criticism makes them potential collaborators in
our research, not just as subjects but also as para-ethnographers (see Downey, 2008).
The authorities in these contexts monitor our pragmatic grasp of the subtleties of prac-
tice, often making explicit the cultural criteria we seek to understand. As teachers moni-
tored our development as students, they were also monitoring our advancing understanding
as fieldworkers. Our ineptness became an object of practical concern and a provocation
for cultural reflection.
The ethnographic opportunity of ineptness is especially pronounced when the kinaes-
thetic style of the researcher, including his or her previous bodily knowledge, is mark-
edly different from the discipline being studied. The student-ethnographers own
distinctiveness becomes the object of the teachers interventions; sometimes, we are
inept in such unprecedented ways that we flush out inchoate or tacit knowledge in our
informants. Learning abhinaya, or expression, in kathak dance brought into focus for
Dalidowicz the culturally specific ways of performing emotion absent in the bodies of
novices, especially foreign students. Embodied differences among students due to gen-
eration, ethnicity, social class and regional backgrounds made visible the unspoken ele-
ments of a class-specific cultural aesthetic of Indian femininity. Students attempts to
depict archetypal characters from well-known Indian epics like the Ramayana were sub-
ject to intense scrutiny, by both teachers and audience members, for their apparent differ-
ences from an idealized model. The instructors attempts to fix what he saw highlighted
some of the most difficult-to-reach, inchoate aspects of the aesthetics of embodied cul-
ture. Far from being invisible to the instructor, embodied differences were thrown into
high relief in performance, commented upon explicitly, and subjected to correction. Put
bluntly, in apprenticeship-based research, the embodied difference of the researcher is a
problem that instructors seek to fix, sometimes to their exasperation, but often in a way
that provides unparalleled comparative insights, even if it can be extremely uncomfort-
able to be under such scrutiny (see, for example, Rice, 1995: 26970). John Blacking
192 Qualitative Research 15(2)

(1973: 214), an ethnomusicologist who worked among the Venda of South Africa, simi-
larly felt that learning to perform was a crucial research technique and believed research-
ers had to participate and invite criticism of [their] performance in order to confirm
their practical knowledge.
In addition to technical know-how, apprenticeship also required an embodied under-
standing of the sensibilities, behaviours, values and shared cultural assumptions of the
broader community; apprenticeship includes instruction in how to be a proper, socially-
appropriate person (see Bryant, 2005; Coy, 1989; Marchand, 2008; also Stephens and
Delamont, 2009 on technical and tacit learning). One of the key insights suggested by
Lave and Wengers (1991) model of legitimate peripheral participation in situated
learning, is that apprenticeship is, in part, the slow social movement from a position of
peripheral acceptance in a community toward deeper and deeper integration, whether or
not the learner is an ethnographer.7 Our teachers intervened in our personal formation
too, as did our peers; like other students, we underwent a more deliberate shaping of the
self, whereby one empersons a body of knowledge that also contains a set of values,
both ethical and aesthetic (Bryant, 2005: 234). Outside of the classroom, Dalidowicz
found herself reprimanded for breaches in etiquette, for example, failing to adequately
offer the appropriate namaskar, a bowed gesture with palms together, to pay respect to
her seniors. As experts gave explicit instruction on otherwise taken-for-granted aspects
of their culture, embodied understandings found their way into discussion, opening up
new channels of communication and reflection. But more intimate fieldwork required
practical mastery of these standards, or the researchers were seen to be insufficiently
respectful to deserve further instruction.
In our own fieldwork, we have found that the reverse move from explicit explana-
tion to embodied skill similarly has a salutary effect on communication. Instead of
communicating about the art, because of our apprentice positions, subjects sought to
communicate the art itself, its practical foundation and aesthetic subtleties. Downey
found that in normal interviews, subjects often gave explanations borrowed from well-
known histories, political criticisms or academic theories from African Diaspora studies.
In the Pelourinho Capoeira Angola Group, for instance, Downey discovered that subjects
frequently resorted to contemporary theories of Black cultural resistance, from Robert
Farris Thompsons Afrocentric aesthetics, Paulo Freires pedagogy of the oppressed or
from the pop psychology of self-actualization. The group held seminars where students
in the group also doing postgraduate studies in history, sociology or other fields offered
sophisticated analyses of capoeira from their disciplines; the rest of the group quickly
adopted these explanations and produced them in response to explicit questions.
Whether or not these academic theories were accurate, they were largely irrelevant to
day-to-day practice. For example, while the group had adopted a Bantu-centric critique
of Yoruba (or Nago) cultural dominance within Afro-Brazilian culture (the privileging of
cultural expressions brought by slaves from the area of modern Nigeria rather than
Angola), this critique had little effect on the transmission of musical styles or the suc-
cessful execution of techniques. In formal interviews, the current theoretical interests of
the group dominated individual reflection more than in instruction. Shifting our relation-
ships by becoming an apprentice produced more experience near discussion and
analysis.
Downey et al. 193

In kathak training, formal explanations of the Indian theory of rasa, which takes emo-
tion as central to performance, repeated convention inscribed in several key texts, like
the Natya Sastra, a Sanskrit treatise on dance, music and drama. The actual teaching of
rasa was far more diffuse and idiosyncratic, relying on a combination of students per-
sonal histories, local understandings of emotion, and some adherence to the expressive
style and authority of the individual guru. For Mason, only apprenticeship and the infor-
mal conversations that punctuated pencak silat training sessions revealed the tension
between the project to impose a standardized nationalist form of the martial art and
regional variants. While taking a break for a cigarette, a regional teacher might discuss
his frustration that his own local techniques were not included in the rigidly codified
forms upon which students would be judged in state-sponsored competitions.
To put it simply, interviews often produced circular confirmation of academic theories
that our informants, too, knew well. Explicit questions provoked formulaic recitation of
accepted orthodox thinking, including traditional authoritative texts, or surprisingly shal-
low accounts, with the dominant framing that government officials or other authorities
had successfully instilled. In contrast, the teaching context itself was rich with a com-
pletely different set of concerns, often extremely sophisticated and perceptive in the
discrimination of correct practice.

Cultural learning as rediscovery

Whereas explicit explanations of practice sometimes proved to be quite uniform, appren-
ticeship-based practical research revealed that bodily learning, in contrast, was a con-
stant process of re-discovery or reinvention that produced (and in some cases, weeded
out) chronic variation. Often, we refer to the learning of physical arts as transmission,
but close study of settings where individuals learn draws our attention to the fact that a
student does not always learn exactly what a teacher knows. Or, more accurately in a
discussion of practice, an apprentice does not always do what his or her teacher does (see
Lock, 1980 on guided reinvention in language). Capoeiristas, for example, widely rec-
ognize that the style of the apprentice will not be identical to the masters, and they
openly discuss this variation, including how to adapt individuals to the art, as well as the
art to each individual. Training offers opportunities to develop skills; it does not inject an
unvarying code or implant a uniform body of tacit knowledge in the student. As Tim
Ingold suggests:

What each generation contributes to the next, then, are not rules and schemata for the production
of appropriate behaviour, but rather the specific conditions of development under which
successors, growing up in a social world, acquire their own embodied skills and dispositions.
(2000: 387)

Even in the same classes, what each student discovers is distinct.

This account of culture as variable, independently-developed skills rather than
shared code or uniform mental content suggests that innovation and instability are
endemic in skill development. In fact, Ejgil Jespersen (1997: 183) suggests that appren-
ticeship (he discusses sports) almost inevitably has centrifugal creative tendencies
194 Qualitative Research 15(2)

because individuals continually endeavour to improve their own performance and often
draw on multiple role models of expertise. The more skill-like culture is (the less we treat
it as explicit code or text, for example), the more apparent uniformity itself begs explana-
tion. If guided rediscovery is inherently centrifugal, generating constant variation, cul-
tural institutions must exist that curb the tendency toward fragmentation in any practical
discipline. In an apprenticeship setting, we can see more clearly the institutional, struc-
tural and functional centripetal forces the rituals, aesthetic standards and genre demands
that channel endemic creativity and variation because the ethnographer him- or herself
is subject to the disciplining forces that maintain some degree of uniformity. As ethnog-
raphers, we must recognize that some of the corrections we receive are themselves recur-
ring interventions to bend practice toward normative forms.
Calling bodily practices like kathak, pencak silat or capoeira a culture or a habitus,
if either of these implies a uniform and unchanging body of knowledge transferred from
one generation to the next, has a tendency to conceal the constant innovation inherent in
the rediscovery of the same practice, as when each student invents anew how to do a
bananeira, or the capoeira handstand (Downey, 2005).8 We would argue that the mode
of transmission may actually make physical practices, especially those not bolstered by
strong disciplining, centripetal institutions, more liable to rapid innovation and change.
Kathak dancers, for example, drill basic techniques like the heel-anchored pirouettes
known as chakkars; sequences of up to one-hundred-eight turns are repeated, literally, ad
nauseum. But repetitive sequences are more about each individual finding better and bet-
ter ways to perform a technique like a chakkar and develop their own method. Students
are not so much creating an exact replica, but rather adapting to the demands of the task
(Bernstein, 1967: 134). In fact, the more strictly standards are observed in an established
tradition like kathak, the greater are the improvisational demands placed on individual
performers to get it right (Hallam and Ingold, 2007: 5). While teachers parse the tech-
nique into manageable sections, outlining starting and ending positions, and try to elabo-
rate the how-to of turning, becoming adept is a matter of problem-solving as we find
creative ways for our bodies to produce skilled action.
Even at the level of basic technique, complete conformity was elusive. Dalidowiczs
teacher, Pandit Das, readily pointed out that his adept students did not dance as he did.
For example, his dynamic of turning is markedly different to his students, and part of his
skill as an instructor was in helping students to find their own distinctive solutions within
the bounds of the tradition. Positing a fixed body of knowledge, wholly transferable from
one generation to the next, contradicts what practitioners themselves say: their artistic
culture demands constant adaptation, even to support continuity.
In fact, the close proximity to practice inherent in apprenticeship-based research
quickly reveals the lack of uniformity in practice, the subtle variations that become more
evident the more one becomes proficient. In our experience, as our own expertise grew,
we became better able to perceive the variation in spite of the commonalities in style and
practice within groups; and we found our apprentice-colleagues also growing connois-
seurs and critics of variation. That is, once one is a student, subject to criticism for stylis-
tic flaws and unable to precisely emulate ones role models, the fiction that a discipline
imposes itself without limit on individuals becomes impossible to maintain. Learning to
appreciate variety, or struggling mightily to conform to stylistic expectations, reveal to
Downey et al. 195

the apprentice-researcher that discrepancy, variation, and even unintentional innovation

are inherent to the learning process.

Acquiring cultural proficiency as method?

As an ethnographer lives in an unfamiliar place, he or she inevitably becomes accultured,
although this acculturation process is liable to inconsistencies, erratic pacing and idio-
syncratic lacunae of all sorts. The ethnographer who studies local learning processes by
engaging in those same processes, however, is necessarily involved in a reflexive project
because his or her own experience is part of the research (Roth, 2012: 2056). This inher-
ent reflexivity has led some critics to suggest that practitioners of apprenticeship-based
research are engaged in what Fine (2004: 505), discussing Loc Wacquants (2004)
research in a South Chicago boxing gym, called reflexive autoethnography. Wacquant
(2005, 2011) vigorously countered these arguments (as we would, too), but the criticism
seems to dog apprenticeship-based accounts. Downeys (2005) manuscript on capoeira,
for example, was judged by one anonymous reviewer to represent the worst excesses of
reflexivity in anthropology, in spite of the fact that Downey chose a representational
strategy that featured his own identity less than Wacquants exemplary work.
With apprenticeship-based ethnography, the researcher is poised on a rhetorical
knifes edge. Ones own experience provides crucial ethnographic information and ana-
lytical insight, but the object of knowledge is really anothers culture. The ethnographer
him- or herself is an ethnographic tool, but the ethnographer is not the research object.
Although the analytical method needs to be reflective, the writing must not be exces-
sively reflexive (see also Delamont, 2009). Ones experience sheds light on practical
knowledge, but that experience can become exaggerated, so that it seems to be the sub-
ject: ethnography as autobiography. In our opinion, excessive rhetorical self-reference,
rather than analytical reflexivity, can undermine the credibility of the account, confound-
ing the method with the research object.
We first want to emphasize that there is no trump position in the debate about reflexiv-
ity. No matter what balance one achieves, some readers will find an author focuses
excessively on his or her own experience, while others will likely feel that there is too
little reflexive self-disclosure. The attempt to bring a more lived tone and texture to eth-
nographic text requires more patience with each other as writers. We are asking ethno-
graphic authors to attempt a bit more artistry, to endow their texts with creativity and
accept personal risk. We should not be hyper-critical if all ethnographers do not demon-
strate identical aesthetic preferences or always succeed with such difficult ethnographic
experiments.
However, we also want to note that recognizing the inherent variation involved in
learning helps us to explain the role of reflexivity in apprenticeship-based research: we
interrogate what we are learning, not because we are necessarily developing knowledge
or skill identical to our informants. In fact, other apprentices are not themselves acquir-
ing uniform knowledge or practical skills. Instead, we must be self-reflexive because we
too have become the targets of pedagogical work, and the strains and frustrations we
feel help to illuminate the mechanisms brought to bear on the novice, the rigours of prac-
tice, and the exhilaration of self-transformation.
196 Qualitative Research 15(2)

Noting the inherent variation in practitioners ways of being expert (or failing to
achieve full expertise) also provides us with a much better explanation of why, just
because we are willing as apprentice-ethnographers to strive for expertise, the quality of
our research does not depend upon our excellence as practitioners. If the research object
is the learning process, passing through this process too quickly or too easily would argu-
ably lead to less comprehensive understanding of how the social machinery of training
functions. Likewise, our most articulate informants were not the most virtuoso perform-
ers; often, the best indigenous analysts, commentators and coaches combine a degree of
competence with sufficient frustration that they have more thoroughly analysed the dis-
cipline (and their own failings). Technical and practical accomplishments in a field of
practice do not necessarily translate into either ethnographic or reflexive insightfulness.

Conclusion: ethnography as apprenticeship

In fact, the authors all had little choice whether or not to engage in apprenticeship-based
ethnography; inclusion in the community of practice, in our judgement, depended upon
active participation. The assertion by Mestre Moraes that the ethnographer was like
every other student and similar declarations elsewhere provided a research niche, at
once rich and yet tightly bounded. Subject to the same socializing mechanisms as other
novices, ethnographers find their fieldwork interpretations constantly scrutinized in
practice by their informants. These methods also provide a readily understandable posi-
tion for the researcher in what may be, to our collaborators, a profoundly alien academic
enterprise. As Fibiger (2010: 30) argues, the anthropologists analyses are constantly
shaped in collaboration with informants in the field by discussing situations and events
while observing these informants and speaking with them about the observations.
Depending on local expectations, apprenticeship-based methods can generate almost
overwhelming obligations. Shared practice fundamentally changes how we communi-
cate, and yet the demands of practice can prevent us, at times, from doing even the most
basic ethnographic tasks.
The corporeal sensibility we developed through apprenticeship served as the basis
from which to evaluate what we heard, read and observed. Anthropologist Maurice
Bloch (1998) suggests that most ethnographies are based on similar forms of apprentice-
ship and non-discursive knowledge, as was the case in his fieldwork in Madagascar:

I am fairly sure that the way I proceed in giving an account of the Malagasy cultures I study is
by looking for facts, and especially for statements, that confirm what I already know to be right
because I know how to live efficiently with these people . Like other anthropologists, I then
pretend that the linguistic confirmations of these understandings, which I subsequently obtain
from what my informants say, are the basis of what I understand, but this is not really so. My
knowledge was established prior to these linguistic confirmations. (Bloch, 1998: 17; emphasis
in the original)

Enculturation happens to all fieldworkers. Apprenticeship processes are not unique to

ethnography in performance traditions, since, as Bloch describes, some kind of cultural
apprenticeship occurs in all field sites. Processes of culture-making are, however, given
Downey et al. 197

a privileged stance in learning environments like the ones we write about, where indi-
viduals progress is actively analysed, explained and guided by teachers as students
move toward the shared goal of cultural competency. The particularities of apprentice-
ship as method highlight shared problems for all ethnographers, bringing into focus the
limits and opportunities generated by a method that requires balancing immersion and
participation with systematic observation.
But perhaps more importantly, apprenticeship-based research helps us to better see
the mechanisms of enculturation, the processes that shape individuals until they achieve
competence. Apprenticeship problematizes expertise because, for the novice, gaining
expertise is a problem.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like especially to thank the various gurus and masters who welcomed them into a
range of arts, across three continents. Although there are too many teachers and fellow students to
thank, we would be especially remiss if we did not single out Pandit Das, Mestres Moraes and Joo
Grande, and Pak Haji Uho Holidin as well as the late Frederico Abreu for special recognition. Thanks
also to the members of the Department of Anthropology of Macquarie University, who have
responded to and commented upon the various ethnographic projects that contributed to this article.

Funding
The Macquarie Research Excellent Scholarship fund supported fieldwork for both Dalidowicz and
Mason.

Notes
1. For a discussion of two-handed ethnography of capoeira, a cooperative project in which one
ethnographer participates extensively and the other predominantly observes, see Stephens
and Delamont (2006) and Delamont and Stephens (2008). Their collaboration highlights
opportunities provided by both approaches.
2. For readers unfamiliar with these genres, the following are links where videos of the vari-
ous genres can be viewed: Capoeira (Capoeira Angola style): http://youtu.be/pxxr2zjospU;
Kathak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsvREisdbUA; and West Javanese Pencak
Silat:http://youtu.be/T99HhXIeD4o.
3. John Miller Chernoffs (1979) account of West African drumming makes a compelling argu-
ment for apprenticeship as a research method, as does Loc Wacquants (2004) account of
boxing (see also Desjarlais, 1992: 335; Friedson, 1996; Stoller and Olkes, 1987). James
Fernandez and Michael Herzfeld (1998) and Timothy Jenkins (1994) offer theoretical
defenses of apprenticeship research; and Jean Lave (e.g., 1977, 1988) has been one of the
most passionate advocates of studying apprenticeship as a form of education in anthropology.
Barz and Cooley (1997) discuss apprenticeship as research method specifically in perfor-
mance genres.
4. Wacquant borrows the expression from Gaston Bachelard.
5. See also Roth and Bowen (2001) on the physical hardships of fieldwork.
6. Developing specific forms of expertise relied on a shifting engagement of the senses, includ-
ing sight, but also and especially our auditory and tactile senses. Teachers themselves engaged
different sensory approaches in aiding students learning, for example, physically moving
a students body into place. Apprentices too learned to attend to the senses, for example,
198 Qualitative Research 15(2)

listening to the berimbau, a stringed musical bow used in capoeira, or the tabla drum used
to accompany kathak, in order to hear the dance. See for example, Downey (2002), Stoller
(1989) and Sparkes (2009), who draw our attention to the sensual dynamics of apprenticeship.
7. Lave and Wengers concepts have been extensively used and critiqued, see for example
special issues of Teaching and Teacher Education 20(1) (2010) and Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 16(s1) (2010). Responding to criticism of their model as being
overly static, Lave stresses the changing and dynamic nature of communities of practice in
her later work (see, for example, Lave, 1996: 150).
8. Stephen Turner (1994) offers a devastating critique of theories of practice in the social sci-
ences that posit a socially shared body of implicit assumptions, presuppositions, embodied
knowledge or transmittable dispositions. This brief discussion of the centrifugal nature of
capoeira apprenticeship was originally inspired by his work (see also Turner, 2002).

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Author biographies
Greg Downey is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Australia. His
research examines the biological and psychological effects of intensive training in sports, such as
capoeira, mixed martial arts and rugby. He serves on the board of the Centre for Elite Performance,
Expertise and Training (CEPET) at Macquarie University and writes extensively at the weblog,
PLOS Neuroanthropology.
Monica Dalidowicz is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Carleton University, Canada. Her
research explores the ways people make sense of the world through movement, sensory engage-
ment, and bodily experience.
Paul H Mason is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research with
whom he is conducting ethnographic research to facilitate a tuberculosis screening program in
Vietnam. His other research interests extend to dance anthropology, ethnomusicology and
neuroanthropology.