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Ethnographic Rendez-vous
to myself) the purpose of my being there. (Tango notes, May 25,
1999 )
Needless to say, during my first ethnotango incursions I was secretly
terrified at the prospect of becoming one of them, a want-to-be-
chosen tango practitioner committed to dancing well enough to be in-
vited to join the tango race. While stoically enduring the social pres-
sure to dance with my tango pals, I could have foreseen myself as a
suffering wallflower enduring the anticipated sense of rejection (for
not being asked to dance or for not being asked often), afraid of for-
getting that I was there to accomplish something else. As much as I
had been hypnotized by the ritualized sensual embraces that I had wit-
nessed in so many tango salons, I finally kept my itch to dance to my-
self and got ready to assume my role as a chaperone.
In the end, rather than being marginalized in the ballroom by re-
maining on the sidelines, like the protagonist in Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice ( 1999 ), I cautiously reversed the passive role of the anx-
ious waiting gal that would be eventually stigmatized if not chosen
by the male gaze. Instead of expecting to be asked to dance, I hoped
to be chosen to talk, a seeming oddity in a place where “conversing”
is often seen as nothing more than a failure to dance. Nevertheless,
both Austen’s waiting flowers and I shared this need to be accepted
within social milieus where women, more than men, are subjected to
subtle rules of inclusion and exclusion.
In addition, I often felt awkward when trying to identify potential
informants willing to share with me their everyday issues, including
details about their health problems. An uncomfortable task for me
was indeed to move from the spontaneous exchange of information
with my occasional companions to the arrangements for a longer in-
terview at a later time, as summarized in one of my journal’s entries:
Again today I found myself faced with blurred frontiers between
“real” life an fieldwork and felt unclear about my role. When I was
still feeling remorse for having tried to pull out information from
her too soon [referring to a potential informant], here she was sud-
denly bursting things for which I wish I had had a tape recorder
ready. She just got into telling me about her troubles, about how
