Rupturing Performer-Spectator Interaction

Audience-spectator-performer interactions are central to public events because they are meant to encourage interpersonal relations and collective sentiments in public spaces. This is particularly the case with the Olympics because their original purpose was to bring together performers and spectators from different parts of the globe. When surveillance procedures dominate the organization of the event, these interactions take on interesting forms. I became aware of these restricted relations while studying the Lillehammer Games of 1994 as part of a team of anthropologists. I shall draw attention to these interactions through methodology by trying to show how the organizational design of the Olympics as a global event and the strategies of surveillance put in place to ensure its success set specific conditions for fieldwork and hence affect the research process. More specifically I shall discuss how these conditions shape the questions that we are able to pose and the kind of data we are able to collect. When I studied the Winter Olympics in 1994 as member of a research team, I did not see surveillance as a research topic in its own right. I just found myself subject to the rules and regulations that surrounded the arrangement.