Expanded Ethnography Notes on the Dialectics between Convergence and Expansion of the Ethnographic Field in the production of Supereverything*

This paper is the result of an extended research (2-year) in ethnographic representation and the enlargement of the field. It was written as a constructive reflection upon the review published in JRAI 26 (3): 689-690 by DYUTI A. of Paganopoulos (2018) In-Between Fiction and Non-Fiction, in which the reviewer rightly highlighted the lack of the edited anthology of essays in further showing how the "field" has changed (p. 690). The paper offers a theoretical analysis of Supereverything *, a live cinematic performance in the synthetic form of a musical gig and visual spectacle, produced by The Light Surgeons and British Council of Malaysia between 2011-2017. By looking at ethnography as a multi-sited and evolving field in the tradition of George Marcus and Michael Fischer, the paper returns to the cinematic concept of “expanded cinema” looking into current forms of expansion in audio-visual ethnographic representation (i.e. “expanded ethnography”). In doing so, it analyses the live cinematic performances of Supereverything * in terms of convergences, correspondences, and intermedial staging, all of which dialectically synthesize the expanded "field," as it emerges from within the world system (Marcus). In doing so, the paper discusses the aesthetical dialectics that produce the enlargement of the ethnographic field from a singular stage to a multiplicity of actors and stages ("fields") via staged interconnections made between intermedia technologies and social/bodily intersubjective relations, as they emerged via exploratory practices on and beyond the limits of the stage for the production of Supereverything*.