Dancing Histories: Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo

John C. McCall's Dancing Histories, Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2000, is an ethnography of the Ohafia Igbo of Nigeria built around the war dance and the ancestral and funerary practice it belongs to, examining how rival villages tell competing versions of shared history through the performance itself. McCall conducted direct fieldwork within Ohafia communities and frames his method explicitly as heuristic, using the dance as a tool for uncovering historical understanding rather than treating performance as mere illustration of history already known. Its strength is that methodological self-awareness, showing how oral and performed history actually gets contested and transmitted rather than assuming a single fixed village account. Its limit is that it is focused specifically on Ohafia practice, so a claim about Igbo funerary or ancestral practice more broadly, across other Igbo subgroups, needs a source with that wider scope.