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 individual's rediscovery or reinvention of skill, apprenticeship encourages our subjects to collaborate with us by allowing them to critique the ethnographer's performance and provide feedback in familiar, locally-meaningful ways.

Through a phenomenological account of apprenticeship in the North Indian dance form of kathak, I show how skills are adapted and changed through the ingenuity and innovation required in teaching to new generations of students. The traditional pedagogical model for learning in the Indian arts, the guru‐shishya parampara (master‐disciple relationship), has historically been based on imitative and repetitive pedagogies. Yet close examination reveals less conspicuous forms of creativity at work in the process of reproducing the tradition with fidelity; this improvisational work is further heightened in the demands of teaching in the diaspora. As teachers create opportunities for experiential learning, a spectrum of pedagogical tactics, scaffolding strategies, and coaching competencies are developed and accumulate as this tradition is passed on from one generation to the next. The pedagogical work in crafting fidelity can, in fact, produce its own kind of knowledge, which, ironically, can add new elements to the tradition in unexpected ways. In one unique case – the example of ‘kathak yoga’ – the pedagogical adaptations of kathak artist Pandit Chitresh Das elicited a creative response, a new scaffolding technique that would eventually be incorporated into the repertoire as a skill in itself. Pedagogical process, in this sense, was creative process.

This chapter undertakes a phenomenological investigation of the musicking and moving body that examines how North Indian kathak dancers apprehend sound through movement and simultaneously perceive movement through sound. While our senses can be described empirically as discrete entities, phenomenologically speaking, this is not how we experience the world. It is this entangled and undifferentiated aspect of sensory experience that is explored here through an ethnographic description of the teaching and learning of kathak dance. Kathak dancers are in fact musicians producing complex rhythmic patterns through vocal rhythms and the sound of their bare feet slapping rhythmically on the floor. Learning how to hear dance is a vital part of the process of sensory enskillment that occurs in the learning of this art form.