An Exercise in Applied Personal Anthropology

Abstract

This paper represents an attempt to raise three points with regard to the study of dance and social anthropology. First, I have stressed the importance of an anthropological perspective in contrast to other perspectives in connection with ethnographies of dance. Second, I have briefly outlined a few ontological and epistemological implications of treating social anthropology itself as a language-based, rather than as a Behavioural science. Third, I have only barely indicated the epistemological consequences involved in accepting the idea of a personal anthropology.In fact, it is the latter point which suffers most from the following brief treatment, for while the subject matter for a deeper analysis is present in this essay (i.e. the parts of texts of articles written before I read anthropology), it has mainly been subjected to a fairly standard anthropological critique. There are those who might say that this could have been done without the benefit of the idea of a personal anthropology.