Anthropology and Dance Scholarship

Abstract

Research on dance is generally a multifaceted area. Only the sum of the results obtained in each area of studies will allow choreology, the knowledge of dance, to be established and developed. Anthropology of dance has a very specific position within choreology, which is defined by its aims and methods. The nature of anthropological research itself is based primarily on data obtained from living people. Thus there is the great advantage that dance may be viewed as part of a cultural process, within a living context, during field work. Also, the dance material itself may be recorded in its entirety, as a progression of changes in space and in time. Dance is a dynamic event and has no affinity to a series of static poses so often portrayed in dance books. Iconography, at its best, by portraying static poses taken out of the movement context, can obviously serve only as an additional source of information. Therefore it is imperative that the full dance texture should be secured during field research, on film, video tapes, and occasionally in pencil notes. It will thus provide the material for adequate transcriptions in full graphic movement notation. Transcriptions are essential in the further stages of analysis of collected data. No contemporary musicologist can rely solely on sound recordings he has to write down his music on paper for the purpose of analysis and study. Similarly, in research on dance, film and video tapes are only material-recording gadgets. Dance is a non-verbal idiom. Thus the texture of dance cannot be described verbally. Any attempt fails here. The description of impressions, though, gained when viewing dance, may certainly be an important source of information. However, it amounts to talking about or around a dance rather than truly describing it. It is, of course, possible to conduct research on dance centring our attention only on one of the many possible aspects, such as the social aspect of dance, and to confine ourselves to descriptive observations. In some cases the material is especially conducive to such treatment or is the sole aim of a particular study. However, conclusions and comments made from such a position do not allow us to identify a