Exploring Cultural Dance as a Medium for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication in Medicine: The Aseemkala Model

Abstract

Dance has been a vehicle for cultural communication and socialization for centuries—a medium where action and understanding meet, and cultural rites, such as birth, death, and marriage, are celebrated and passed on generation to generation (Stevenson 2019). The world of biomedicine and medical humanities has long worked with dance movement therapy—a field developed in the 1940s—to address biopsychosocial integration to address illness clinically, with notable improvement in illness management. This chapter explores the use of dance, specifically traditional dance, to offer a diverse and patient-centred approach to teaching cultural awareness to medical students and physicians-in-training. Applying the traditional dance framework to clinical settings can enhance cross-cultural communication, identify barriers or unexplored areas of healthcare access for cultural minorities in medicine, and improve public health or narrative medicine efforts through this new applied health humanities tool. The framework—the Aseemkala Model—also allows for focused discussions around a clear structure to incorporate a wide variety of cultural and traditional art forms into medical settings. Through traditional dance study and exchange, improved cultural safety and patient-driven cross-cultural communication can be achieved in medical settings.KeywordsDanceTraditional danceIllness managementNarrative medicineIndia, BuddhismCross-cultural communication