Reprise: On Dance Ethnography

Abstract

In 1991, when my essay, “On Dance Ethnography,” appeared in this journal, there was a small body of American research in dance that examined movement in cultural context (1). Since then, a radical shift has occurred in American dance scholarship. Cultural critique, with its attention to ethnicity, race, class, and gender, has permeated the academy, and dance historians have turned to sociocultural issues, blurring the boundaries between the sub-fields of dance. We now have a range of theories, methods, and case studies that address the cultural situatedness of dance and movement, a range reflected in the names applied to the subject: “dance ethnology,” “cultural studies in dance,” “ethnochoreology,” “performance studies,” “anthropology of dance,” and “anthropology of human movement.” While long-established paradigms continue to inspire work from structural, symbolic, and functional perspectives, two new trajectories have risen in ethnographic dance studies in this decade.One trajectory is sociopolitical; it draws on the rapidly developing ideas and language of cultural studies. Here we talk about dance in terms of the “socially constructed nature of human movement” (Reed 1998, 503) and of “bodily theories— armatures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic, or community identities” (Foster 1995, 8). We discuss globalization, transmigration, de- and re-contextualization, invented communities, kinesthetic homes, all of which address the way dance works and is worked upon in the changing contexts of world politics. We specify whether a dance affirms, resists, re-creates, challenges, undermines, or reenforces the status quo, and sometimes whether it does several of these at once, for we agree that dance as social action can be ambiguous (Desmond 1994) (2).