Contra dancing is connection-to your inner self, to your partner, to musicians and caller, to all dancers in hall moving in synchrony with calls and music, to other dance communities across country, each with their own version of this Saturday night, and to 200 or so years of tradition of this music and dance (Songer and Curley 1997:139). Contemporary American contra dancers readily and often describe themselves as part of dance community.1 It is term used extensively by contra dancers all over country, referentially (the dance community, or the contra community) as well as ideologically (a sense of community). Folklorists express legitimate concerns about casual use of term, some advocating restricted usage to those groups demonstrating high degrees of historical and geographic cohesiveness. Dorothy Noyes, for example, makes strong case for as more generic term for those who practice various types of collective behavior. By using term in both etic and emic senses, we risk endorsement of participant usage and in effect validate ideological concept of as presented by our informants. One solution, therefore, is to restrict usage to etic terms and concepts: in effect studying function, not use. As Robert A. Georges noted thirty years ago, however, confining ourselves to functional analysis leads only to inferential conclusions, never to full understanding of practices as conceived by participants themselves (1969). But can we legitimately ignore way group uses term and still claim to understand group's folkloric behavior? Obviously not. The real objection is less to group's uses than to researcher's failure to distinguish between those uses and one's own. The confusion is of our own making and is avoidable, if we are careful. Another solution is to use term to refer to abstract idea of what binds group together, something that participants refer to as a sense of In this paper I wish to indicate why I believe referential use of term can be valid in certain cases, and why we must also take account of ideological uses, whether expressed by term communality (as in this paper), or by a sense of community, or just in abstract (that is, without definite or indefinite adjective). For referential use to be valid, something more must be going on in group than just single-focused activity in particular situations. In other words, in dance community participants must do more than simply get together, dance, and then go home. From my experience as participant-observer at dance venues across country for several years, I have noted indications of complex and stable networks of affiliations characterizing many groups, which they express in multitude of traditional ways on and off dance floor.2 These affiliations demonstrate continuity and consistency through time and space, in trenchant words of Georges and Jones (1995: 1). They also express dynamics of innovation and tradition, power and solidarity, and individuality and community. As in any group, each affiliation comprises alliances, feelings of fellowship, conflicts, and tensions. Mere observation of behavior of participants at dance events, whether from stage or from dance floor, is insufficient to determine existence or nonexistence of communality. Instead we need to examine some ways dance groups express and solidify their cohesion by engaging in other, non-dance-related activities. CONTRA DANCE GROUPS AND ACTIVITIES Contra dance is social figure dance related historically and in form to English country dance, which came to America in 17th century. In musical tempo and style, contra dance resembles American square dance. Like English country dance, it is performed by an indefinite number of participant couples in one or more sets of straight parallel lines. …