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The study of dances as historical and cultural discourses can be an illuminating anthropological project. The combination, however, diverges from typical anthropological research and analyses where these two approaches are usually separated. Classic ethnographic research was based on extended fieldwork that attempted to present a picture and synchronic analysis of a contemporary society and usually resulted in a detailed account of the “ethnographic present.” In contrast, latenineteenth -century “armchair anthropologists” studied written accounts and theorized about diffusion or migration in the long ago. More recently , historians have researched historical records for societies usually reserved for the anthropological gaze. The twain did meet during the second half of the twentieth century when some anthropologists, such as Fernand Braudel and Marshall Sahlins, began to focus their attention on history and embarked on studies of “structures in the long run.”1 Even though many anthropologists have felt that structure and history are opposing concepts, they have used history in their studies— especially the long view of history as taken from archaeology and oral history with its contributions to the study of myth and genealogy. 25 2 Dances and Dancing in Tonga Anthropological and Historical Discourses  .  Because of the problematic heritage of evolutionism and diffusionism, however, anthropologists have generally shied away from history and especially from grandiose schemes. Those, such as Marshall Sahlins, who have attempted to bridge the gap between the structural/functional emphasis on synchrony and the historian’s emphasis on diachrony , have carried out long-term fieldwork in contemporary societies and combed libraries and archives to place them in a historical perspective. Sahlins has demonstrated the possibilities and significance of combining structural analysis, history, event, and action in his structures in the long run and has concluded that “the historical process unfolds as a continuous and reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice.”2 As a student in the 1960s, I became drawn to the vibrancy and importance of dance performances while carrying out anthropological fieldwork in Tonga. Why was dance so important? Who were the patrons , composers, performers, and audiences? How did these dances come to their present complexity? What could dance tell me about society ? Over the years I have often focused my attention on dance (or on its broader application as “structured movement systems”) and its relationships to social structure, authority, gender, and art, as well as more theoretical concepts such as the analogy of dance with language, style, and aesthetics. I have also, nonetheless, found it necessary to place these concepts into historical perspectives. Here I explore this combination of some historical and cultural aspects of dance. That dance can be a form of historical and cultural discourse is not common in the study and analysis of dance; historically anthropologists have not often focused on dance, except for its use in ritual.3 Dances are surface manifestations or exemplars of movement languages that convey information, just as speech sequences are surface manifestations of spoken languages. The analogy is a convenient one, but it is always necessary to point out that what movement and speech communicate may be similar or quite different. If discourse is “communication of thought” usually through conversation (as the dictionary tells us), how can bodies converse and convey history? And how can history help us to understand dance and other structured movement systems in the present? The term “history” evokes the idea of a linear knowledge of what happened in the past that has been recorded in writing. But even in the best of times, written history records only select “moments” when someone happened to write down what she or he saw or was told. When we 26  .  attempt to look at the history or historical processes of dance outside of the Euro-American traditions, we find that only occasionally did someone commit to writing information about dance performances. But history does not just depend on what was written down by outsiders or insiders . In this chapter, I pursue an anthropological approach to dance history and ethnography in the Kingdom of Tonga in the south Pacific that does not depend only on accounts that were written down, but rather on a variety of discourses derived from oral history, ethnohistory, ethnography, and movement itself. Dancing and its history are not just “out there” in some positivistic sense; it is the framing and interpretation of dancing that makes history for the present. History, Politics, Oratory, Dance, and Aesthetics in Tonga Ethnographic fieldwork often elicits a series of puzzles—puzzles...

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