Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies

Chapter 9: Marking Boundaries: Dance against Religion

210 Marking Boundaries Dance against Religion When van der Leeuw turns to elaborate four other phenomenological nets he has woven in his efforts to write about relationships between dance and religion appearing in human history, the significance of the first net—namely the unity of dance and religion— emerges with greater clarity. As name for a structural relation, the unity of religion and dance itself appears as one phenomenon, one moment in a fabric of structural relations comprised itself as well of these four other possibilities. “Unity of religion and dance” represents one family of features—one that van der Leeuw is able to perceive by virtue of its difference from the conceptual nets described in this chapter. At the same time, in so far as the conceptual net naming the unity of religion and dance identifies dance as enacting a unity of life, then this first concept necessarily plays a role in interpreting the significance of other historical moments where dance and religion do not appear in the same guise. In other words, the four other conceptual nets described here appear as structural derivatives of the spiraling rhythm between image and movement, reason and experience, which the concept of dance as enacting the unity of life predicts. In so far as van der Leeuw succeeds in comprehending instances of dance by way of the other patterns he identifies, he demonstrates the value of his first phenomenological structure—regardless of whether or not such chapter 9 a moment ever really existed in history.The four other relational possibilities between dance and religion that Van der Leeuw recreates are: transition, antithesis, influences, and harmony. This chapter introduces these four conceptual structures and assesses their implications for scholars in religious studies. In short, in identifying these structural relations, van der Leeuw rejects the idea that a unity of religion and dance is ever possible, in practice or in theory. He animates the differences among the various structural relations in order to argue that there is no moment of recognizing a phenomenon as either dance or religion in which that recognition does not presuppose both the inevitability and the incomprehensibility of their simultaneous appearance. In a conclusion to Part 2, I continue the argument begun at the end of Chapter 8, providing a phenomenological defense for the study of dance in and as religion. transition The first of the four remaining structural relations van der Leeuw outlines is “breakup of unity” or “transition” (S 36; W 44). Next to the unity of dance and religion, this conceptual net is most important because transition represents the perspective on religion and dance capable of seeing other shapes of the relationship as possibilities. It represents the perspective of van der Leeuw himself as a phenomenologist in modern society. As van der Leeuw notes, for a person who perceives dance and religion as comprising a unity, the question of their relationship, of possible “paths and boundaries” between them, does not arise. A given instance of dancing may appear as “prayer, work, and dance” at once (S 16; W 33). By contrast, the fact that the question of relationship arises for him is a sign that he is between. In his historical study of religions, he notices coincidences of religion and dance, but he does so because they strike him as strange. He does not live in a society where such perspectives of unity are common— quite the reverse. Marking Boundaries 211 As van der Leeuw employs his phenomenological method to recreate imaginatively the forms in which this strangeness appears to him, a new structural relation comes into view—”transition.” It represents a new perspective on his own context. He becomes conscious of how his perceptions of religion and dance are constituted by his movement between the kinds of moments he inhabits and those he studies. Van der Leeuw elaborates: “We find ourselves, so to speak, always in transition [in een overgang] from the primitive sphere of magical continuity to the differentiated sphere of the ‘modern’ spirit [geeste], a transition which is eternal [eeuwig], because it is determined not temporally, but structurally” (S 267; W 440-1). The “we” here includes those for whom “paths and boundaries” between religion and dance appear as a concern. For such people, to be “always in transition ” is to be moving, yet not on the way to somewhere else in time or in space. As a structure, transition is “eternal...