Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities

Selected Further Reading

        Dancing from Past to Present aims to stimulate further research into and debate on the use of ethnographic and historical theory and method in the study of dance as cultural practice. The following suggestions and reflections on literature relevant to such inquiry make no pretence to be inclusive or without bias. I include here key texts that have emerged through virtue of recurrent citation across this volume’s chapters and elsewhere in dance scholarship. More localized references, even if essential to the interpretation of specific instances of dancing the past in the present, may be found within the notes of each individual essay.  Influential texts in anthropology that raise issues of history, representation, and power inequalities include the following: Appadurai, Arju. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Asad, Talal, ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press, 1973. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. . Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983. . Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. 231 Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. The following useful texts advance such lines of thinking in anthropology: Fox, Richard G., ed. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1991. Hastrup, Kirsten. A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge, 1995. Herzfeld, Michael. Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. . Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001.  There is a vast literature that addresses ethnography, but recurrent texts in this collection, or ones that are useful in characterizing and challenging practice at the turn of the twenty-first century, include the following works: Amit, Vered, ed. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London: Routledge, 2000. Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage, 1999. Davies, Charlotte Aull. Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others . London: Routledge, 1999. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Williams, Drid, and Brenda Farnell. “Editorial Comments: Ersatz Ethnography .” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 11, no. 3 (2001): i–v. Wolcott, Harry F. Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press; London: Sage, 1999. It must be remembered, of course, that ethnography is not a methodology restricted to anthropology. An essential volume that provides insight on its diverse practice is the Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson et al. (London: Sage, 2001). Dance does not, however, figure in its pages, and the reader is advised to consult my edited collection, Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) for an overview of North American and European approaches to dance and ethnographic practice. Helen Thomas’s chapter “Ethnography 232 Selected Further Reading Dances Back” in her book The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) provides a summary of emergent trends in the second half of the twentieth century of relevance to dance research.  With respect to the discipline of history, postmodernist and poststructuralist thought has resulted in ground-shifting texts, such as the following: Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Originally published as L’écriture de l’histoire [Paris: Gallimard, 1975].) Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock, 1972. (Originally published as L’archéologie du savoir [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969].) . The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1970. (Originally published as Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines [Paris: Gallimard, 1966].) White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. . Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. . Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Debate has raged within the discipline of history over the problematization of knowing...