Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities

Preface

 This book has two principal goals. First, it aims to stimulate debate on the combined use of ethnographic and historical strategies in investigating dance as embodied cultural practice. Second, it aims to expand the field of mainstream dance studies by focusing on examples beyond typically Eurocentric conceptualizations of concert dance. The eight essays presented here constitute a specially commissioned collection of case studies on dancing in Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. Each author was asked to root discussion in her or his own long-term ethnographic inquiry and to reflect upon issues of past and present within the dance practice investigated . Authors were also invited to discuss their relationship to the research. The resultant collection provides examples not only of the making of histories and identities through bodily practices, but also of the part that disciplinary frameworks, methodology, and autobiography play in determining selection and interpretation. The balance of this collection lies with researchers of dance whose investigations did not begin with history; rather they turned toward the diachronic perspective in order to shed light on present cultural meanings. Scholarly examination of “the past” might not immediately suggest the research focus of the human sciences as social scientists traditionally concentrate their attention on the present, initially at least. Such was the starting point for all the contributors to this volume. Traditionally too, social scientists are concerned more with understanding communal than individual practice. Again, this is a characteristic of the essays, apart from one example ( Janet O’Shea), in which the practice of individuals is examined in relation to interpretations of shared pasts. Taken as a whole, the collection of essays sheds light upon continuities and vii disruptions in codified movement systems, interrogates attributions of significance and power to particular dance forms, and scrutinizes social and political agency behind a rhetoric that may foreground dance as cultural expression by reference to specific “past(s).” The inquiry has been undertaken through the explicit juxtaposition of ethnographic and historical frameworks. The concentration is on dance practices typically associated with particular cultural groups professing national, ethnic, or regional identities. Such identification may be challenged within the essays , and differing interpretations of the working processes of ethnographic and historical inquiry are evident. Nonetheless, the emphasis upon empirically based studies, resulting from long immersion in whatever constitutes the “ethnographic community,” is a collective feature. Not every writer in this volume, of course, would necessarily consider herself or himself first and foremost as a social scientist. Some contributors work in university dance departments or dance organizations and may have training that parallels or draws upon aspects of the social sciences; others do hold specific qualifications as social scientists and are institutionally situated in such disciplines. The resultant treatment of the selected dance practices across this volume addresses a number of research questions that reach across past and present documentation and interpretation of dance practices. In answering such questions, the research requires techniques and analytical models beyond those traditionally associated with a single framework of inquiry. What brings the authors together here is less a single shared theoretical vision and more an interest in issues and knowledge gained from dancing across both pasts and presents. Obviously, the collection does not represent every academic discourse that utilizes ethnography as a major methodology. Evident absences are sociology and cultural studies, both fields that have made innovative contributions to advancing dance knowledge and understanding .1 The principal academic frameworks used here are anthropology , dance ethnology, folk life studies, dance history, and performance studies. The essays demonstrate variation in the ways in which the researcher, as a result of his or her training, may relate to people and their practices. Even where the authors explicitly locate themselves within one disciplinary field, there exist differences of approach. Three essays are written from within anthropology (Adrienne Kaeppler, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, and Lynn Maners), but the specific treatment emerges from the separate schools of ethnoscience, social anthropology, viii Preface and cultural anthropology, respectively. Dance ethnology may constitute the disciplinary base for the essays by Judy Van Zile and Elsie Ivancich Dunin, but each author’s treatment of the overall theme by no means suggests a uniformity of engagement. The interpretations provide reminders that even if the writers have a declared “home” discipline , they also exercise individual theoretical and methodological preferences . Moreover, all authors respond to different influences in dealing with their material in relation to the book’s theme. Interdisciplinary tendencies evident in this collection may result from...