Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, and: Dance and Society: Dancer as a Cultural Performer. Re-Appraising Our Past, Moving into the Future (review)

The large international participation of scholars, many of them young graduate students, in the recent CND/CORD/SDHS conference in Paris (June 21–27, 2007), along with new publications in the field and the spread of world dance courses in colleges and universities in many regions of the world, suggest the need for increasingly sophisticated research publications. New publications featuring the works of well-known senior scholars are cause for celebration by those of us attempting to meet research and student demand for new sources of information that feature new conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches. In the past few years scholars have produced an exciting array of monographs and collections of essays important to the field of world dance or dance ethnology.

In Dancing from Past to Presentthe editor, Theresa Jill Buckland, has shaped a volume that “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” (vii). Buckland has gathered together the work of eight scholars investigating an impressive variety of traditional dance cultures in order to add a historical dimension to ethnographic studies, which, following some past anthropological practices, often omit the crucial diachronic element from their findings.

As Buckland notes, most mainstream dance scholarship concentrated on Western theatrical and historical dance practices: dance as an art form. By contrast, “Anthropologists sought to understand the present of cultures as holistic systems, an aim for which the methodology of ethnography— documenting and explaining the present— was essential” (5). This was a practice that many dance ethnologists, especially in the beginnings of the field of anthropologically based dance studies, followed. Many of these senior scholars have been studying dance in the same geographical regions and continue to make frequent visits to their respective sites over many years; thus, they have gained a historical perspective that newer scholars in the field sometimes lack. Many of the studies found in this volume have been enriched by this historical perspective.

In shaping the volume Buckland notes that the essays are not characterized by “any overarching tendency toward monolithic conceptualizations of world dance cultures. . . . 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” ( ix, viii). Indeed, some of the essays presented in the volume frequently lack any theoretical perspective and constitute simple descriptions of dance phenomena through time, while others, such as those by Lynn Maners, Janet O’Shea, Deidre Sklar, and Buckland herself, are cast in a variety of sophisticated theoretical frameworks. However, even the least theoretically informed articles presented in the volume, with their rich ethnographic and historical discussions and descriptions, will provide vital ethnographic and historical information on a variety of world dance traditions and constitute an important starting point for future studies.

Some of the essays, like the introductory study by Buckland, point out the crucial differences between conceptual and theoretical approaches of researchers and scholars in the United States and Great Britain and those of Eastern Europe and Asia. In the latter regions, because of the deep-seated nationalism that characterized the formation of new states throughout the twentieth century, the collecting of folk dance, as with all folklore, constituted an element in the construction of ethnicity, identity, and the nation-state itself...