Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka (review)

Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka. by Susan A. Reed. 2010. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 328 pp., 10 b/w photos, map, index. $29.95 paper and DVD. doi:10.1017/S0149767711000088 Translation is . . . not only necessary but unavoidable. And yet, as the text guards its secret, it is impossible. The ethical task is never quite performed. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Ethnography is inevitably an act of translation— from experience to page, insider to outsider, past to present. Dance writing shares with ethnography the compulsion to evoke the embodied through words. As such, dance ethnography is a doubled act of translation, a doubled act of impossibility. The question then becomes, what seams shall the dance ethnographer leave exposed? According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation of translation ’s urgency and inherent impossibility (2000,), to admit failure is perhaps the only fitting way to introduce one’s ethnographic project. Nevertheless, anthropologist Susan A. Reed takes a different approach in Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka. This is not the self-reflexive critical poetics of Barbara Browning’s 1995 Samba: Resistance in Motion and Julie Taylor’s 1998 Paper Tangos, both highly embodied explorations of the limits of dance’s translation to text. Hardly a suggestive phrase lands on Reed’s page. Clear in her determination to bridge ethnography and history, Reed’s contribution to the anthropology of dance lies not in a poetics that attempts to mimic the form of dance it describes, nor in a commitment to the first-person singular’s intimate yet everalienated subjectivity; rather, Reed’s is a project that lingers in description and revision. Reed thoroughly details the changing tradition of the Kandyan dance of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), within—and decontextualized from— the village ritual of Kohoomba Kankariya, where the dance first developed. In doing so, she offers a corrective to historical inaccuracies that have dominated writings on Sri Lankan performance. Indeed, for scholars interested in Sri Lankan history and culture, regardless of their discipline, Reed’s text provides a wealth of knowledge. This book intrigues in unexpected ways, as the reader is left with a newfound understanding of the relationship between the state and the stage, the zoological and the ethnographic, virtuosity and endurance, and “traditional” Kandyan and American modern dance. Dance and the Nation operates under three unusual premises. First of all, Reed conducted most of her fieldwork two decades ago; second, by researching an upper class art form, Reed upsets typical class relationships between ethnographer and informant; and finally, seemingly objective observations of the history of Kandyan dance create the opportunity for rich theorization, as the analytical impulse is shifted from writer to reader. As a book that resists freewheeling critical analysis, Dance and the Nation indeed offers the scholar of dance much to reflect upon, especially in its invitation to rethink certain assumptions of performance cross-culturally and trans-historically: here, endurance is not a trope reserved solely for avant-garde performance, and the transformation from ritual to stage does not necessarily incite a lament. That the bulk of Reed’s fieldwork took place between 1986 and 1989 (and continued sporadically until 1997) makes for an inherently historical project. Disallowing a preoccupation with the idea that fieldwork could have an expiration date, Reed notes the changing circumstances of Sri Lankan culture and politics: The period from 1987 to 1989— often referred to as bhisana kalaya, “the time of terror”— was a particularly horrific one in Sri Lanka. Quite independent of the ongoing civil war between Tamil separatists and the state, there ensued a violent conflict in the southern and central regions of the island between the state’s armed forces and the JVP, a Sinhala opposition movement . (18) DRJ 43/2 • WINTER 2011 89 The change was such that dance-based rituals comprising Reed’s research sites were sometimes interrupted by violence, and Reed explains, “The circumstances of my fieldwork changed dramatically” (18). Furthermore, Reed augments the historicization inevitable to any project with a deliberate use of historical methods, finding that “. . . ethnographic work in Sri...