Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and “Cultural Studies”

Dance Research Journal

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 43-53

  Desmond, Jane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012524270     PISSN: 01497677     EISSN: 1940509X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1478275     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull's (aka Cynthia Novack) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) remains a model.
2. Randy Martin integrates participant-observer into his analyses. See, for example, his discussion of hip-hop classes in chapter 3 of his Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
3. See also Sally Ann Ness's Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)
4. Barbara Browning's Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
5. Marta Savigliano's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995)
6. Julie Taylor's Paper Tangos (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
7. For studies of institutions, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable's The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
8. Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
9. I provide an extended discussion of these issues in “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” which first appeared in Cultural Critique, vol. 26 (winter 1993): 33–63. In that article, as here, I use the term “cultural studies” to indicate a loosely aligned community of scholars who draw on a shared body of critical approaches.
10. See Gay Morris, ed., Moving Words: Rewriting Dance (New York: Routledge, 1996)
11. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy, eds., Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995)
12. Susan Leigh Foster, ed. Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power (London: Routledge, 1996)
13. Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
14. A full list of all relevant books and authors would exceed the parameters of this essay. Readers seeking more comprehensive bibliographic information are urged to consult the bibliographies of the collections named for a wide-ranging sense of which literature, approaches, and authors are most involved in this scholarly community. In addition, several scholars who see their primary affiliation as outside “dance studies” have made important incursions into dance-related issues, such as Robert Allen's work on the sexual and class politics of burlesque, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
15. For a stimulating discussion of the, at times, contentious debates over “culture” in anthropology and cultural studies approaches, and the attitudes of scholars in each group toward the work associated with the other, see Virginia R. Dominguez, “Disciplining Anthropology” in Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996): 37–62. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature is one of the few widely cited texts circulating among cultural studies scholars that employs ethnographic methods. Remarkably, despite the influence of that book in the roughly fifteen years since it was published, it has been joined by few others.
16. Selected works by these authors include the following: Adrienne Kaeppler, Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1993)
17. Brenda Farnell, ed., Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: the Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dancing (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995)
18. Anya Peterson Royce, Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Interpretation in Ballet and Mime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
19. For an excellent and comprehensive review of articles on dance studies written by an anthropologist, see Susan A. Reed, “The Politics and Poetics of Dance,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 503–532. Reed concludes that anthropologists “have played a critical role in this new dance scholarship” of the last decade. I take a different point of view here, suggesting that dance work produced by those trained explicitly as anthropologists (or dance ethnographers) has, with some exceptions, been undervalued in “dance studies.” I am hopeful that this will change. Given the emphasis of many dance ethnographers on dance outside the U.S., part of this change may come as U.S. dance studies scholars begin to develop a more internationally comparative framework. This latter issue is one that demands extensive discussion in the future.
20. Susan Manning, personal conversation, January 1999.
21. Cynthia Cohen Bull's work (published under the name Cynthia Novack) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) runs counter to this trend in its analysis of dance practice engaged in predominantly by Euro-Americans, and reflects perhaps her own experience as a modern dancer combined with training in anthropology.
22. Joann Keali'inohomoku, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, eds., What Is Dance? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 533–549. Originally published 1970.)
23. Helena Wulff, Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (London: Berg Publishers; New York: Oxford: 1998). I thank Ellen Lewin for bringing this book to my attention.
24. A vigorous critique of colonial legacies and the politics of representation within anthropology has taken place at least since the mid-1980s. While many critiques came from those outside the field, much of the criticism has also been generated by anthropologists themselves. I cannot attempt to summarize those debates here, but they indicate the importance of not just “doing” field work, but of learning something of the history and methodology of that practice, and proceeding with critical caution. This need underlines the necessity of having ethnographic issues and practices (including politics and ethics) integrated into our training curricula as well as our conferences and publications. For an influential text in this auto-critique, see James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
25. See also Karen Narayan, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist, ” American Anthropologist 95, 3 (1993): 67186.
26. Some scholarship exists on some of these topics, like Jack Anderson's The American Dance Festival (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987) on the American Dance Festival, but that book focuses more on a history of who and what and less on an ethnographic understanding of why and how.
27. Naima Prevots's book Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, a Studies in Dance History book published by Wesleyan University Press (1998), moves in this direction.
28. Drawing primarily on archival sources, she reconstructs (as a sort of historical ethnography) the decision-making processes involved in selecting State Department-sponsored tours by leading American dance companies. I only wish this book were twice as long so the political analyses of the decision-making processes could be further elaborated. See also Jan Van Dyke's discussion of how the policies of the National Endowment for the Arts have shaped the dance field in “Modern Dance in a Postmodern World,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1989.
29. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
30. See also Judith Lynne Hanna, The Performer-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
31. See Leila Sussmann, “Dance Audiences: Answered and Unanswered Questions,” Dance Research Journal 30, no. 1 (spring 1998): 54–63 for an example of some contemporary audience research.
32. Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
33. See Susan W. Stinson, “A Question of Fun: Adolescent Engagement in Dance Education” (pp. 49–69)
34. Judith B. Alter, “Why Some Dance Students Pursue Dance: Studies of Dance Students from 1953–1993” (pp. 70–89)
35. both in Dance Research Journal 29, no. 2 (fall 1997)
36. Sue Stinson, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Jan Van Dyke, “An Interpretative Study of Meaning in Dance: Voices of Young Women Dance Students,” Dance Research Journal 22, no. 2 (fall 1990): 13–22.
37. Anna Scott, “Spectacle and Dancing Bodies that Matter: Or, If It Don't Fit, Don't Force It,” in Meaning in Motion: 259–269
38. Jonathan Bollan, “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor,” forthcoming in Jane Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
39. See Ellen Graff's Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)
40. Studies in Dance History 5, no. 1 (spring 1994) also contains a collection of articles edited by Lynn Garafola which discusses “dancing on the left.”
41. See Linda Tomko's Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
42. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
43. While I am highlighting the “middlebrow” realm here, I should note too that the “lowbrow” often gets ignored as well. I am thinking here of lap-dancing in “gentlemen's clubs” which Bobby Allen has recently started researching, or the dancing strippers that Judith Lynne Hanna writes about. (See Robert C. Allen, “High Heels and Hysteria: Toward a Cultural Theory of Lap Dancing,” paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association Meeting, 1998
44. Judith Lynne Hanna, “Toying with the Striptease Dancer and the First Amendment,” in Stuart Reifel, ed., Play and Cultural Studies, vol. 2. (Greenwich, Conn.: Ablex, 1998): 37–55. One simple reason that more work is not done on these dancing arenas, choreographies, and patrons is that many women feel uncomfortable in these clubs, making research by female scholars potentially harder to do than going to a performance of Paul Taylor.
45. Theresa Buckland, ed., Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
46. For example, anthropologist Deborah P. Amory's “Club Q: Dancing with (a) Difference,” in Ellen Lewin, ed., Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996): 145–160, is one of the very few discussions of lesbian bar dancing in print, but it includes only generalized descriptions of movement, spatial interactions, and the relation of music to movement, which are critical components of the bar-goers' experience and of a dance studies analysis.
47. Also in the same book, Rochella Thorpe's article “A House Where Queers Go: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975” (pp. 40–61) discusses African-American women's experiences at house parties that include dancing, but includes no detailed discussion of the dancing.
48. Jose Lim6n's book Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994) also contains extensive discussion of social life taking place through dancing at bars, but again, the emphasis is not on the dance practices themselves.