All Dances Are Ethnic, but Some Are More Ethnic Than Others: Some Observations on Dance Studies and Anthropology

Buckland, Theresa Jill

doi:10.3366/drs.1999.0001

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…We acknowledge that dance anthropology is an important oeuvre but this work, essentially, reflects a broad interest in the variations in dance in world culture (Buckland, 1999). This tradition of writings examines such themes as the integration of dance and culture (Farnell, 1995); the social meaning of bodily action in ethnic dance research (Williams, 1997); bodily participation and symbolic action in dance cultures (Ness, 1996); the embodiment of dance at a religious festival in New Mexico (Sklar, 2001); and that sometimes the researcher is an active participant, for instance, as a performer in contact improvization dance in America (Novack, 1990).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epiphanies of embodiment: injury, identity and the balletic body

Wainwright

Turner

2004

Qualitative Research

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Our ethnography of the balletic body is a contribution to the relatively small corpus of empirical research studies on embodiment in general and on dance as a social practice in particular. In contrast, much of the literature on the sociology of the body is characterized by its theoretical discussion of the nature of the body. We draw upon our fieldwork at the Royal Ballet (London) where we conducted 20 in-depth interviews with ballet staff, and where we also watched ‘the company at work’(in class, rehearsal and performance). We explored the perceptions, of their bodies and dancing careers, of both dancers ( n= 9) and ex-dancers ( n=11: who are now teachers, administrators and character artists with the company). Furthermore, we especially focused upon the epiphanies of injury and ageing that endanger their balletic vocation, and that may even threaten their personal identity. Although our ethnography of the balletic body is set within the elite and narrow cultural field of dance, we hope that our research is also an appealing and constructive adjunct to discussions on the interactions between self and society; the body and culture; embodiment and identity; and individuals and institutions. Our article is one example of our broader research programme on the embodiment of vulnerability in the arts, medicine and society.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epiphanies of embodiment: injury, identity and the balletic body

Wainwright

Turner

2004

Qualitative Research

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“…Another line of argument was based on considering the dance in the backdrop of folk category. Buckland (1983) referring to Kennedy writes that "folk dance covers a variety of dance forms which survive as or are based on local or national tradition " (1983: 318). Kennedy linked it to pre-Christian religious and quasi-religious rites, maintained as country customs and more of a seasonal nature.…”

Section: источники и материалыmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2022

ВкА

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“…With such material, it can be difficult to break out of the conventional and internal discourses of the artistic field and find a critical distance. The analysis of realisations may enable the researcher to bracket his or her preconceptions and see a western theatrical dance work from a distance similar to the one a western researcher might take to a dance form that is unknown to her or him (Keali'inohomoku 1983;Buckland 1999). With transcriptions of realisations, that is individual performances, you will be able to compare them, to see to which degree they are different, and if so, how they are different.…”

Section: Dance Movement Transcriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

3. Transcription and Description: Tasks for Dance Research

Bakka¹

2022

Perspectives in Motion

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We are celebrating our dear colleague Adrienne Kaeppler and I will do that through comparison and reflection upon some of our differences in point of departure and the resulting differences in methodologies seen in the context of trends in our fields. She is an anthropologist of dance specialising on Tonga and Hawaiʻi, while I am an ethnochoreologists specialising on Norway and the Nordic Countries. I will describe my own point of departure in a quite personal way, while I have had to base my reference to Adrienne more on her published works. Her engagement with the safeguarding of dance in Tonga already during the very first years of the twenty-first century has been followed up by similar engagements from many colleagues, each for cultures they study. It does in my mind signalise the need for ethnochoreologists and dance anthropologists to engage with tools for transmission, two of which are transcription and description. My article ends with an apology for, a definition, and an exemplification of those. Some memoriesAt the ICTM world conference in Edinburgh in 1969, I was listening to Adrienne Kaeppler presenting her work on the dance in Tonga. As a first-timer with a rather weak command of English, but still having experience in fieldwork and dance analysis, I was very impressed by her presentation. She was one of the young stars there, and I may have stuttered a few words to her at some point. As far as I can remember the two of us did not meet again until around 1990 when the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology made a new start, attracting anthropologists of dance from the USA and Western Europe. Before that, through the 1970s and 1980s I worked intensively with documenting traditional dances of my country for research purposes, but even more for the purpose of supporting their transmission, as a cultural value for the communities from which they came, and I mostly published in Norwegian for a Nordic readership. In the same period, Adrienne worked intensively at the Bishop museum in Honolulu and from about 1980 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, also with fieldwork, research projects and publications in English. Norwegian discussionMy perspective on work with dance first came from my strong involvement in the organised Norwegian folk dance movement, but also from the attitudes of the mostly old traditional dancers and musicians, as well as from some young people in their communities. They saw traditional dance first of all as valuable heritage, which also became part of the vision for my professional work at the Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music and Dance. I felt pressure from many sides of the research environment against the validity of treating dances or immaterial folk culture as objects of value. My teachers of folkloristics in the 1960s, Svale Solheim,

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All Dances Are Ethnic, but Some Are More Ethnic Than Others: Some Observations on Dance Studies and Anthropology

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Epiphanies of embodiment: injury, identity and the balletic body

Epiphanies of embodiment: injury, identity and the balletic body

Untitled

3. Transcription and Description: Tasks for Dance Research

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