Beyond Binarism: Exploring a Model of Living Cultural Heritage for Dance

Abstract

UNESCO's effort to include many different types of human expression on its lists is commendable and an important attempt to safeguard aspects of the world's cultural heritage.However, we agree with Naguib (2008) that the use and interpretation of the term intangible is problematic to describe the complexity of human practices, because of the polarities implied by the notions of tangible/intangible, which insert a false distinction, in the form of a binary opposition, between the material and immaterial elements of culture. Instead, building on insights from Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) and Ruggles and Silverman (2009), we argue that practices and the artefacts that surround them are embodied heritage, internal to all human beings and affecting us at physical and emotional levels. Therefore, the intangible and 3 tangible are indissolubly linked and a preferred definition might be developed around the idea of "living cultural heritage."The label of intangible is particularly problematic when considering dance as heritage, given the central role that the human body has in the practice of dance, and because the phenomenon of dance is simultaneously emergent from, and constitutive of culture and society. Buckland (2001, 1) confirms the increased social science interest in the body and performance has 'helped to raise the profile of dance as a significant academic site for cultural investigation'. This development has opened up channels for dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, embodiment has been explored sociologically through dance in a range of ways including: cultural theory and everyday life (Thomas 2003(Thomas , 2013 bodylore and bodily knowledge (Sklar, 1994(Sklar, , 2001, bodywork (BraceGovan, 2002), embodied identity (Dyck & Archetti, 2003) and ageing, injury and identity (Wainwright & Turner, 2006). There are some notable early exceptions, Novak (1988) for example, incorporated dance as a key exemplar in her work on culture. One reason for this, Buckland argues, drawing on Connerton's (1989) distinction between incorporated and inscribed practices, is that dance 'has a particular propensity to foreground cultural memory as embodied practice by virtue of its predominantly somatic modes of transmission', thus making dance strongly relevant to discussions of cultural heritage through the incorporation of specific cultural elements (such as artefacts and movement vocabularies) into its practice.Dance is also an inscribed practice as Blacking (1983, 97) illustrates, 'the bodily experience of performance can also stimulate the imagination and help to bring new coherence to the sensuous life, which in turn could affect motivation, commitment and decision-making in other spheres of social life.' Therefore, while culture is incorporated within dance, such dances are also inscribed with layers of shared meanings (which may be symbolic, narrative, 4 emotional, aesthetic depending on the genre) making it not only a site of cultural reception but also a site of cultura...

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