Guides: DAN 2020 & DAN 4490: Getting Started

Encyclopedias

Encyclopedias can be a great place to start research. They can often provide an overview of a topic and get you thinking about areas to deepen your research. Remember, when you are writing your research, you will need to move past encyclopedias in search of deeper sources like peer-reviewed articles, books, and filmed performances.

The encyclopedia of world folk dance by Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Call Number: 2016021732
ISBN: 1442257490
Publication Date: 2016
The Encyclopedia of World Folk Dance offers the student, teacher, choreographer, historian, media critic, ethnographer, and general reader an overview of the evolution and social and religious significance of folk dance.
International Encyclopedia of Dance : a project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc by Selma Jeanne Cohen and Dance Perspectives Foundation
ISBN: 9780195187632
Publication Date: 2004
With nearly 2,000 articles written by scholars from fifty countries, the Encyclopedia covers the full spectrum of dance—theatrical, ritual, dance-drama, folk, traditional, ethnic, and social dance. Cultural and national overviews are accompanied by entries on dance forms, music and costumes, performances, and biographies of dancers and choreographers.

View Dance at the Library

The library has several databases that collect high quality, academic videos for student and faculty. Try these databases for filmed performances of dance.

Academic Video Online
Academic Video Online (AVON) is the most comprehensive video subscription available to libraries. It contains over 80,000 educational and academic video titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. Content formats range from films, documentaries, demonstrations, and more. This database is also searchable in ProQuest Databases.
Docuseek
The Docuseek Complete Collection contains over 2,300 independent, social issue and documentary films across multiple disciplines across the arts and humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. Docuseek includes access to GOOD DOCS, a collection of documentaries focused on ethnic and women's studies, area studies, and the social sciences, and also access to the Global Environmental Justice Collection, a collection of educational documentaries aimed to promote environmental literacy, global and humanistic awareness of environmental issues, and social, ecological, political and environmental justice.
Kanopy Streaming Video
Multidisciplinary mediated streaming video service, licensed for classroom use, and viewable on a range of devices and platforms.
Please note: Kanopy films without instant access are available upon request. Please fill out Kanopy's Request Form to request reactivation of titles. At this time, only current faculty requests for required course assignments will be considered. Current faculty/staff may request 3-5 films.
For assistance with closed captioning (CC), transcripts, and audio description, or other questions, contact Brinna Pam Anan, Collection Development Coordinator, at bpanan [at] cpp [dot] edu.

Guides on Ethnographic Research

Decolonizing Research by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Foreword by); Jo-Ann Archibald Q'um Q'um Xiiem (Editor); Jenny Bol Jun Lee-Morgan (Editor); Jason De Santolo (Editor)
ISBN: 1786994623
Publication Date: 2019-05-15
From Oceania to North America, indigenous peoples have created storytelling traditions of incredible depth and diversity. The term 'indigenous storywork' has come to encompass the sheer breadth of ways in which indigenous storytelling serves as a historical record, as a form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. But such traditions have too often been relegated to the realm of myth and legend, recorded as fragmented distortions, or erased altogether.Decolonizing Research brings together indigenous researchers and activists from Canada, Australia and New Zealand to assert the unique value of indigenous storywork as a focus of research, and to develop methodologies that rectify the colonial attitudes inherent in much past and current scholarship. By bringing together their own indigenous perspectives, and by treating indigenous storywork on its own terms, the contributors illuminate valuable new avenues for research, and show how such reworked scholarship can contribute to the movement for indigenous rights and self-determination.
Experimenting with ethnography : a companion to analysis by edited by Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik.
Call Number: 2020028572
ISBN: 1478013214
Publication Date: 2021
"Experimenting with Ethnography offers concrete suggestions for thinking about and doing research and writing (i.e., analysis). The volume challenges the notion that analysis is simply an abstract, theoretical exercise; but rather, a concrete mode of action. The contributors come from a variety of intellectual traditions and are wide-ranging in their ethnographic approach. Each essay invites readers to take a step back from concepts, fieldwork, and theories and center on the elusive work that needs to be performed before an argument can be completed. More specifically, the essays explore the deliberate processes for nurturing a space of play for things that have not yet materialized, opening up ways of experimental thinking through ethnographic knowing"--
Introduction to Ethnographic Research by Kimberly Kirner; Jan L. Mills
Call Number: GN345 .K57 2020
ISBN: 9781544334011
Publication Date: 2019-10-15
Introduction to Ethnographic Research streamlines learning the process of research, speaks to the student at a foundational level, and helps the reader conquer the apprehensions of mastering research methods. Written in a conversational style, authors Kimberly Kirner and Jan Mills use a focus on scaffolding across the chapters to help the student transition from step to step in the research process. Case studies and first-hand accounts are also featured in each chapter, allowing the student to see the early steps, successes and at times failures that accomplished researchers experienced in their past. These real examples further encourage the student that even the best researchers failed along the way, and more importantly, learned from those mistakes. This text is designed to be used as a stand alone book, but is enhanced by the use with the supplemental workbook, Doing Ethnographic Research by the same authors. This text has call-outs to the supplemental text, which allow for application and practice of the material learned.
Dancing Cultures by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (Editor); Jonathan Skinner (Editor)
ISBN: 9780857455765
Publication Date: 2012-10-30
Dance is more than an aesthetic of life - dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

Databases to Search

Academic Search Premier
Multi-subject database; articles from journals & other publications. Covers business, education, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, politics, science, and technology.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index
Included with Web of Science. Subject coverage includes archeology, architecture, dance, music, film and theater, history, humanities, literature, and religion. 1991 to present.
JSTOR
Searches back runs of scholarly journals; art & architecture, language & literature, history, economics, social sciences, mathematics, ecology and music. JSTOR now includes some current issues for selected titles. Ebooks from scholarly publishers are also available.
Project Muse
Includes over 300 full text scholarly journals in humanities, arts, and social sciences from 60 scholarly publishers. Dates vary, 1990 to present.
Social Science/Humanities Library
The Social Science/Humanities Library is a collection of over 1,480 online social science/humanities journals spanning a broad range of academic disciplines. Use the search function to find titles and articles. The Social Science/Humanities Library title list also provides direct URL links to the individual journals. All currently subscribed journals are also available and accessible.

Book Examples of Ethnographic Research in Dance

Revolutionary Bodies by Emily Wilcox
ISBN: 0520300572
Publication Date: 2018-10-23
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)--a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source-based history of concert dance in the People's Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China's dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.
A Guru's Journey by Sarah Morelli
ISBN: 9780252051722
Publication Date: 2019-12-20
An important modern exponent of Asian dance, Pandit Chitresh Das brought kathak to the United States in 1970. The North Indian classical dance has since become an important art form within the greater Indian diaspora. Yet its adoption outside of India raises questions about what happens to artistic practices when we separate them from their broader cultural contexts. A Guru's Journey provides an ethnographic study of the dance form in the San Francisco Bay Area community formed by Das. Sarah Morelli, a kathak dancer and one of Das's former students, investigates issues in teaching, learning, and performance that developed around Das during his time in the United States. In modifying kathak's form and teaching for Western students, Das negotiates questions of Indianness and non-Indianness, gender, identity, and race. Morelli lays out these issues for readers with the goal of deepening their knowledge of kathak aesthetics, technique, and theory. She also shares the intricacies of footwork, facial expression in storytelling, and other aspects of kathak while tying them to the cultural issues that inform the dance.
Entangled Mobilities in the Transnational Salsa Circuit by Joanna Menet
ISBN: 1003002692
Publication Date: 2020-05-26
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002697, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. With attention to the transnational dance world of salsa, this book explores the circulation of people, imaginaries, dance movements, conventions and affects from a transnational perspective. Through interviews and ethnographic, multi-sited research in several European cities and Havana, the author draws on the notion of "entangled mobilities" to show how the intimate gendered and ethnicised moves on the dance floor relate to the cross-border mobility of salsa dance professionals and their students. A combination of research on migration and mobility with studies of music and dance, Entangled Mobilities in the Transnational Salsa Circuit contributes to the fields of transnationalism, mobility and dance studies, thus providing a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of gendered and racialised transnational phenomena. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in migration, cultural studies and gender studies.
Situated narratives and sacred dance : performing the entangled histories of Cuba and West Africa by Jill Flanders Crosby and J.T. Torres
ISBN: 1683402952
Publication Date: 2021
Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, 'Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance' explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arara of Cuba.
Pina Bausch's Dance Theater by Gabriele Klein
ISBN: 9783839450550
Publication Date: 2020-06-08
Pina Bausch and Dance Theater. The Art of Translating offers new and ground-breaking perspectives on the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. The development and performance of its oeuvre, the passing on of choreographic material and reactions by the public are presented as complex, interdependent, and reciprocal processes of translation. For the very first time, this book focuses on the artistic research involved in the company's international co-productions and features extensive empirical material in form of interviews with dancers, collaborators, and spectators, as well as ethnographic insights. This book introduces a praxeology of cultural and aesthetic translation as a viable key concept for research into dance and art.
The Cultural Work by Corinna Campbell
ISBN: 0819579564
Publication Date: 2020-03-17
How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Corinna Campbell's fascinating study The Cultural Work, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain and advocate for their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Based on the author's long-term fieldwork, The Cultural Work focuses on three distinct collectives: Kifoko, Saisa, and Fiambaknown locally as "cultural groups" (cultureel groepen), all of which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons of Suriname and neighboring French Guiana. Weaving together performance analysis, ethnography, and critical theory, Campbell demonstrates the broad spectrum of functions and meanings that culture-representational performance can have, while highlighting competing pressures that feature prominently in the lives of Maroons in Paramaribo. She suggests that ambivalence--fundamental to the folkloric enterprise and magnified here by the urban Maroons' social circumstances--enhances possibilities for social criticism for performers and audiences alike. A vital contribution to scholarship that seeks to broaden our knowledge of the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this interdisciplinary book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of ethnomusicology, dance studies, performance studies, and anthropology.
Dancing Youth by Sandra Kurfürst
ISBN: 3837656349
Publication Date: 2021-12-14
Breaking, popping, locking, waacking, and hip-hop dance are practiced widely in contemporary Vietnam. Considering the dance practices in the larger context of post-socialist transformation, urban restructuring, and changing gender relations, Sandra Kurfürst examines youth's aspirations and desires embodied in dance. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including interviews, sensory and digital ethnography, she shows how dancers confront social and gender norms while following their passion. As a contribution to area and global studies, the book illuminates the translocal spatialities of hip hop, produced through the circulation of objects and the movement of people.
Impersonations by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
ISBN: 9780520301665
Publication Date: 2019-06-25
Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman's guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries--village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative--to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.
Styling Blackness in Chile by Juan Eduardo Wolf
ISBN: 0253041139
Publication Date: 2019-04-30
Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence. Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers--a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indígena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.
Sexscapes of pleasure : women, sexuality and the whore stigma in Italy by Elena Zambelli
ISBN: 9781800736863
Publication Date: 2023
Focusing on Italy, this book discusses how women negotiate sexuality and social status in a Western sexscape constituted by multifaceted articulations of women's sexuality, commodities and modernity. Drawing from ethnographic research, this book brings together the narratives of Italian and migrant women pole dancing for leisure, women pole and lap dancing for work, as well as women selling sex. By tracing commonalities in women's processes of subjectivation and othering across the non/sex working women divide, the book foregrounds the intersecting structures of oppression under which women negotiate selfhood.
Badhai by Adnan Hossain; Claire Pamment; Simon Shepherd (Series edited by); Jeff Roy
ISBN: 9781350174535
Publication Date: 2022-12-01
This is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders, including those of nation, religion, genre, and identity. This collaboratively authored book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study explores the form's changing status and analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, to extend ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.
India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective by Margaret E. Walker
ISBN: 1315588323
Publication Date: 2016-05-23
Kathak, the classical dance of North India, combines virtuosic footwork and dazzling spins with subtle pantomime and soft gestures. As a global practice and one of India's cultural markers, kathak dance is often presented as heir to an ancient Hindu devotional tradition in which men called Kathakas danced and told stories in temples. The dance's repertoire and movement vocabulary, however, tell a different story of syncretic origins and hybrid history - it is a dance that is both Muslim and Hindu, both devotional and entertaining, and both male and female. Kathak's multiple roots can be found in rural theatre, embodied rhythmic repertoire, and courtesan performance practice, and its history is inextricable from the history of empire, colonialism, and independence in India. Through an analysis both broad and deep of primary and secondary sources, ethnography, iconography and current performance practice, Margaret Walker undertakes a critical approach to the history of kathak dance and presents new data about hereditary performing artists, gendered contexts and practices, and postcolonial cultural reclamation. The account that emerges places kathak and the Kathaks firmly into the living context of North Indian performing arts.
Languid Bodies, Grounded Stances by Nandini Sikand
ISBN: 9781785333699
Publication Date: 2016-12-30
Widely believed to be the oldest Indian dance tradition, odissi has transformed over the centuries from a sacred temple ritual to a transnational genre performed--and consumed--throughout the world. Building on ethnographic research in multiple locations, this book charts the evolution of odissi dance and reveals the richness, rigor, and complexity of the form as it is practiced today. As author and dancer-choreographer Nandini Sikand shows, the story of odissi is ultimately a story of postcolonial India, one in which identity, nationalism, tradition, and neoliberal politics dramatically come together.
Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by Jane K. Cowan
ISBN: 9781400884377
Publication Date: 2016-09-29
Valued for their sensual and social intensity, Greek dance-events are often also problematical for participants, giving rise to struggles over position, prestige, and reputation. Here Jane Cowan explores how the politics of gender is articulated through the body at these culturally central, yet until now ethnographically neglected, celebrations in a class-divided northern Greek town. Portraying the dance-event as both a highly structured and dynamic social arena, she approaches the human body not only as a sign to be deciphered but as a site of experience and an agent of practice. In describing the multiple ideologies of person, gender, and community that townspeople embody and explore as they dance, Cowan presents three different settings: the traditional wedding procession, the "Europeanized" formal evening dance of local civic associations, and the private party. She examines the practices of eating, drinking, talking, gifting, and dancing, and the verbal discourse through which celebrants make sense of each other's actions. Paying particular attention to points of tension and moments of misunderstanding, she analyzes in what ways these social situations pose different problems for men and women.
Staging Ghana by Paul Schauert
ISBN: 0253017491
Publication Date: 2015-09-07
The Ghana Dance Ensemble takes Ghana's national culture and interprets it in performance using authentic dance forms adapted for local or foreign audiences. Often, says Paul Schauert, the aims of the ensemble and the aims of the individual performers work in opposition. Schauert discusses the history of the dance troupe and its role in Ghana's post-independence nation-building strategy and illustrates how the nation's culture makes its way onto the stage. He argues that as dancers negotiate the terrain of what is or is not authentic, they also find ways to express their personal aspirations, discovering, within the framework of nationalism or collective identity, that there is considerable room to reform national ideals through individual virtuosity.
Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California by Mark F. DeWitt
ISBN: 9781617030499
Publication Date: 2011-01-30
Queen Ida. Danny Poullard. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie Records. These are names that are familiar to many fans of Cajun music and zydeco, and they have one other thing in common--longtime residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are all part of a vibrant scene of dancing and live Louisiana-French music that has evolved over several decades. Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California traces how this region of California has been able to develop and sustain dances several times a week with more than a dozen bands. Description of this active regional scene opens into a discussion of several historical trends that have affected life and music in Louisiana and the nation. The book portrays the diversity of people who have come together to adopt Cajun and Creole dance music as a way to cope with a globalized, media-saturated world. Ethnomusicologist Mark F. DeWitt innovatively weaves together interviews with musicians and dancers (some from Louisiana, some not), analysis of popular media, participant observation as a musician and dancer, and historical perspectives from wartime black migration patterns, the civil rights movement, American folk and blues revivals, California counterculture, and the rise of cultural tourism in ""Cajun Country."" In so doing, he reveals the multifaceted appeal of celebrating life on the dance floor, Louisiana-French style.
Sweating Saris by Priya Srinivasan
ISBN: 1283333864
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
A groundbreaking book that seeks to understand dance as labor, "Sweating Saris" examines dancers not just as aesthetic bodies but as transnational migrant workers and wage earners who negotiate citizenship and gender issues. Srinivasan merges ethnography, history, critical race theory, performance and post-colonial studies among other disciplines to investigate the embodied experience of Indian dance. The dancers sweat stained and soaked saris, the aching limbs are emblematic of global circulations of labor, bodies, capital, and industrial goods. Thus the sweating sari of the dancer stands in for her unrecognized labor. Srinivasan shifts away from the usual emphasis on Indian women dancers as culture bearers of the Indian nation. She asks us to reframe the movements of late nineteenth century transnational Nautch Indian dancers to the foremother of modern dance Ruth St. Denis in the early twentieth century to contemporary teenage dancers in Southern California, proposing a transformative theory of dance, gendered-labor, and citizenship that is far-reaching. "
Seize the Dance! by Michelle Kisliuk
ISBN: 0195353501
Publication Date: 1998-11-01
"Pygmy music" has captivated students and scholars of anthropology and music for decades if not centuries, but until now this aspect of their culture has never been described in a work that is at once vividly engaging, intellectually rigorous, and self-consciously aware of the ironies of representation. Seize the Dance! is an ethnomusical study focused on the music and dance of BaAka forest people, who live in the Lobaye region of the Central African Republic. Based on ethnographic research that Michelle Kisliuk conducted from 1986 through 1995, this book describes BaAka songs, drum rhythms, and dance movements--along with their contexts of social interaction--in an elegant narrative that is enhanced by many photographs, musical illustrations, and field recordings on two compact discs.
City Folk by Daniel J. Walkowitz
ISBN: 0814784526
Publication Date: 2010-04-01
This is the story of English Country Dance, from its 18th century roots in the English cities and countryside, to its transatlantic leap to the U.S. in the 20th century, told by not only a renowned historian but also a folk dancer, who has both immersed himself in the rich history of the folk tradition and rehearsed its steps. In City Folk, Daniel J. Walkowitz argues that the history of country and folk dancing in America is deeply intermeshed with that of political liberalism and the 'old left.' He situates folk dancing within surprisingly diverse contexts, from progressive era reform, and playground and school movements, to the changes in consumer culture, and the project of a modernizing, cosmopolitan middle class society. Tracing the spread of folk dancing, with particular emphases on English Country Dance, International Folk Dance, and Contra, Walkowitz connects the history of folk dance to social and international political influences in America. Through archival research, oral histories, and ethnography of dance communities, City Folk allows dancers and dancing bodies to speak. From the norms of the first half of the century, marked strongly by Anglo-Saxon traditions, to the Cold War nationalism of the post-war era, and finally on to the counterculture movements of the 1970s, City Folk injects the riveting history of folk dance in the middle of the story of modern America.
Dance and Authenticity in Israel and Palestine by Elke Kaschl
ISBN: 1280467746
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
"Dance and Authenticity" is an ethnography of dance performance and cultural form. It describes how "dabkeh," a type of dance performed at Palestinian weddings, became a model for the Israeli Jewish "debkah" as a means of affirming Israeli Jewish belonging and common society. The Palestinian "dabkeh," in turn, acquired nationalist meanings, especially after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank. The book traces the history of these competing, and conflicting, dance forms, basing the argument principally on the ethnographic study of two Palestinian and one Israeli Jewish dance group conducted between 1998 and 1999. The result is a fascinating parallel ethnography, showing how the ethnography of dance forms contributes to evolving notions of collective national and political identity in a context of unequal power.
Baakisimba by Sylvia Antonia Nannyonga-Tamusuza
ISBN: 1135456593
Publication Date: 2014-02-04
Originally a royal court dance, baakisimba asserted the authority of the king as the head of Baganda society. After the abolition of kingship in 1967, baakisimba dance began to be performed in other contexts, with women sometimes playing the accompanying drums-traditionally a man's role-and with men occasionally performing the dance.Sylivia Nannyonga-Tamusuza argues that the music and dance of the Baganda people are not simply reflective of culture; baakisimba participates in the construction of social relations, and helps determine how these relations shape the performing arts. Integrating a study of foregrounds the conceptualization of gender as a time-specific cultural phenomenon. Illuminating the complex relationship between baakisimba and Baganda culture, this path breaking volume bridges the gaps in previous scholarship that integrates music and dance in ethnomusicological scholarship.
Learning Senegalese Sabar by Eleni Bizas
ISBN: 1782382577
Publication Date: 2014-02-28
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is maintained, what role the imagination plays in mobilizing participants and how the 'cultural flow' of the dances is 'punctuated' by national borders and socio-economic relationships. She explores the different meanings articulated around Sabar's transatlantic movement and examines how the dance floor provides the grounds for contested understandings, socio-economic relationships and broader discourses to be re-choreographed in each setting.