Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
From the dancer’s perspective, which is usually shared by audience members of the dancer’s *culture, dance is human behaviour comprising purposeful, intentionally rythmical and culturally patterned sequences of non-verbal body movements. Distinct from ordinary motor activities, this motion (in time, space and with effort) has inherent and ‘aesthetic’ value and symbolic potential.
A subfield of the discipline, the anthropology of dance crosses over the anthropology of *cultural studies, *gender, the *body, *medical anthropology, *music, *politics and *religion. Impediments to Western scholarship on dance were fearful, negative attitudes towards the human body and emotion, the inherent instruments of dance, as well as an exaggerated esteem for verbal language’s capacity to describe reality.
When researchers began to study dance, they lacked knowledge of the elements of movement and the training required to associate visual imagery with verbally conceptualized elements. Consequently, descriptions of dance were limited until the mid-twentieth century. Since the 1970s the cognitive and persuasive dimensions of visual imagery, still and kinetic (including dance, especially the original designing of movement), have been recognized.
Most studies emphasized either the text (movement) or context (cultural and social). However, the interrelationship provides a fuller understanding of this human phenomenon of thought, structure and process. An examination of this interrelationship found, for example, that among the Ubakala Igbo of Nigeria, dance movement patterns reflected age and sex-role differentiation patterns. Young people of both sexes have relatively similar dance movements; elderly men and women have similar dance patterns. But when the two sexes are relatively similar in age but markedly different in biological and social role, the dance movement patterns diverge. When the women are life-givers (mothers) and the men life-takers (warriors), women use circles, slow movement and gentle effort, whereas men dance in lines, rapidly, and with intense, percussive energy.
For some researchers a dance study is about the historically unique; for others the study of dance should contribute to a generalizing comparative social science. Anthropologists may focus on dances of a culture, a culture area or on crosscultural theoretical issues. In *functionalist studies, the meaning of dance lies in its presumed consequences for social and personality systems. Structural studies focus on identifying physical movement patterns of space, time and effort or steps and phrases, the rules for combining these and the resulting regularities in dance form. Communication studies include the interaction between human capacities, sociocultural context, sociological setting, the dynamics of what dance is and what is assigned to dance.
Contemporary anthropologists tend to focus on dance as a medium through which multiple ideologies of *person, gender, generation, social *class and *ethnicity are expressed, negotiated and contested. Dance is an intimate and constitutive aspect of cultural identity, and like language is a window to a person’s world view. Aesthetic forms, such as dance, may convey anxieties and aspirations as well as covertly express political feelings that people cannot express directly owing to the perils of challenging the social order.
Studies of dance in *possession, healing and stress reduction have found that the physical activity of dance may cause emotional changes and altered states of consciousness, flow, and secular and religious ecstacy. Dance may increase one’s energy and provide a feeling of invigoration. The exercise of dance increases the circulation of blood carrying oxygen to the muscles and brain as well as altering the levels of certain brain chemicals, as in the stress-response pattern. Vigorous dancing induces the release of endorphins thought to produce analgesia and euphoria. Thus dance is a complex physical, emotional and cognitive culturally-patterned social activity.
This is the complete article, containing 579 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Dance
