Staging Histories of Anthropological Thought: Dance and Performance as Theory

Abstract (English)

How can dance performance serve our endeavor to decanonize the histories of anthropological thought? This question presents extensive challenges, primarily because so many intricacies of dance are resistant to textual preservation, rendering aspects such as the quality of how a body moves through space, the communion between the choreography and the music, or the affective energy generated between dancer and audience member lost to future audiences or readers. To suggest an answer, however, I focus on the work and legacies of Katherine Dunham– a dancer, choreographer, and founder of the first self-supported American Black dance company and anthropologist who trained with Bronsilaw Malinowski and Robert Redfield, and conducted fieldwork in Jamaica, Martinique, and Haiti. Despite the close connections between her research in the Caribbean and the development of her creative, pedagogical, and institutional practices, her ethnographic work has largely been ignored in courses on the history of the discipline. This occlusion of her contributions is symptomatic, and may perhaps be because her intervention “works on its feet rather than moves across the page” (Chin et al. 2014). Through engaging with Katherine Dunham’s archived ethnographic films alongside films of her dance company’s staged performances, I utilize performance as a mode of theorization– demonstrating how theoretical interventions can be made and read through dance and performance. This paper argues for a pluralization of what is considered anthropological theory– one that includes political and theoretical stances created, learned, and passed on through movement of the body, rather than solely through text. Just as dance performance holds the potential to encounter theory-making, historical remembering, and sociopolitical action from a diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and bodies, so too might a decanonized, pluralized history of anthropological thought.