Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and "Cultural Studies" Author(s): Jane Desmond Reviewed work(s): Source:

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Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territoryin Dance and "Cultural Studies"

Jane Desmond
In this essay I propose new initiatives I hope to see in U.S. dance studies in the next decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive literature survey, or citing all possible relevant material, I want to identify what appears to me to be terrae incognitae-unmapped and un- or under-explored realms of dance research-and to suggest that we collectively consider what the effects might be if they were brought into focus. While there are many such terrae incognitae, I want to concentrate here on issues relating to ethnography, suggesting that we expand our methods of analysis to include more ethnographies of institutions and audiences. While some work in these areas is already part of "dance studies," it does not predominate and has been overshadowed by work on the history or representationalpractices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet. I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork-that is, the sustained participation in and observation of communities, institutions, and practices-and apply this widely to a variety of sectors in the U.S., including modem dance and ballet companies, dance institutions such as archives, training schools, community dance centers, and even our own scholarly organizations. While I hope there will be more ethnographies of dancing communities, like the contact improvisers Cynthia Cohen Bull analyzes, or the dancers of the Philippine ritual dance form sinulog that Sally Ness engages, there has already been some movement in this direction and those books provide excellent models. I want to emphasize here, instead, the importantpotential of critical ethnographic examination of institutions and organizations. These investigations will parallel new initiatives in anthropology, where scholars such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable have taken as the subject of their analyses The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and historical site, and Sharon Traweek, who has made a point of studying physics labs (1).

Dancing "CulturalStudies"and its Omissions

During the last decade or so, many scholars in dance studies have produced exciting new work by bringing to bear on their research those questions and methodologies that are loosely part of "culturalstudies." Although this term has many meanings, it usually refers to a body of work and a community of scholars who draw on poststructural approaches to investigate representationalpractices (literary texts, films, fashion, music, advertisements, theatrical events, among others). Driving these analyses is a commitment to uncover the ideological workings of representation,that is, how symbolic systems are imbued with issues of power. Cultural studies scholars strive to reveal the complicity of certain representationalsystems with continuing systems of social oppression and to better understandhow social "subjects" (the individuals who make up collectivities) are constituted by and, in turn, manipulate these representationsand their meanings (2). Formerly a professional modem dancer and choreographer,Jane Desmond has also worked in film as the co-producer of the PBS film Chuck Davis: Dancing Though West Africa and as co-designer of movement for Volker Schlondorff's film The Handmaid's Tale. She is author of Staging Tourism:Bodies on Display from Waikikito Sea World (Chicago, 1999), and editor of Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Duke, 1997), and of the forthcoming Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (Wisconsin, 2000). She is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, and co-founder and co-director of the InternationalForum for U.S. Studies. Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000) 43

This new wave of dance scholarship has been especially powerful when feminist and critical race studies have formed the frameworks. For example, we have a theory much better understandingnow than we did ten to fifteen years ago of how dancing has produced representations of "the feminine" and how African-American and EuroAmerican dance forms are intimately intertwined. A number of key, edited collections appearing since 1995 have charted this explosion, among them Moving Words:Re-writing Dance, edited by Gay Morris; Corporealities, edited by Susan Foster; Bodies of the Text:Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by Jacqueline Shay Murphy and Ellen Goellner; and my Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. During roughly the same period, a number of notable books by dance studies scholars such as Susan Manning, Susan Foster, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Ann Cooper Albright, Ann Daly, Amy Koritz, Ramsay Burt and Marta Savigliano, among others, have helped define and deepen dance studies engagement with theoretical issues aligned with cultural studies (3). However, like other scholarly communities, including that of literary studies, dance studies' engagement with "cultural studies" approaches (whether Marxist, feminist, critical race studies, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist) has often resulted in a focus on dances as "texts" ratherthan on the practices that result in such texts, or the acts of engagement with those "texts." The omission of ethnographic approaches from cultural studies, and the potential for new arenas of research that such an approach offers, is what I want to investigate here. "Culturalstudies" scholars across the humanities sometimes draw selectively on certain anthropological texts (by authors such as James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, and George Marcus), but in practice there is relatively little cooperation with those whose primary training prepares them for fieldwork rather than "textual"analysis (4). Dance studies has largely echoed this pattern (5). Most of the theoretical vigor of dance studies in the last decade has not come from its engagement with ethnography.This marginalization of dance ethnographers,while not complete, is consistent enough to merit comment. A quick scan of the table of contents of leading collections appearing over the past five years makes this clear. And major contributorsto dance ethnography (among them Adrienne Kaeppler, Brenda Farell, Anya Peterson Royce, just to name a few) are not read and cited widely by dance scholars beyond the contours of the "dance ethnography" world (6). In part this situation reflects the bifurcation that Susan Manning has noted: "A persistent divide between ethnographic approaches (usually applied to popular and/or non-Eurocentric dance forms) and aesthetic/ideological approaches (usually applied to elite and/or Eurocentric dance forms) characterizes the (inter)discipline of dance studies (7)." As a result, thirty years after Joann Keali'inohomoku wrote her pathbreaking article "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance," ethnographic studies of that form and the communities it engages are still rare (8). I felt this lack again last fall while teaching an introductoryundergraduate course entitled "Dance in America." I had students read Gelsey Kirkland's wrenching and soap-opera-like autobiographyDancing on My Grave. I instructed them to read it not simply as one person's story, but as one person's experiential report of professional company hierarchies, training methods, school structure, social class access, funding, and the decision-making processes of the professional ballet world of the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. With these instructions, students were able to read the book as more than a passionate expose of Kirkland's romances and professional challenges and triumphs.All the while I still wished we had such ethnographies-the product of scholarly research that could analyze the institutional structuresfor their enabling role in producing certain aesthetic histories, ideologies, and social relations. A recent book by Swedish social anthropologist Helena Wulff, Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the Worldof Dancers, provides one model for what such ethnographies might look like (9). Wulff, an anthropologist who had trained seriously in 44 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)

ballet through age seventeen, spent a year with the Royal Swedish Ballet, and a few months each with the American Ballet Theatre in New York and the Ballett Frankfurtin Germany. Her book describes something of the training regimens, interpersonal relationships, touring experiences, and relationship to management, technical staff, and critics that she found in these three companies. A very streamlined volume, this solid work deftly emphasizes structuralrelations, but we come away without a palpable sense of sweaty, breathing bodies or of the dancers' or audiences' relationship to the dances. On the other hand, a particularstrengthof the book is its sketch of the ballet world as an international and transnationalone, with dancers, dances, choreographers, and critics moving across national boundaries in a continual flow. No one book can do everything, which is why many studies are needed, each with its own methodological approach and particularemphasis. Such multiple ethnographies, used in conjunction with the histories we do have, could provide a dynamic vision of important institutions changing through time, and as they operate on a daily basis.

Ethnographiesof Institutionsand Audiences

Ethnographies, as complex descriptions and analyses of social structures and practices, have traditionally been based on "fieldwork,"that is, the sustained engagement of the researcher with a community. Prior to the 1970s, this approach usually involved an "outsider"(most often of European or Euro-American descent) entering a community of which she or he was not a part, and then producing a description of the "peoples" she "studied."The colonial legacy of this aspect of anthropology has undergone a thorough auto-critique during the past fifteen years (10). Contemporaryethnographic writing and research is now much more attentive to the politics of representation,of access, of "speaking for" versus "speaking about," and so on. No longer is "the field" always a place geographically far away from a researcher's home. Now "the field" can be anywhere, including one's own community. What an ethnographic approach requires that textual analysis does not is actually speaking to people, participatingwith them in their activities ("participantobservation"), and trying to understandtheir own interpretationsof what is going on. This requires sustained engagement with communities, not just going to a performance several times, or spending a couple of months in an archive. Researchers must rearrange their lives and resources to spend (at the very least) months at a time working "on site." This "site" can be a ballet studio, a gay dance club, or Latin dance night at the local YWCA, but the researcher must be there, again and again. And she cannot assume access, as she might at a public performance or archive. "Access," the opportunity and privilege of joining people in their everyday lives, must be granted by those who choose to let the researcherparticipate.In this sense, all ethnographicwork is collaborative. We cannot underestimatethe complexity of these politics of knowledge; such issues are always with us even in the library,but in fieldwork they are viscerally brought to the fore, as they should be. By bringing these (always partial) understandingsof the researcher into dynamic relation with whatever frameworks for analysis are being employed (a feminist analysis, for instance), the researcher produces a provisional analysis of a particularaspect of social life. Without a doubt, these analyses represent the researcher's point of view and bear the limitations (and insights) possible with whatever analytical frames she employs. I am not suggesting that ethnographicwork is a magic cure, politically simple, or the only approachof value. I want to suggest instead that, when appropriateto our research, we combine ethnographic approaches with historical research and with "cultural studies" tools for the analyses of "texts." In this way we can attempt to avoid some of the limitations of both "ethnographic"and "textual/culturalstudies" approaches. In many cases, ethnographies excel in their mapping of broad, social configurations yet falter when it comes to detailed, richly textured analyses of specific representational practices. For much work in cultural studies, the opposite is true. An elegant reading of Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000) 45

a literary narrative,a film, or a particulardance performance on the stage suffers from insufficient evidence to anchor the "text" firmly in the larger contours of social formations except in the most general way (11). Combining approaches can be of signal importance in helping us understand how "dancing" happens, when and where, and what meanings and pleasures people attach to it under specific conditions. None of this discussion of ethnography is news to anthropologists or those trained as dance ethnographers,but cultural studies scholars rarely take on these challenges. In this essay I want to urge us to do so, and to do so not only in the ways that dance ethnography has traditionally done (as studies of non-elite practices among nondominant populations), but as a way of understandingalmost any sort of dance practice and, just as importantly, any dance-relevant institution. Numerous possible field work sites spring to mind: regional ballet companies, modem dance companies located outside of New York-like the Dayton ContemporaryDance Company, state arts councils and such major national institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Dance Festival, and so on-all offer rich possibilities (12). In sites such as these we need to understandnot only what happens (which projects are funded, which dances are included in the repertory)but how those decisions are made. On what bases does authority operate? Here is where archival work combined with on-site fieldwork can be so useful, because many "real"reasons for such decisions are expressed in ongoing discussions and revealed in social interactions but never make it into official records. What conceptions-of a company, a region, a state, a nation-underpin the process of deciding who and what (companies, institutions) doing what (style of dance, pedagogy, events) gets funded or produced (13)? We also need analyses of our major academic resources-how would we characterize the holdings, acquisition policies, and patterns of use of a national/international resource like the Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts? How have the parametersof that collection shaped what has been written in the last ten years? What are the future implications? How is the concept of "value" constituted through the collection and the ways it is used? We can apply similar questions to our leading professional organizations to trace our own intellectual histories, to throw into relief those areas and methods of investigation that have predominatedin the past five, ten, fifteen years. We could analyze the program offerings and modes of debate at important conferences such as those sponsored by The Society for Dance History Scholars, The InternationalAssociation of Blacks in Dance, and The Congress on Research in Dance. These analyses, drawing on archival and ethnographic work, can tell us something of what we have valued as "dance studies." A model ethnography of an institution and the pleasures, values, and beliefs it promotes is Janice Radway's A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-MonthClub, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (14). It is at once a social history of taste, an acutely analyzed memoir of the experiences of reading, and a subtle analysis of the evolving structure, function, and influence of a prominent institution-the Book-of-the-Month Club-that has helped shape the practice and meaning of reading in this country for decades. While books are not dances, and live dancing resists in fundamental ways the commodification and mass circulation that books can participate in, Radway's study is exemplary in its focus on both the pleasures of engagement and the institutional structures that enable those pleasures; it can provide a working model of how other such studies might be conceptualized. In addition to studies of dance institutions, I want to advocate numerous ethnographic studies of audiences. For example, who is the audience for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre? How do we understandthe troupe's simultaneous appeal this season in New York City and in Iowa City? In Japan?Who goes? Why? What pleasures do they take in the choreography?In the act of being part of an audience? These questions may begin with demographic information (age, racial identification, social 46 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)

class, gender, etc.) but must go beyond that reportage to deeper questions of how social relations are constituted. Dance studies theorist Randy Martin points us in this direction when he proposes dance audiences as a model for a political formation. Audiences, he reminds us, do not just "read"dances. They participate in the making of communities joined by the performer-audienceconnection (15). But we need to investigate further and in great detail what that constitutive act of belonging means, how it comes to be and how it varies. This means talking to audience members, to fans, to hangers-on, to members of boards of directors, to marketing strategists, and to people who never go to dance performances and wouldn't dream of doing so (16). Here is where we can draw on some recent work in music, like Barry Shank's Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (17), a detailed ethnographic study of the new music "scene" in Austin during the mid-1980s. Shank, a musician and scholar, considers factors of race, age, industry structures, regionalism, building codes, and publicity circuits to help us understandhow music making and music fandom happen and how they are intricately intertwined. Dance scholars, too, could examine local and regional "scenes." Many of us refer to (and are part of or have spent time in) "the New York dance world." What are the dimensions, conventions, populations, and practices of this "world?"Which studios, which lofts, which theaters, which school programs, which community centers? Sociologist Howard Becker's Art Worlds,published in 1982 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), still provides one of the clearest approachesto such an analysis and a model for future studies tailored to dance. In addition to institutions and audiences, there are practitioners and communities. Some important studies of dancers, like the books by Cynthia Cohen Bull, Sally Ness, Marta Savigliano, and BarbaraBrowning, cited earlier, are circulating widely. Other studies, especially of children's perceptions and their processes of learning dance, are being developed by scholars such as Susan Stinson and Judith Alter who use ethnographic observation and/or interview techniques (18). Social dancing is beginning to receive some ethnographic attention, as the work of JonathanBollen on gay and lesbian dancers at the Sydney Mardi Gras celebrations demonstrates. Other researchers, like Anna Scott, have written about racial and cultural politics in the dance class from a point of view. Studies like these, in conversation with institutional participant-observer and audience studies, will provide a complex vision of dancing "worlds" (19). analyses

Neglected Terrain: Ethnographiesof the "Middlebrow"

But there are also other under-researchedarenas of practice that are amenable to ethno-

I and graphicexploration. want to advocateincreasedattentionto both "middlebrow"

"amateur"forms, practices, and communities. To date, a great deal of work in U.S. dance studies has concentratedeither on elite theatrical forms, or, it has investigated more popular forms associated with working class communities, minority populations, or out-of-favor political groups that can be seen, at least partly, as realms of resistance (20). This gives work on these practices a certain urgency and can place it within wider scholarly conversations about modes of resistance or postcoloniality. But there is another realm of practice which engages large segments of the population yet has no obvious political or aesthetic cachet: the "middlebrow." Both Radway and Lawrence Levine (Highbrow/Lowbrow:The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America) (21), among others, have argued persuasively that the shifting class relations arising in the latter half of the nineteenth century shaped conceptions of artistic taste in ways that continue to inform our critical, personal, and pedagogical practices today. With the expansion of a managerial/professional social segment now giving rise to a "middle class" not born to class privilege but educated and trained into it, the complex category of "middlebrow"as that below the "high" and above the "low" emerged. As Radway makes clear, this "middle" was more than the training ground for aping the tastes of the elite via the acquisition of cheap imitations; rather,it Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000) 47

was the ground where a dangerous mixing of tastes and practices of consumption associated both with the upper classes and with the working classes could co-exist. It is still very much with us but, like the amorphous "middle class" to which a majority of Americans see themselves as belonging, it does not receive the critical examination its powerful, shaping force deserves. Too often casually dismissed without examination as "bourgeois," or characterizedmerely as that against which working class cultures resist, this "middle"has its own complex history, its own internal class and racial divisions. To understandhow the cultural tastes and social identities of this vast "middle" are constituted, we should take seriously those cultural appetites and practices by which many people define themselves. I am suggesting here that we give middlebrow dancing its due: I am thinking of possibilities like a critical social history (and ethnography!)of the ArthurMurray studios; studies of the multitude of dancers employed by cruise ships and the masses of people who encounter dance as a crucial part of those stage shows; and theme park employees who dance Disney's world. These categories fall outside of the elite theatrical practices of the concert dance world, as well as the social dance realm (22). They are, of course, related to musicals on Broadway (another realm of dance that has received the tribute of coffee-table books, but less close analysis than it would seem to warrant),and to dancing on popular TV shows, whether it be the Solid Gold Dancers of the 1950s or the Fly Girls of the 1990s. We need critical/theoreticaland historical studies of Cats and A Chorus Line and their predecessors. We also need ethnographic studies of dancers at Dollywood and on the Princess Cruise Line. There are also huge amounts of dancing taking place in the category of the "amateur,"and they include the innumerable dance studio "recitals"that occur throughout the country, whether at elite ballet company training schools or at small local operations that might include tap, jazz, tae bo, and baton twirling along with ballet and modern dance. All of these are amenable to on-site ethnographic studies. Comparative studies of the uncountable mountings of The Nutcracker in a variety of regions across the country would be a good place to start. (I am always surprised when everyone in my beginning classes, including students who grew up in farming communities of fewer than six hundred inhabitants, has seen a live performance of The Nutcracker.) Other amateur groups might include those connected with new communities of immigrants, such as the Los Matachines dance troupe of West Liberty, Iowa, which serves both as a community-building group among Mexican-Americans in the area, and as a community-representingone as well. We need to look at these realms of amateurpractice because they too are part of "dance studies," if we conceive of dance studies as the study of "dancing"however defined, in all forms and formats, and by all populations (23). In the next several years, I hope that these sorts of investigations become more central to our discussions in dance studies. For this to happen, not only will they have to become central to what and how we write, but central to what we teach, to the way we continually retrain ourselves, and to the theoretical issues that engage us. Ethnography requires training and also carries with it its own limitations which must be critically engaged. With some exceptions (Riverside, UCLA, NYU), we are not integrating a knowledge of the theoretical, practical, and political challenges of fieldwork methodologies into U.S. programs that emphasize dance history and critical studies. In part this is a division between the humanities and social science approaches, but we should actively work to overcome this division of knowledge. Luckily, an excellent new book, edited by Theresa Buckland, Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography (24), should help insert these issues into a more central position in dance studies in the U.S. Several of the Western and Eastern European scholars in this collection also engage issues relevant to doing field work at "home" in Greece or Hungary, 48 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)

Making Changes Happen

for instance, rather than working outside of one's own community. These initiatives, concurrentwith similar moves in anthropology over the last fifteen years, will eventually help to "de-exoticize" the use of fieldwork as a methodology. Beyond integrating these materials and issues more fully into our teaching, there are several other practical moves that we can make to facilitate these developments. We can initiate new research projects that engage them. We can establish roundtables at conferences to focus attention on them. These are obvious and rather straightforward things to do. But for many of us, this is not enough. We need to continue to expand our own analytical frames. The theoretical issues that have become core topics for dance studies in the last five years or so may not be the most illuminating frames through which to study some of these arenas. Ethnographies of the downtown dance world, for instance, might best be done in concert with anthropologists and urban sociologists. Comparative studies of amateur performances of The Nutcracker might benefit from new work on place and identity coming out of geography, that would help us factor in the power of regionalism. Cross-training and integrated research teams are two approaches to these intellectual demands. Cross-training might involve intensive exposure to the methodologies and current debates in a relevant/related discipline. Obviously, several graduate programs in Performance Studies, in American Studies, and the Dance Program at Riverside already offer multidisciplinary approaches. But we needn't stop there. At the postdoctoral level we could easily initiate residencies which place us in the middle of other conversations (perhaps during a sabbatical year so funding is not an immediate impediment). Dance scholars could initiate informal attachments to anthropology departments, to geography departments,to ethnic studies programs, and so on. Constudies programs could initiate versely, those of us located in dance/theater/performance invitations for such residencies, inviting scholars who have shown some interest in dance but who have never been trained in the close analysis of movement-here I can think of several anthropologists or sociologists. Often scholars such as these write about the very topics dance studies has tended to ignore but, not being trained in dance per se, often do so with little explicit discussion of movement and bodies, concentrating rather on the social utility of a certain dance practice or event. As a result, they are rarely read as a part of "dance studies," and their work is limited in its ability to contributedirectly to our discussion (25). Collaborative research teams are another way of gaining this cross- and multidisciplinary richness, but these work best when there really is teamwork, not simply a division into discrete tasks built on the team members' extant areas of expertise. For instance, bringing together the fictive team of dance specialist, sociologist, and anthropologist for the "downtown dance scene" would be most exciting if these three worked together from the beginning to design the entire framework of the intellectual approach rather than apportioning the "social" and the "dance" analyses along disciplinary lines. Working in teams such as this means going against the grain of the design of work in the humanities. It means taking the collaborative process of the rehearsal studio as a model, or the lab approach of the hard sciences or some social sciences. It mutes the emphasis on individual "credit"that humanities hiring, tenure, and promotion procedures are built on. Since it carries this risk, it may first be incumbent upon scholars with secure jobs to begin these experiments in collaborative teamwork, thereby modeling this team approach (and, hopefully, eventually legitimating it within the academic context). If we take up some of these initiatives (ethnographic methodologies, researching under-researchedarenas like the middlebrow, and restructuringour research along collaborative lines), what might we gain beyond the "more" of an additive approach? We might get closer to answering some of the bottom-line questions that draw us to dance studies: What is dancing? What happens when we do it? Why do we do it? How does doing it constitute a "we"? An "I"? A "you"?A social relation? A social history? In what ways is dancing unlike other social/aesthetic practices? Like other commercial Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000) 49

practices? In what ways is it the same? Why and how does it matter?To whom? Put so simply, these questions sound so obvious. They are the same ones I ask students to consider on the first day of class. Yet they are also the ones I and many other dance scholars grapple with in our own work. Surely, we will never answer all these questions and the others that animate dance studies. But I want to advocate here increased attention to these terrae incognitae as a way of continuing the pursuit. Notes 1. Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull's (aka Cynthia Novack) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) remains a model. Randy Martin integrates participant-observerinto his analyses. See, for example, his discussion of hip-hop classes in chapter 3 of his Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham:Duke University Press, 1998). See also Sally Ann Ness's Body, Movement,and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Barbara Browning's Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Marta Savigliano's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Julie Taylor's Paper Tangos (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). For studies of institutions, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable's The New History in an Old Museum:Creatingthe Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), and Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The Worldof High Energy Physics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 2. I provide an extended discussion of these issues in "Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies," which first appearedin Cultural Critique, vol. 26 (winter 1993): 33-63. In that article, as here, I use the term "culturalstudies" to indicate a loosely aligned community of scholars who draw on a shared body of critical approaches. 3. See Gay Morris, ed., Moving Words:Rewriting Dance (New York: Routledge, 1996); Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy,eds., Bodies of the Text:Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, 1995); Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power (London: Routledge, 1996); Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion: New CulturalStudies of Dance (Durhamand London: Duke University Press, 1997). A full list of all relevant books and authors would exceed the parameters of this essay. Readers seeking more comprehensive bibliographic information are urged to consult the bibliographies of the collections named for a wide-ranging sense of which literature, approaches, and authors are most involved in this scholarly community. In addition, several scholars who see their primary affiliation as outside "dance studies" have made important incursions into dance-related issues, such as Robert Allen's work on the sexual and class politics of burlesque, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (ChapelHill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1991). 4. For a stimulating discussion of the, at times, contentious debates over "culture"in anthropology and cultural studies approaches, and the attitudes of scholars in each group toward the work associated with the other, see Virginia R. Dominguez, "Disciplining Anthropology"in Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar,eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996): 37-62. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature is one of the few widely cited texts circulating among cultural studies scholars that employs ethnographic methods. Remarkably,despite the influence of that book in the roughly fifteen years since it was published, it has been joined by few others.

50 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)

5. Cynthia Cohen Bull's work and that of Kate Ramsay departfrom this trend. See also work by ethnomusicologist Amy Stillman, which includes discussion of hula music and dance. 6. Selected works by these authors include the following: Adrienne Kaeppler, Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1993); Brenda Farnell, ed., HumanAction Signs in Cultural Context:the Visibleand the Invisiblein Movement and Dancing (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995); Anya Peterson Royce, Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Inin Ballet and Mime terpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). For an excellent and comprehensive review of articles on dance studies written by an anthropologist, see Susan A. Reed, "The Politics and Poetics of Dance," in Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 503-532. Reed concludes that anthropologists "have played a critical role in this new dance scholarship"of the last decade. I take a different point of view here, suggesting that dance work produced by those trained explicitly as anthropologists (or dance ethnographers)has, with some exceptions, been undervaluedin "dance studies." I am hopeful that this will change. Given the emphasis of many dance ethnographers on dance outside the U.S., part of this change may come as U.S. dance studies scholars begin to develop a more internationally comparative framework.This latter issue is one that demands extensive discussion in the future. 7. Susan Manning, personal conversation, January 1999. Cynthia Cohen Bull's work (published under the name Cynthia Novack) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) runs counter to this trend in its analysis of dance practice engaged in predominantly by Euro-Americans, and reflects perhaps her own experience as a modern dancer combined with training in anthropology. 8. Joann Keali'inohomoku,"An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance," in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, eds., What Is Dance? (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1983): 533-549. Originally published 1970.) 9. Helena Wulff, Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (London: Berg Publishers; New York: Oxford: 1998). I thank Ellen Lewin for bringing this book to my attention. 10. A vigorous critique of colonial legacies and the politics of representationwithin anthropology has taken place at least since the mid-1980s. While many critiques came from those outside the field, much of the criticism has also been generated by anthropologists themselves. I cannot attempt to summarize those debates here, but they indicate the importance of not just "doing" field work, but of learning something of the history and methodology of that practice, and proceeding with critical caution. This need underlines the necessity of having ethnographic issues and practices (including politics and ethics) integrated into our training curricula as well as our conferences and publications. For an influential text in this auto-critique, see James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). See also KarenNarayan, "How Native is a 'Native' Anthropologist," American Anthropologist95, 3 (1993): 67186. 11. I am not suggesting that enlarging our competence is an easy thing. I still remember vividly the day I finally "got it" and realized how deeply bounded my previous work had been by the notion of a dance as something that happens on stage-an artistic event of some kind-within a social context, ratherthan as a social event itself. No doubt this was a legacy of my experiences as a choreographerand performer.Up until that point I had been passionately invested in thinking that my analyses of living, breathing "texts" were significantly different than literary analysis. Of course, in key ways they were not. 12. Some scholarshipexists on some of these topics, like Jack Anderson's The American Dance Festival (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987) on the American Dance

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Festival, but that book focuses more on a dents," Dance Research Journal 22, no. 2 history of who and what and less on an eth- (fall 1990): 13-22. nographic understanding of why and how. 19. Anna Scott, "Spectacle and Dancing 13. Naima Prevots's book Dance for Export: Bodies that Matter:Or, If It Don't Fit, Don't Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, a Force It," in Meaning in Motion: 259-269, Studies in Dance History book published by and Jonathan Bollan, "Queer Kinesthesia: Wesleyan University Press (1998), moves Performativity on the Dance Floor," forthin this direction. Drawing primarily on ar- coming in Jane Desmond, ed., Dancing chival sources, she reconstructs(as a sort of Desires: ChoreographingSexualities on and historical ethnography)the decision-making off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisprocesses involved in selecting State Depart- consin Press). ment-sponsored tours by leading American dance companies. I only wish this book were 20. See Ellen Graff's Stepping Left: Dance twice as long so the political analyses of the and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942 decision-making processes could be further (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); elaborated. See also Jan Van Dyke's discus- Studies in Dance History 5, no. 1 (spring sion of how the policies of the National En- 1994) also contains a collection of articles dowment for the Arts have shaped the dance edited by Lynn Garafola which discusses field in "Modern Dance in a Postmodern "dancing on the left." See Linda Tomko's World," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and SoNorth Carolina at Greensboro, 1989. cial Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 14. Janice Radway,A Feelingfor Books: The 1999). Book-of-the-MonthClub, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: Univer- 21. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in sity of North Carolina Press, 1997). America (Cambridge: Harvard University 15. See also Judith Lynne Hanna, The Per- Press, 1988). former-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society (Austin: 22. While I am highlighting the "middlebrow" realm here, I should note too that the University of Texas Press, 1983). "lowbrow" often gets ignored as well. I am 16. See Leila Sussmann, "Dance Audiences: thinking here of lap-dancingin "gentlemen's Answered and Unanswered Questions," clubs" which Bobby Allen has recently Dance Research Journal 30, no. 1 (spring started researching, or the dancing strippers 1998): 54-63 for an example of some con- that Judith Lynne Hanna writes about. (See Robert C. Allen, "High Heels and Hysteria: temporary audience research. Toward a CulturalTheory of Lap Dancing," 17. Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The paper delivered at the American AnthropoRock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas logical Association Meeting, 1998, and (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University JudithLynne Hanna, "Toying with the Striptease Dancer and the First Amendment,"in Press, 1994). Stuart Reifel, ed., Play and Cultural Stud18. See Susan W. Stinson, "A Question of ies, vol. 2. (Greenwich,Conn.:Ablex, 1998): Fun: Adolescent Engagement in Dance Edu- 37-55. One simple reason that more work is cation" (pp. 49-69) and Judith B. Alter, not done on these dancing arenas, choreog"Why Some Dance Students Pursue Dance: raphies, and patrons is that many women Studies of Dance Students from 1953-1993" feel uncomfortable in these clubs, making (pp. 70-89), both in Dance Research Jour- research by female scholars potentially nal 29, no. 2 (fall 1997), and Sue Stinson, harderto do than going to a performanceof Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Jan Van Dyke, Paul Taylor. "An Interpretative Study of Meaning in Dance: Voices of Young Women Dance Stu52 Dance Research Journal 32/1 (Summer 2000)

23. With some notableexceptions,little of the intellectualenergy in dance studies in the last decade has gone into investigating realms.Oftenthe performthese, or similar, seem to lack sophisticaers andparticipants seems predicttion, and the choreography Thismaynot be the case able andsimplistic. is at all, but the perception thatthese forms are aestheticallylacking and thereforenot central to our work. For many of us who cometo dancestudiesout of careers modas ern dancers,our researchreflects this bias. While this has led to the developmentof highly sophisticated analyses of modern concert dance,ballet,andAfrican-American dance, it leaves a huge range of practices, meanings,and publics out of sight.
Field: Theory,Methods, and Issues in Dance

25. For example,anthropologist DeborahP. "ClubQ: Dancingwith (a) DifferAmory's ence," in Ellen Lewin, ed., InventingLesPress, 1996): 145-160, is one of the very few discussions of lesbian bar dancing in print, but it includes only generalizeddeof scriptions movement,spatialinteractions, and the relation of music to movement, which are critical componentsof the bargoers' experience and of a dance studies analysis.Also in the same book, Rochella article"AHouseWhereQueers Go: Thorpe's African-American LesbianNightlife in Detroit, 1940-1975"(pp. 40-61) discussesAfrican-American women's experiences at house partiesthat include dancing,but includes no detailed discussion of the dancDevil: Society and CulturalPoetics in Mexibian Cultures in America (Boston: Beacon

24. Theresa Buckland, ed., Dance in the ing. Jose Lim6n's book Dancing with the

Ethnography (Basingstoke, Hampshire: can-American South Texas (Madison: UniMacmillanPress; New York: St. Martin's versityof WisconsinPress, 1994) also contains extensivediscussionof social life takPress, 1999). ing placethrough dancingat bars,but again, the emphasisis not on the dance practices themselves.

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