Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and "Cultural Studies"Author(s): Jane DesmondReviewed work(s):Source: Dance Research Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Summer, 2000), pp. 43-53Published by: Congress on Research in DanceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1478275 .Accessed: 04/01/2012 16:44

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Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in 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-un- mapped 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 representational practices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet.

I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork-that is, the sustained participa- tion 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 important potential of critical ethno- graphic 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 "Cultural Studies" 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 "cultural studies." 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 representational practices (literary texts, films, fashion, music, advertisements, theatrical events, among others). Driving these analyses is a commit- ment 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 representational systems with continuing systems of social oppres- sion and to better understand how social "subjects" (the individuals who make up collectivities) are constituted by and, in turn, manipulate these representations and 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 Waikiki to 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 International Forum for U.S. Studies.

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This new wave of dance scholarship has been especially powerful when feminist theory and critical race studies have formed the frameworks. For example, we have a much better understanding now than we did ten to fifteen years ago of how dancing has produced representations of "the feminine" and how African-American and Euro- American 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, femi- nist, critical race studies, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist) has often resulted in a focus on dances as "texts" rather than 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.

"Cultural studies" 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 contributors to 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 introductory undergraduate course entitled "Dance in America." I had students read Gelsey Kirkland's wrenching and soap-opera-like autobiography Dancing 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 structures for 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 World of Dancers, provides one model for what such ethnographies might look like (9). Wulff, an anthropologist who had trained seriously in

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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 Frankfurt in Germany. Her book describes something of the training regimens, interpersonal rela- tionships, 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 structural relations, 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 particular strength of the book is its sketch of the ballet world as an international and transnational one, 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 particular emphasis. 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.

Ethnographies of Institutions and 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). Contemporary ethnographic 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 any- where, including one's own community.

What an ethnographic approach requires that textual analysis does not is actu- ally speaking to people, participating with them in their activities ("participant observa- tion"), and trying to understand their own interpretations of 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 researcher participate. In this sense, all ethnographic work is collabora- tive. We cannot underestimate the 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) understandings of 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 particular aspect 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 ethnographic work is a magic cure, politically simple, or the only approach of value. I want to suggest instead that, when appropriate to our research, we combine ethnographic approaches with historical research and with "cul- tural studies" tools for the analyses of "texts." In this way we can attempt to avoid some of the limitations of both "ethnographic" and "textual/cultural studies" 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 particular dance performance on the stage suffers from insufficient evidence to anchor the "text" firmly in the larger contours of social forma- tions 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 chal- lenges. 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 non- dominant populations), but as a way of understanding almost 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 Contemporary Dance Company, state arts coun- cils 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 understand not 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 char- acterize 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 parameters of that collection shaped what has been written in the last ten years? What are the future implications? How is the concept of "value" consti- tuted 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 investiga- tion that have predominated in the past five, ten, fifteen years. We could analyze the program offerings and modes of debate at important conferences such as those spon- sored by The Society for Dance History Scholars, The International Association 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-Month Club, Liter- ary 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 struc- tures 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 ethno- graphic studies of audiences. For example, who is the audience for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre? How do we understand the 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

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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-audience connection (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 ethno- graphic 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 understand how 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 approaches to such an analysis and a model for future studies tai- lored to dance.

In addition to institutions and audiences, there are practitioners and communi- ties. Some important studies of dancers, like the books by Cynthia Cohen Bull, Sally Ness, Marta Savigliano, and Barbara Browning, 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 ethno- graphic observation and/or interview techniques (18). Social dancing is beginning to receive some ethnographic attention, as the work of Jonathan Bollen 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 participant-observer point of view. Studies like these, in conversation with institutional analyses and audience studies, will provide a complex vision of dancing "worlds" (19).

Neglected Terrain: Ethnographies of the "Middlebrow" But there are also other under-researched arenas of practice that are amenable to ethno- graphic exploration. I want to advocate increased attention to both "middlebrow" and "amateur" forms, practices, and communities. To date, a great deal of work in U.S. dance studies has concentrated either 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 an- other 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 concep- tions of artistic taste in ways that continue to inform our critical, personal, and peda- gogical 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

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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 characterized merely as that against which working class cultures resist, this "middle" has its own complex history, its own internal class and racial divisions. To understand how the cultural tastes and social identities of this vast "middle" are consti- tuted, 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 Arthur Murray stu- dios; 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 theatri- cal 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 re- ceived 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/theoretical and 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 through- out the country, whether at elite ballet company training schools or at small local opera- tions 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 commu- nity-representing one as well. We need to look at these realms of amateur practice 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).

Making Changes Happen 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 methodolo- gies 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 Eth- nography (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 collec- tion also engage issues relevant to doing field work at "home" in Greece or Hungary,

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for instance, rather than working outside of one's own community. These initiatives, concurrent with similar moves in anthropology over the last fifteen years, will eventu- ally 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 develop- ments. 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 con- tinue 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 intel- lectual demands. Cross-training might involve intensive exposure to the methodologies and current debates in a relevant/related discipline. Obviously, several graduate pro- grams 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. Con- versely, those of us located in dance/theater/performance studies programs could initiate 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 contribute directly to our discussion (25).

Collaborative research teams are another way of gaining this cross- and multi- disciplinary 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 anthro- pologist 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 proce- dures 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-researched arenas like the middlebrow, and restructuring our 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

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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 atten- tion 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 Im- provisation and American Culture (Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) remains a model. Randy Martin integrates participant-observer into 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: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), and Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of 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 appeared in Cultural Critique, vol. 26 (win- ter 1993): 33-63. In that article, as here, I use the term "cultural studies" to indicate a loosely aligned community of scholars who draw on a shared body of critical ap- proaches.

3. See Gay Morris, ed., Moving Words: Re- writing 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, 1995); Susan Leigh Foster, ed. Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Cul- ture, and Power (London: Routledge, 1996); Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham and 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 bib- liographic 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 af- filiation as outside "dance studies" have made important incursions into dance-re- lated issues, such as Robert Allen's work on the sexual and class politics of burlesque, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and Ameri- can Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

4. For a stimulating discussion of the, at times, contentious debates over "culture" in anthropology and cultural studies ap- proaches, and the attitudes of scholars in each group toward the work associated with the other, see Virginia R. Dominguez, "Dis- ciplining Anthropology" in Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dis- sent 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.

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5. Cynthia Cohen Bull's work and that of Kate Ramsay depart from 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., Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: the Visible and the Invisible in Move- ment and Dancing (Metuchen, N.J.: Scare- crow Press, 1995); Anya Peterson Royce, Movement and Meaning: Creativity and In- terpretation in Ballet and Mime (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 An- nual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 503-532. Reed concludes that anthropolo- gists "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 eth- nographers) has, with some exceptions, been undervalued in "dance studies." I am hope- ful that this will change. Given the empha- sis 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 compara- tive 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: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1990) runs counter to this trend in its analysis of dance practice engaged in predominantly by Euro-Ameri- cans, and reflects perhaps her own experi- ence as a modern dancer combined with training in anthropology.

8. Joann Keali'inohomoku, "An Anthropolo- gist 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: Ca- reer and Culture in the World of Dancers (London: Berg Publishers; New York: Ox- ford: 1998). I thank Ellen Lewin for bring- ing this book to my attention.

10. A vigorous critique of colonial legacies and the politics of representation within an- thropology 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 proceed- ing with critical caution. This need under- lines 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 Cali- fornia Press, 1986). See also Karen Narayan, "How Native is a 'Native' Anthropologist, " American Anthropologist 95, 3 (1993): 671- 86.

11. I am not suggesting that enlarging our competence is an easy thing. I still remem- ber vividly the day I finally "got it" and re- alized how deeply bounded my previous work had been by the notion of a dance as something that happens on stage-an artis- tic event of some kind-within a social con- text, rather than as a social event itself. No doubt this was a legacy of my experiences as a choreographer and performer. Up until that point I had been passionately invested in thinking that my analyses of living, breathing "texts" were significantly differ- ent than literary analysis. Of course, in key ways they were not.

12. Some scholarship exists on some of these topics, like Jack Anderson's The American Dance Festival (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1987) on the American Dance

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Festival, but that book focuses more on a history of who and what and less on an eth- nographic understanding of why and how.

13. Naima Prevots's book Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, a Studies in Dance History book published by Wesleyan University Press (1998), moves in this direction. Drawing primarily on ar- chival sources, she reconstructs (as a sort of historical ethnography) the decision-making processes involved in selecting State Depart- ment-sponsored tours by leading American dance companies. I only wish this book were twice as long so the political analyses of the decision-making processes could be further elaborated. See also Jan Van Dyke's discus- sion of how the policies of the National En- dowment for the Arts have shaped the dance field in "Modern Dance in a Postmodern World," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1989.

14. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1997).

15. See also Judith Lynne Hanna, The Per- former-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

16. See Leila Sussmann, "Dance Audiences: Answered and Unanswered Questions," Dance Research Journal 30, no. 1 (spring 1998): 54-63 for an example of some con- temporary audience research.

17. Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock'n'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

18. See Susan W. Stinson, "A Question of Fun: Adolescent Engagement in Dance Edu- cation" (pp. 49-69) and Judith B. Alter, "Why Some Dance Students Pursue Dance: Studies of Dance Students from 1953-1993" (pp. 70-89), both in Dance Research Jour- nal 29, no. 2 (fall 1997), and Sue Stinson, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Jan Van Dyke, "An Interpretative Study of Meaning in Dance: Voices of Young Women Dance Stu-

dents," Dance Research Journal 22, no. 2 (fall 1990): 13-22.

19. Anna Scott, "Spectacle and Dancing Bodies that Matter: Or, If It Don't Fit, Don't Force It," in Meaning in Motion: 259-269, and Jonathan Bollan, "Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor," forth- coming in Jane Desmond, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (Madison: University of Wis- consin Press).

20. See Ellen Graff's Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Studies in Dance History 5, no. 1 (spring 1994) also contains a collection of articles edited by Lynn Garafola which discusses "dancing on the left." See Linda Tomko's Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and So- cial Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

21. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

22. While I am highlighting the "middle- brow" realm here, I should note too that the "lowbrow" often gets ignored as well. I am thinking here of lap-dancing in "gentlemen's clubs" which Bobby Allen has recently started researching, or the dancing strippers that Judith Lynne Hanna writes about. (See Robert C. Allen, "High Heels and Hysteria: Toward a Cultural Theory of Lap Dancing," paper delivered at the American Anthropo- logical Association Meeting, 1998, and Judith Lynne Hanna, "Toying with the Strip- tease Dancer and the First Amendment," in Stuart Reifel, ed., Play and Cultural Stud- ies, vol. 2. (Greenwich, Conn.: Ablex, 1998): 37-55. One simple reason that more work is not done on these dancing arenas, choreog- raphies, and patrons is that many women feel uncomfortable in these clubs, making research by female scholars potentially harder to do than going to a performance of Paul Taylor.

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23. With some notable exceptions, little of the intellectual energy in dance studies in the last decade has gone into investigating these, or similar, realms. Often the perform- ers and participants seem to lack sophistica- tion, and the choreography seems predict- able and simplistic. This may not be the case at all, but the perception is that these forms are aesthetically lacking and therefore not central to our work. For many of us who come to dance studies out of careers as mod- ern dancers, our research reflects this bias. While this has led to the development of highly sophisticated analyses of modern dance, ballet, and African-American concert dance, it leaves a huge range of practices, meanings, and publics out of sight.

24. Theresa Buckland, ed., Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

25. For example, anthropologist Deborah P. Amory's "Club Q: Dancing with (a) Differ- ence," in Ellen Lewin, ed., Inventing Les- bian Cultures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996): 145-160, is one of the very few discussions of lesbian bar dancing in print, but it includes only generalized de- scriptions of movement, spatial interactions, and the relation of music to movement, which are critical components of the bar- goers' experience and of a dance studies analysis. Also in the same book, Rochella Thorpe's article "A House Where Queers Go: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in De- troit, 1940-1975" (pp. 40-61) discusses Af- rican-American women's experiences at house parties that include dancing, but in- cludes no detailed discussion of the danc- ing. Jose Lim6n's book Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexi- can-American South Texas (Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1994) also con- tains extensive discussion of social life tak- ing place through dancing at bars, but again, the emphasis is not on the dance practices themselves.

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