Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance

240 Pages·2012·1.87 MB·English

by  Hélène Neveu Kringelbach

Dancing Cultures
DANCE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES
General Editors:
Helen Wulff, Stockholm University and Jonathan Skinner, Queen’s University, Belfast
Advisory Board:
Alexandra Carter, Marion Kant, Tim Scholl
In all cultures, and across time, people have danced. Mesmerizing performers and
spectators alike, dance creates spaces for meaningful expressions that are held back in
daily life. Grounded in ethnography, this series explores dance and bodily movement
in cultural contexts at the juncture of history, ritual and performance, including
musical, in an interconnected world.
Volume 1
Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland
Helena Wulff
Volume 2
Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
Volume 3
Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism and Social Change in an Irish Village
Adam Kaul
Volume 4
Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance
Edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
Volume 5
Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Volume 6
Learning Senegalese Sabar: Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar
Eleni Bizas
Dancing Cultures
Globalization, Tourism and Identity in
the Anthropology of Dance
q
Edited by
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
Published in 2012 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2012, 2014 Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
First paperback edition published in 2014
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dancing cultures : globalization, tourism and identity in the anthropology of
dance / edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner.
p. cm. -- (Dance & performance studies ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-85745-575-8 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-78238-522-6
(paperback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-85745-576-5 (ebook)
1. Dance--Anthropological aspects. 2. Dance--Social aspects. 3. Tourism--
Anthropological aspects.
4. Tourism--Social aspects. I. Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène, 1969- II. Skinner,
Jonathan, Ph. D.
GV1588.6.D394 2012
306.4’846--dc23
2012013684
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN: 978-1-78238-522-6 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-85745-576-5 ebook
Contents
List of Figures vii
q
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction The Movement of Dancing Cultures 1
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
Part I: Dance and Globalization
1 Globalization and the Dance Import–Export Business: The Jive Story 29
Jonathan Skinner
2 Ballet Culture and the Market: A Transnational Perspective 46
Helena Wulff
3 ‘We’ve Got This Rhythm in Our Blood’: Dancing Identities in 60
Southern Italy
Karen Lüdtke
Part II: Tourism, Social Transformation and the Dance
4 Performance in Tourism: Transforming the Gaze and the Tourist 77
Encounter at Híwus Feasthouse
Linda Scarangella-McNenly
5 Movement on the Move: Performance and Dance Tourism in 100
Southeast Asia
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
6 Dance, Visibility and Representational Self-awareness in an Emberá 121
Community in Panama
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos
Part III: Dance, Identity and the Nation
7 Moving Shadows of Casamance: Performance and Regionalism 143
in Senegal
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
vi ■ Contents
8 Ballet Folklórico Mexicano: Choreographing National Identity in 161
a Transnational Context
Olga Nájera-Ramírez
9 Dance, Youth and Changing Gender Identities in Korea 177
Séverine Carrausse
10 Preparation, Presentation and Power: Children’s Performances 194
in a Balinese Dance Studio
Jonathan McIntosh
Epilogue Making Culture through Dance 211
Caroline Potter
Notes on Contributors 219
Index 223
List of Figures
2.1 Gina Tse in Swan Lake with Royal Swedish Ballet 47
q
5.1 Guests participate in the Saravahn dance in Vientiane, Laos 105
5.2 Urban visitors participate in a rural tayuban in Java 107
5.3 Overseas visitors participate in tourist tayuban in Java 108
5.4 Locals join in at the Tayuban Festival in Java 109
7.1 Bakalama women dancers performing in Dakar, April 2003 149
7.2 Bakalama musicians performing in Dakar, April 2003 155
8.1 Grupo Folklórico de la Universidad de Guadalajara, circa 1965 163
8.2 Arce Manjares family performing in Guadalajara, circa 1960s 164
10.1 Happy applies make-up to Tomi’s face prior to a pentas 203
10.2 Costume for the female welcome dance, Tari Panyembrama 206
Acknowledgements
The authors of this volume would like to thank the following for their support
q
and encouragement of this volume. The European Association of Social
Anthropologists gave us the initial prompt in the direction of Dancing Cultures
in their 2004 annual conference in Vienna, where we convened a panel under the
title, ‘Meaning in Motion: Advancing the Anthropology of Dance’. The panel was
the first step towards the constitution of a network of dance anthropologists who
have met subsequently, shared and explored similar approaches to dance and culture
and, ultimately, led to this volume. Andrée Grau was a discussant on the EASA
panel, and her perceptive comments have substantially helped to shape the theme
of the book and all of our discussions. We should also like to thank the anonymous
reviewers at Berghahn Books for their constructive comments and support, and
Barnaly Pande for her editing assistance.
Berghahn Books generously supports the study of dance and performance
through their ‘Dance and Performance Studies’ book series. We are grateful to
Berghahn and to the series editors for including this volume in the series. On
the production side, we are also grateful to the staff at Berghahn, Ann Przyzycki
especially, for their patience and encouragement towards the completion of this
project.
Introduction
The Movement of Dancing Cultures
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
q
Nigerian nationality was for me and my generation an acquired taste – like cheese. Or
better still, like ballroom dancing. Not dancing per se, for that came naturally; but this
titillating version of slow-slow-quick-quick-slow performed in close body contact with
a female against a strange, elusive beat. I found, however, that once I had overcome my
initial awkwardness I could do it pretty well.
—Chinua Achebe
Thus opens the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s reflections on life growing
up in colonial Nigeria as a ‘British-protected child’ (Achebe 2010). Achebe
acknowledges that he inhabits – and embodies – the ‘middle ground’ between
colonialism and postcolonialism. Whilst he has fond nostalgia for his imperious
school teachers, he craves for an independent, strong and free Nigeria, but also
laments the failings and difficulties of a country in disarray. The above analogy sums
up Achebe’s postcolonial ambivalence. ‘His’ dancing comes naturally, driven by a
drum beat, but he is also attracted to the colonial quickstep, a European import,
acquired, refined and ‘cultured’. Argentinean dance scholar Marta Savigliano writes
about her identity and the tango dance with similar ambivalence: it is the ‘locus
of [her] identification … ever since [she] moved outside of her culture’ (Savigliano
1995: 12). She recognizes that it is a stereotype of her culture but that she still needs
it as her cultural prop. Yet as a woman in a male-dominated postcolonial South
American world, it is a dance where she can find some space to ‘decolonize’ herself
doubly:
Tango is the main ingredient in my project of decolonization because I have
no choice. It is the stereotype of the culture to which I belong. If I reject
my stereotype I fall, caught in nowhere. Caught in endless explanations
of what I am not and justifications of what I am. Caught in comparisons
with the colonizer. By assuming the tango attitude and taking it seriously,
I can work at expanding its meaning and power. My power, actively tango.
Tango is my strategic language, a way of talking about, understanding,
exercising decolonization. (Savigliano 1995: 16)
2 ■ Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner
Such is the importance of dance in a person’s life, strong identifications carried
with them, in this case a dance borne out of rural displacement, ‘a tense dance’
(Savigliano 1995: 30) of embrace and healing in a time of separation and violence.
Dancing Cultures is a volume featuring and exploring dance as it relates to
culture. As terms, ‘dance’ and ‘culture’ share a lack of concreteness: they are – they
become – in their doing. Culture, a politically charged concept, is a creative process,
one of integration as much as differentiation, and the boundaries between the two
cannot be clear-cut. It is also an essential premise of this volume that there is a
close relationship between dance and social change. Our contention is that dance
does not simply ‘reflect’ what happens in society or serve a particular ‘function’,
but that it is often as central to social life as music and other universal forms of
expression. We would like to suggest, therefore, that anthropology has much to
gain from giving due attention to dance in its multiple forms and social contexts.
One of the objectives of this collection is indeed to demonstrate that a focus on
dance has the potential to reveal domains of individual experience and social life
that remain hidden from view in an exclusive focus on the verbal. Dance makes
meaning, but in different ways from the verbal, since as Farnell reminds us, ‘body
movement [can] provide human beings with a resource for action in a semiotic
modality that frequently elides spoken expression but is never separate from the
nature, powers, and capacities of linguistically capable agents’ (Farnell 1999: 343).
Dance is often performed together with music, song, sometimes poetry or other
oratorical performance, as in the West African traditions of praise singing. To
reflect the entanglement of dance with other elements, it has become increasingly
frequent to use the term ‘performance’, and several contributors in this volume do so
deliberately. But there is also a conscious choice to retain the term ‘dance’ because
bodily movement is our primary focus, and because many studies of performance in
anthropology have emphasized music at the expense of a holistic approach to what
bodies do (see Moore 1997; Wade 2000; Askew 2002; Ebron 2002; White 2008).
Can dance, then, simply be equated with body movement?
The Nature of Dance
In the 1960s and 1970s, as the anthropology of dance was being established as a
sub-discipline, the question of its object of study seemed urgent. There was heated
debate on the nature of ‘dance’. Most dance scholars agreed with Mauss (1973
[1935]) that dance movement and its evaluation varied cross-culturally, but there
was disagreement as to whether the study of dance should be subsumed within that
of music, whether dance necessarily possessed a purposefully aesthetic dimension,
whether it had to be addressed to an audience to qualify as ‘dance’, or whether
movement had to be recognized as ‘dance’ in a given cultural context to be worthy
of study. Much of the debate is summed up in Hanna (1979a) and in the comments
and reply that followed her theoretical review.
The debate has faded somewhat, and few scholars now attempt to come up
with a universal definition, even though, as Wulff notes, ‘dance anthropologists
seem to converge on a consideration of bounded rhythmical movements that are