Anthropology and the Study of Dance: A Report

Abstract

ICAES provides an opportunity for anthropologists from throughout the world to assemble every five years. This year, a number of pre-congress conferences were organized to provide settings for intensive interaction among small groups of specialists preparatory to the general Congress sessions. The report I was asked to present to the general ICAES section drew heavily upon discussions by pre-Congress participants in dance, music, oral literature, and visual arts, as well as comments at other contemporaneous formal and informal meetings with dance anthropologists (including two active CORD members, Joann Kealiinohomoku and Anya P. Royce) and two participants from the 1972 CORD conference on Dance and Anthropology (Alan P. Merriam and Beryl Bellman). The report was, of course, also shaped by my own perspectives on the anthropological study of dance. The paragraphs which follow include what is essentially an abstract of my report to the Congress. The importance of dance as a phenomenon for anthropological study derives from its near universality, its possible biological and evolutionary significance as innate behavior with survival value (Norbeck, ICAES 1973, Blacking, ICAES 1973), its stylistic endurance, episodic nature which is in some sense repeated by other actors, malleability, apparent record in antiquity, interrelation with other behavioral phenomena, accessibility to empirical observation and film recording (Collier 1967, Sorenson 1967, Prost, ICAES 1973, Sorenson and Jablonko, ICAES 1973) and relative lack of systematic study by any of the social science disciplines (see Royce 1973 and Merriam 1973 on approaches to the study of dance). Dance as recurring human behavior thus constitutes a legitimate cultural field of inquiry.