PRAGMATIST PHILOSOPHY AND DANCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY DANCE RESEARCH IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH by Eric Mullis. 2019. Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan. 247 pp. $89.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9783030293130. $59.99 paper. ISBN: 9783030293154. $44.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783030293147. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-29314-7

Abstract

Eric Mullis provides a rigorous demonstration of interdisciplinary scholarship, merging performance theory with theology, philosophy, and autoethnographic and historical research methodologies. Mullis’s Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance: Interdisciplinary Dance Research in the American South addresses the value of combining research modalities and drawing on embodied research as part of a process model of dance philosophy. Mullis examines ecstatic states within Appalachian charismatic Pentecostal churches and the ethics of researching and representing these traditions through performance. His work differs from recent publications on dance and philosophy in its emphasis on pragmatism and somaesthetics. For example, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (Farinas and Van Camp 2021) and Midwest Studies in Philosophy’s December 2019 issue dedicated to dance philosophy feature a wide range of philosophical topics, theories, and methodologies, including Mullis’s discussion of political dance and Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetic perspectives. Mullis’s monograph brings a renewed focus on pragmatism, which has been overwhelmed in the American context by phenomenological, analytic, and continental philosophical approaches. However, Pragmatist Philosophy shares a focus on philosophical approaches to dance and religion with Kimerer LaMothe’s Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (2004) and an emphasis on relationships between dance and religion with Sam Gill’s Dancing Culture Religion (2012). Simultaneously, Mullis draws attention to autoethnographic methodologies in the dance field, aligning with work such as the edited collection Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance (Davida 2011), Karen Schupp’s (2017) autoethnographic studies of dance competition culture, and Lliane Loots’s (2016) “The Autoethnographic Act of Choreography,” to name but a few. Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance’s interdisciplinarity governs its structure, offering a journey that feels, at times, segmented by research modalities and disciplinary methodologies, while drawing varied methodologies into dialogue with one another across eight chapters. Pentecostalism and charismatic states link autoethnographic field notes to philosophy, choreographic analysis, and religious history. Chapter 1 performatively enacts a historical and pragmatist justification for autobiography as a valid form of philosophical inquiry, while also conveying Mullis’s positionality within his ethnographic research of Southern Pentecostal churches. Beginning with an autoethnography of Mullis’s journey to choreographing Later Rain and its development into formal sections that also function as standalone performances (Paw Creek, This Falls to Us, and The Land of Nod), he provides theoretical, religious historical, and methodological background before closing with a standard outline of chapters. Mullis frames the book’s remaining structure around issues arising from his creation of Later Rain and its stand-alone sections,