Address on Career of Dance Anthropologist

There are relatively few anthropologists (or other scientists) who have studied dance, and less than a handful who concentrate exclusively on it. The social scientists' avoidance of dance can be explained in the following ways. Dance has only recently been thought of as an element of man's culture, and therefore, as a legitimate concern for study. Dance has been disparaged as a minor art unworthy of study due, as Munro puts it, to the "survival of the many obsolete prejudices, based partly on Puritanical dislike of bodily beauty and gayety [and] partly on the inferior social status of actors and dancers." A technological explanation is that it has only recently been possible to record and preserve dance. Finally, the social scientists' need to emphasize the "science" in their disciplines has led them to avoid the more "humanistic" cultural domain.^