Curt Sachs and his Heritage: A Critical Review of World History of the Dance with a Survey of Recent Studies that Perpetuate his Ideas

viewed in the proper historical perspective. Although there are substantial errors in theory, methodology, and fact in this study, most of these faults have their source in the specific scholarly tradition in which Sachs was working. The framework for this study, first published as Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes in 1933, depends, to a large extent, on the paradigms of German and Austrian ethnology which were being developed in the first decades of the twentieth century. The disciplines of German ethnology, American anthropology, and British social anthropology were very different from each other during this period (and to a lesser extent these differences persist today). The distinction was especially sharp between the German-speaking and the English-speaking countries. Most of the ideas of the German ethnological school were never accepted in the field of American anthropology; in fact, most of the writings of its main proponents, Friedrick Ratzel, Fritz Graebner, and Father Wilhelm Schmidt, were never even translated into English. Therefore, with the translation of World History of the Dance into English in 1937 and its publication in 1963 in paperback, the book was transplanted into an alien intellectual climate. Thus, much of the misunderstanding and misuse of Sachs's ideas derives from the somewhat anomalous position this book occupies in the anthropological and historical literature available in English.