This article ultimately identifies style in the dance and human movement studies by contrasting it with technique in various dance forms. The essay concludes that “style” in dance forms (and other physical activities) is centered in the human capacity for language use, which permits the construction of personal identities and self-awareness.

Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly.

This essay addresses three questions: (1) What happens to information that cannot be recorded on film or videotape? (2) Is the “visual image” conceived to be an autonomous, universalized object of study, as if it exists prior to and independent of conventional human languages? (3) Who are the much-talked-about viewers of ethnographic films, and what is their relationship to visual anthropologists' investigations? The essay's focus is on Grimshaw's statement about visual anthropologists who “seek legitimation by turning away from the mainstream textual tradition” [Grimshaw 2001: 172]. I have attempted to submit evidence that such a move weakens visual anthropologists' capacity to provide “mainstream anthropology” with a vital, growing and legitimate contribution.

Postmodernism in the American dance world began in the 1960s, largely through the influence of Sally Banes (affected by Susan Sontag's ideas about "a transparent art''), and had adverse effects, worldwide, on traditional forms of dancing in the sphere of commercial dancing. The results are especially apparent in movies produced by an Indian conglomerate of film companies known as "Bollywood'' and its namesakes.The author argues that "Bollywood dance'' is a debased version of traditional Indian culture that is both nihilistic and meaningless. At the same time, it provides valuable insights into a "pseudo- modern world'' [Kirby 2006] and globalized marketing economics. Several postcolonialist writers enter the discussion because they object to formerly colonized peoples represented as "hollow mimics'' of the Western world; however, the author suggests that they are simply praising other cultures at the expense of their own. She concludes with a quotation from Henrik Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People [1928 (1882)].

This discussion criticizes an outdated style of writing about dances and rituals in New Guinea, a difficult task because this area of the world has produced excellent writers on the same subject, notably "Buck'' Schieffelin's The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers (1976). The reasons for failure are given as the review proceeds in the hope that others may gain insights into writing about a difficult and often intractable subject.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes To view the visual representations to which Dilworth refers, go to www.anthro.uiuc.edu/jashm/dilworth. See Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement (JASHM), 2001–02, Vols. 11–12, Nos. 4 and 1 (Double issue), for complete discussion. [Available from the Anthropology Department, University of Illinois, at Champaign-Urbana.] Sadly she did not, being a product of Richard Schechner's program at New York University in performance studies. Fairbank uses the term “pidginization” to describe the current drive: to create a national Chinese dance form which is a mixture of various movement systems and vocabularies intended to be used “principally for intergroup communication.”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In fairness to Bartenieff, who quit the choreometrics project long before its completion, readers should know that she said, “Dance cannot profitably stretch its concepts to fit the mold of existing scientific models” [1967 Bartenieff , Irmgard 1967 Research in Anthropology: A Study of Dance Styles in Primitive Culture . CORD Research Annual ( May ). [Google Scholar]: 68].

Adrienne McLean says, ‘‘To write about a historical movie star’s subjectivity, then, will mean always, if not only, to seek and to consider the discursive signs that at once indicate and produce struggles between being and doing, between working at making films and working at having a private life, between defining oneself and being defined by others’’ [3]. McLean stimulates her readers’ interest in how Rita Hayworth’s subjectivity ‘‘as worker and woman and the commercial discourses in which [her subjectivity] was produced and located interact with Hollywood’s own labor power differences and with the social tensions and concerns of the culture at large’’ [3]. She also discusses the ways Hayworth ‘‘has been positioned and made use of within academic film studies, particularly feminist film studies’’ [4]. The problem (beyond those working in film studies) consists of the many people (such as critics, gossip columnists, writers of fan magazine articles, fans themselves, newspaper reporters, and others) who ‘‘hesitate to grant anything resembling subjectivity and agency to a female star image’’—much less to a star so well-known ‘‘for her commodification, objectification, passivity and one dimensionality as a performer and pin-up’’ [4]. Having said that, it is hard to know where to begin. This book is praiseworthy in all aspects of the subject. I recommend that cultural and social anthropologists read it because of its emphasis on the construction of meaning. The dance world, too, should be interested, not only because of the images of dancers, dancing and dances that the work conveys, but specifically because of McLean’s cogent discussion about the collaboration between Valerie Bettis and Rita Hayworth [172–197]. McLean’s treatment of the disparity between the constructed image and the person [81], and thus of Rita Hayworth’s struggle to define self and identity [6], amid the processes of commodification and their influence on modes of subjectivity, seems to me unexceptionable. McLean asserts that the visibility of women on the screen becomes a sign of their invisibility as historical women and as agents at work in the world [5], emphasizing the subjectivities that are located in the actions and responses of spectators in relation to the film image: ‘‘Hollywood films . . .determine and produce their own concepts of ethnicity Visual Anthropology, 18: 485–488, 2005 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460590958455

“Clearly, the root problem is how to define and locate human agency” —Brenda Farnell, “Getting Out of the Habitus” [2000: 403] Helen Thomas depends uncritically and heavily on Bryan Turner's sociol...

What is the difference between “hoofing for a buck” and performing authentic dances from other cultures? Is it true that “authentic reconstructions” are “too arty” for cabaret, film, and nightclub entertainment? And what happens when moves from authentic dance forms are appropriated, distorted, and so changed that they are unrecognizable to originators and practitioners of the form? These and other questions regarding commercialism, Orientalism, and authenticity are addressed in this essay, which finally contextualizes them in current postmodern discourse. Drawing upon Adrienne McLean's admirable essay, “The Thousand Ways there are to Move: Camp and Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole” from Bernstein and Studlar's Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film [1997], I examine several provocative subjects: “Paying the Piper;” “Language Analogies and Wannabees;” and “Knowers and the Known.” I reach a provisional conclusion that, to anyone whose conception of East Indian dancing is based upon Hollywood's Orientalism, authentic work goes unrecognized and is often viewed as strange because it does not confirm to the images of “Hindu routines,” “Oriental (or Exotic) dance,” or “American Show Dancing.”

Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000: xii + 270 pp., notes, bibliography, index and 9 pages of photographs between pp. 106–107. $45.00 (hdbd.), no paperback.

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This paper addresses two questions: (1) Why do dances, ceremonies and rituals lend themselves to adaptations that bear no resemblance to their originals? and (2) Why is it creative to change dances, rituals and ceremonies, but plagiary when written texts or spoken words are involved? After explaining why the problem exists in general, the author draws upon Edward M. Bruner's work on tourism and ethnography in Indonesia to further elucidate the problem. From the viewpoint of a Western dancer and social anthropologist, the author provides ethnographic evidence from Africa and Aboriginal Australia to substantiate her claims that (a) dances are changed (in the words of a Tswana headmistress, "perfected"), and (b) ceremonies, rituals and dances are the bearers of meanings that are distorted and violated if the spatial relationships among the performers are changed. She asserts that the notion of "primitive dancing" is a result of the defining consciousnesses of dominant, Western societies, not the result of the consciousness of the performers and/or "owners" of the dances, ceremonies and rituals. She advances the thesis that tourism does not, in fact, preserve cultural traditions (our own or those of others), nor does it assist in maintaining cultural identity, concluding that "Tourists live in a world apart—in a time/space defined by a total lack of political or moral responsibility whatsoever. International tourism is a special kind of escape for the relative minority who can afford it. Television travel is the poor person's substitute."

The author first defended the credibility of movement‐writing in Chapter 2, Section 3, of a B.Litt.1 thesis entitled Social Anthropology and [the] Dance, [Oxford, U.K., 1972]. Seven theoretical criteria from Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art [1969] were used to illustrate to examiners who knew nothing about movement‐writing in any form that Laban's system was not merely a mnemonic device. The guts of the chapter are revived in the following essay because of long‐standing, still‐existing confusion about the relations between movement‐writing and research and between “notation” and “writing” with regard to human movement studies.

In this paper, the author discloses some of the hidden dualisms and behavioristic ideas that persist in contemporary thinking specifically about dancing, but generally about all systems of expressive human movement. The issues involved are: (a) lack of an adequate concept of, and appreciation for, 'language" with regard to the medium of human movement; (b) the fact that the medical concept of the human body isn't an appropriate model for the study of communicative movements; (c) the problem created by separating body and mind, body and verbalization, or body and "person" for those who attempt rationally to understand the art of dancing and other systems of expressive human movement, say, in systems of sign language. These issues include widely‐held unquestioned assumptions that prevent significant progress in the study of all structured systems of human movement. The author writes from a semasiological standpoint which is neither dualistic nor behavioristic. As the discussion proceeds, major points regarding semasiology as an alternative approach to the dance and human movement studies emerge, for readers who are unfamiliar with this theoretical point of view.1

American EthnologistVolume 22, Issue 2 p. 427-427 Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women's Initiation. CORINNE A. KRATZ DRID WILLIAMS, DRID WILLIAMS University of Minnesota, St. PaulSearch for more papers by this author DRID WILLIAMS, DRID WILLIAMS University of Minnesota, St. PaulSearch for more papers by this author First published: May 1995 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.2.02a00230AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume22, Issue2May 1995Pages 427-427 RelatedInformation