ANTHROPOLOGY OF DANCE

Catalog description

The anthropology of dance has often been overlooked by serious ethnographers, but similar to the related field of ethnomusicology, it illustrates the many ways in which culture is - quite literally - performed. In this course we will define dance from an anthropological perspective within the broader context of human movement systems and study the related issues of aesthetics, body modification, gender, identity politics, globalization, cultural appropriation and cultural hegemony. This course will include two case studies and will also introduce students to the necessary tools for conducting successful fieldwork in dance anthropology.