Dancing Cultures

Dance is more than an aesthetic of life – dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is a Senior Lecturer in African Studies at UCL. She was a researcher at the African Studies Centre in Oxford. Her current research interests include dance and musical theatre in West Africa and beyond, contemporary choreography in Africa and transnational families across Senegal and Europe.

Jonathan Skinner is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of Before the Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat (Arawak Publications 2004) and co-editor of Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (Berghahn Books 2011).