Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble

Concentrating on the Caribbean Basin and the coastal area of northeast South America, Yvonne Daniel considers three African-derived religious systems that rely heavily on dance behavior--Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahamian Candomble. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing's embodied knowledge, Daniel examines these misunderstood and oppressed performative dances in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Yvonne Daniel is an associate professor of dance and Afro-American studies at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba, and has performed with the Cuban National Folkloric Ensemble and as Guest Artist for several Latin American dance companies.