The politics and poetics of dance

Since the mid-1980s, there has been an explosion of dance studies as scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to dance. Anthropologists have played a critical role in this new dance scholarship, contributing comparative analyses, critiquing colonial and ethnocentric categories, and situating studies of dance and movement within broader frameworks of embodiment and the politics of culture. This review highlights ethnographic and historical studies that foreground dance and other structured movement systems in the making of colonial cultures; the constitution of gender, ethnic and national identities; the formation of discourses of exoticization; and the production of social bodies. Several works that employ innovative approaches to the study of dance and movement are explored in detail.