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Method and Theory in Analyzing Dance Structure with an Analysis of Tongan Dance

1972; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/849721

2156-7417

Adrienne L. Kaeppler,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

D ance ethnology, with its relatively recent history, has so far been mainly concerned with description and comparison. Dance ethnologists are usually dancers who look at dance as a thing in itself that can be studied in isolation from its cultural context and can be described and compared with other dance forms. Often they either don't know or don't care about the ethnology part of dance ethnology. Using descriptive tools, they record a dance as it occurs during a particular performance, often second-hand because it is usually done from motion pictures. This procedure yields a description of how a dance was performed on a particular occasion. A corpus of material can be collected and described in this way, making it possible to analyze from the observer's point of view the structure of various types of dance existing in a society and to isolate traits such as movement patterns, motifs, lines of direction and repetitions. But ethnologists want to know more than this. Twentieth Century anthropology has developed from a descriptive, natural science approach to an emphasis on theory. To an anthropologist, descriptions of dances around the world are not ethnology, but only data which then must be analyzed in ways that are ethnographically meaningful in both theory and method. No doubt there are many theoretical frameworks and methods through which this can be accomplished. This paper will explore one of them. Ethno-scientific analysis as used in anthropology seeks to analyze culture (or parts of it) in such a way that the resulting description would be comparable to a grammar which enables an investigator to learn to speak a language.2 Such a description of dance would give a reader the information necessary to operate as a member of the society he is studying with regard to any activity that includes or could include dance. We must begin without a priori assumptions that dance even exists in the society. If we find there is such a category we must put aside our own cultural notions as to what constitutes dance and look instead how such a category is structured by the society we study. In other words we want to know what movements are significant and how they can be combined from the point of view of the holders of the tradition themselves. Only a small segment of all possible movements are significant in any single dance tradition. These significant units