Dance Anthropology: What is it? Who does it? What use is it?

By Jennifer Shennan

DANZ Magazine, Issue 28, Winter 2012

Jennifer Sheenan gives insight into the processes and importance of Dance Anthropology.

In a small but inspiring book, The Function of Dance in Human Society (1942), Claire Holt and Gregory Bateson in Form and Function of the Dance in Bali, wrote: "To an anthropologist, next to the question of who, when, how, and why certain members of a given society dance, arises the problem of the relationship of the peculiar character of the dance to the character of the people concerned, and to the whole pattern of the culture." 

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