Indigenous Dance & Dancing Indian: Contested Representation in the Global Era - Hardcover

Krystal, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1607320967 ISBN 13: 9781607320968

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2012

Synopsis

Book & CD. Focusing on the enactment of identity in dance, Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian is a cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, and cross-national comparison of indigenous dance practices. Considering four genres of dance in which indigenous people are represented -- K'iche Maya traditional dance, powwow, folkloric dance, and dancing sports mascots -- the book addresses both the ideational and behavioural dimensions of identity. Each dance is examined as a unique cultural expression in individual chapters, and then all are compared in the conclusion, where striking parallels and important divergences are revealed. Ultimately, Krystal describes how dancers and audiences work to construct and consume satisfying and meaningful identities through dance by either challenging social inequality or reinforcing the present social order. Detailed ethnographic work, thorough case studies, and an insightful narrative voice make this a substantial addition to scholarly literature on dance in the Americas. It will be of interest to scholars of Native American studies, social sciences, and performing arts.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Krystal is an assistant professor of anthropology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinios.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Indigenous Dance and Dancing Indian

Contested Representation in the Global Era

By Matthew Krystal

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2012 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-096-8

Contents

List of Figures, 
Preface: Ethnography and Ethnographer, 
Acknowledgments, 
Part One: Introduction, 
Chapter 1: Dance, Culture, and Identity, 
Chapter 2: Representational Dance and the Problem of Authenticity, 
Part Two: K'iche' Maya Traditional Dance, 
Chapter 3: Conquest, Colonialism, and Continuity, 
Chapter 4: The Dance of the Conquest and Contested National Identity, 
Part Three: Native American Powwow, 
Chapter 5: Origin, Change, and Continuity in Powwow, 
Chapter 6: Characteristics, Functions, and Meanings in Contemporary Powwow, 
Chapter 7: Powwow, Self-Representation, and Multiplicity of Identity, 
Part Four: Folkloric Dance, 
Chapter 8: Folkloric Dance, Modernity, and Appropriation, 
Chapter 9: Appropriation, Round 2: Immigrant Folkloric Dance, 
Chapter 10: Back to the Field: Indigenous Folkloric Dance, 
Part Five: Chiefs, Kings, Mascots, and Martyrs, 
Chapter 11: Dancing Indian in Sports: Origins and Development, 
Chapter 12: Chief Illiniwek Enacted in Ritual and Myth, 
Chapter 13: Chief Illiniwek Contested, 
Part Six: Conclusion, 
Chapter 14: Dance in Comparison, 
Chapter 15: Confusions and Conclusions, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Dance, Culture, and Identity

Peeking above the trees of Grant Park, the tops of some of Chicago's most famous buildings scrape a perfect clear blue July sky. The lakefront park is taken over by the Taste of Chicago, a mega-festival featuring cuisine from scores of the city's numerous and diverse restaurants. In addition to food, "The Taste" offers entertainment. The city provides a number of performance venues, and reflecting a strategy that embraces (and channels) ethnic diversity, it has invited the Mexican Dance Ensemble of Chicago to perform on the "Fun Time Stage." The stage anchors an open meadow lined by booths and tents oriented to children and parents and even a merry-go-round (but no beer vendors). The space and presentation construct not only ethnic diversity, but appropriate family fun as well.

As it is Sunday morning, the festival is lightly attended and the audience is small. The performance, however, is enthusiastic. Dress and props are carefully controlled, uniform. In one presentation, all the men wear identical pants, boots, and bandanas, although their belts vary slightly. The backs of their identical jackets are adorned with identical appliqués featuring the iconic Mexican image of eagle, snake in beak, perched on a cactus. In another performance, women's costumes are identical in form down to matching earrings, although their flowing layered skirts vary in color. This visual, near-complete sublimation of individual to group (and culture) extends to movement and sound. The dancing is crisp; bodies are coordinated tightly to one another and to the music. The effect is particularly dramatic in pieces that feature stamping. The perfect simultaneity of several dancers stamping in unison with the beat of the music overtly communicates precision of performance. Beneath the surface are more subtle messages about unity in the expression of tradition.

Viewing the performance reminds me of other forms I have been observing. Traditional K'iche' dance, partly because it is fundamentally narrative, features vestments, masks, and steps that vary by character but adhere to convention for each figure. Powwow dancers construct regalia and perform dances that afford a greater degree of personal expression within general aesthetic guidelines. All, however, to a varying extent, articulate individual dancer to dance convention.

I approach dance not as a choreographer or as a dancer, but as a social scientist interested in how people form, contest, and communicate culture (and particularly the culture of identity). However, dance is linked in the popular imagination to anthropology more than it is actually investigated by anthropologists. This is unfortunate as dance is instructive of cultural knowledge and social practice to insiders and outsiders alike. It communicates overt information about the current state of social affairs but also tacit information about the conduct of social affairs and even the nature of human experience. However, before getting into dance as a cultural and social act, some attention to defining it specifically is warranted.

Dance is diverse and difficult to define, and the focus here necessarily favors depth of field over sharp clarity. At root, dance involves formal, intentional movement. This intentional movement, even in its "free" forms, involves some degree of bodily conformity to socially shared conventions. Music is common but not necessary to dance. Continuing the notion that individuals express connection to group and convention through dance, rhythm, an essential component of music, provides an auditory framework to organize particular (or particle-like) dancers into coordinated movement. As such, dance enacts the coordination of individuals to group through convention. It may help to employ a common metaphor articulated by early thinkers in social science. If we take human society as an organism, dance provides a code for forming cells into organs and organs into organism. It is more complex, however, than individuals simply articulating themselves bodily to convention.

The commonality of dance across a wide variety of societies reflects a basic challenge of human social organization. Regardless of scale and complexity, societies must articulate individuals with self-awareness and self-oriented drives to group purposes. The degree to which human beings share knowledge and cooperate socially marks us as a species and is at the root of our adaptive fitness. Alone we are slow and weak, but together, sharing accumulated knowledge through symbolic systems of communication, we become the world's dominant species. In social groups, from families to communities to polities, the human potential is realized. Although it is clear that individual human beings survive and thrive in social groups, we do not generally follow the guidelines expressed in our cultures blindly or perfectly. Cooperating with the group necessarily entails sublimation of some individual desires, and we do not always go along happily or willingly. The challenge for any society, then, is creating schemes of social organization that compel conformity but accommodate individual needs and capacities. Varying by culture, history, economy, environment, and so forth, societies have developed a dizzying array of solutions to this fundamental human problem. This is not the place for an ethnology of individual and society, but a clear and logical pattern exists. Rigid structures that rely heavily on coercion foment social tension. Loose and fluid social organizations — the type typically found among foraging bands — afford a great deal of individual autonomy and defuse social tension. Most societies exist somewhere in between, requiring more persistent organized social structure than foraging bands but relying on a combination of avenues for human expression within group conformity. This balance is never perfect, and to get people to go along sometimes requires more direct articulation of ideology and use of force.

I draw a deliberate parallel between this diversity of articulation of individual to group and the diversity of dance form. This is not to say that foragers always have free and loose dance forms that reflect their economy and social organization or that stratified complex societies produce exclusively rigid hierarchical forms of dance. Rather, dance establishes concrete patterns of body conformity (in dress and in movement) and concrete patterns of spatial relations among individuals. It, in effect, enacts and works on that basic challenge of human social organization. When individuals dance they embrace or challenge tradition and express conformity or individualism. It may complicate or make the picture more interesting to point out that, varying by genre and context, dance allows the individual to do all of these things at once. A dancer can follow tradition and innovate while expressing individualism that conforms to the norms of the group. As such, dance is about two basic human tensions: between cultural continuity and cultural change at the collective level and between individual expression and group conformity at the personal level.

Accordingly, dance is an ideal context for members of a society to express, to contest, to contemplate how individuals should be articulated to group. If we accept this basic premise, dance then informs an array of related topics that are governed by the culture of social organization. Most obvious among these are the norms of social interaction. Perhaps more than specific rules, dance asserts the notion that human social interactions are rule-governed. It may tell us how men and women are to interact (e.g., who is to "lead," in the common English metaphor taken from dance) but the constant is that these relations are not random. Rules that govern who does what and when they do it exist in life and in dance, sometimes clear, sometimes tacit.

So enters the topic of social status, those categories of interaction that organize individuals into social structures. Rules of social discourse are informed by roles connected to social statuses held by individuals that are activated in particular social settings. Statuses and associated roles may be hierarchically arranged, and dance can embrace and enact or challenge and invert rank. Accordingly, dance is about rule-governed social behavior, social statuses inhabited by individuals, and the arrangement of these statuses (hierarchical or otherwise). How it fits individuals into group says something about the nature of personhood itself. In dance (as in society) people come together and follow, bend, or break the conventions of social life. Dance sets itself apart from more common activities by doing all of this in an overt and formalized fashion. As such, the anthropological definition of dance that I propose is as follows: intentional, formalized movement of bodies that expresses and contests shared ideas about social structure (including its norms, statuses, and notion of personhood) and the articulation of individuals and groups to social structure.

At this point I begin to narrow the focus to a specific category of dance. The forms I described in the opening paragraphs are representational dances. To define representational dance, some exploration of representation as a concept is necessary. Representation is a heavily loaded term whether employed by social scientists or other social actors. It has social, cultural, artistic, and political dimensions. Basic to human culture are the variety and intensity with which we use acts and objects to stand for or signify concepts and other acts and objects. We experience life through systems of symbols. A combination of sounds represents, by convention, an idea; representation is linguistic and symbolic. Moreover, in language and particularly in art and performance, representations are multivalent. Acts and objects represent multiple ideas, some explicit and highly conventional, others tacit and circulated in subsets of a society.

Representation, however, is about more than symbols and meanings. It has clear political and material dimensions as well. Politicians in democratic societies (ideally) represent their constituents. In disputes, attorneys represent their clients. Beyond the ideals of democracy and peaceful resolution of conflict, social inequality is reflected in representation. A given segment of society (e.g., men) may be overrepresented among formal governing bodies or in the organization of economic production. Others (say, women) may be under-represented in politics and economy. Compounding problems of underrepresentation, minority or marginal peoples are frequently misrepresented either by well-intentioned but ethnocentric advocates or by compromised but official bureaucrats and politicians.

The point of stressing the complexity of representation is to bring to the surface how a given act can have both symbolic and political dimensions. Particularly useful to the present discussion is Terrence Turner's (1992, 2002) treatments of Kayapo (Xingu River Basin, Brazil) use of audiovisual technology as a medium of self-representation. Turner responds to critics who assert that the incorporation of high-tech video equipment undermines Kayapo culture because its origin is outside of their horticultural and foraging lifeway. Turner counters that it is not the medium of expression or the stabilization of expression in repeatable images that matters as much as the relationships among those who represent. Through shot composition, editing choices, and other technical aspects of filmmaking, the Kayapo have made video their own. They indigenize technology in two ways. They use it to express a distinct Kayapo worldview but also to effect political power and protect themselves from the "developmentalist state" of Brazil (Turner and Fajans-Turner 2006:3). As such, the resulting video products are complex technically and in the audiences that they attempt to reach. Turner terms the consequent multiplicity of messages (some available only to some members of the audience) "polyphony" (2002). Kayapo leaders contest and construct power through their use of complex metaphorically loaded speechmaking that is compelling to other Kayapo. Video aimed at and circulated among wider audiences serves to shame state officials and state institutions and thus undermines attempts to realize developmentalist policies. Turner (2002:246) concludes that "power is an effect of representation," not the other way around. Kayapo motivate one another to action, build alliances with other indigenous groups, and reach sympathetic nonindigenous outsiders through acts of representation that are symbolically compelling in multiple ways. Kayapo video, then, is representation of concepts through symbols and images that also seek to effect and protect collective political autonomy or self-representation.

What, then, makes a dance representational? Drawing on the work of Nahachewsky (1995) and Trimillos (1995), Anthony Shay, in Choreographing Identities, discerns between "representational and social modes" of dance (2006:27). However, as I outlined earlier, it is clear that dance is inherently social and representational. If the premise that dance is cultural behavior is accepted, then all dance represents a myriad of ideas about social life. What sets representational dance apart is its emphasis on deliberate representation, what it attempts to represent, and how it does so. First, representational dances are performed publicly, with a clear division between performers and audience. They intentionally construct images and messages intended for viewers who do not directly participate in the dancing. Although representational dance is performed in a context of socializing and socialization, it is not social in the sense of a prom. Just as a video recording of a political meeting is not actual decision making, courting may be referenced in representational dance, but the performance is not a part of actual courtship. Although distinct forms exist, Shay is careful to avoid reification of the categories of dance that he deploys, favoring instead the concept of "parallel traditions" (2006:9–14). Forms coexist. A dance presented in a formal venue in front of a paying audience may draw on several forms that are danced "in the field" (Shay 2006:9). Field dances, in turn, are enacted on various social occasions, at weddings, as rituals, and so forth. Shay rejects the evolutionism that has plagued the social sciences, recognizing that "dances in the field" and representational dances coexist. The modern does not replace the traditional but re-creates (or represents) it in novel settings. In short, representational dance is distinguished among various other dances by its overt theatricality.

Representational dances also differ from other forms in the relationship between audience and performer. First, as indicated above, an audience is necessary for representational dance. This is not to say that other kinds of dances are never observed. Rather, whereas representational dance requires an audience, social or sacred dancing can occur without spectators. Withoutan audience, representational dances are rehearsals. Second, dance forms vary in composition of performer and audience. Where social and sacred dances are generally performed within social groups, representational dance, particularly in the global era, is performed with audiences that include insiders and outsiders. Indeed, as I will explore below, sometimes the whole point of representational dance is to perform for outsiders. As such, it is appropriate to consider what a representational dance can say about collective identity as well as individual identity. In short, what representational dance works to construct is a unique cultural tradition, the foundation of identity. Similar to video described by Turner, representational dance is an intersection of politics and image, wherein performance works to influence and even compel insiders and outsiders.

DANCE AND ETHNICITY

Don Diego was a familiar client at the morería of my apprenticeship. He organized a dance group that performed the Dance of the Conquest, and his young son was learning traditional dance by taking a child's role in the Dance of the Mexicans. He had become comfortable enough with my presence that he invited me to an event he was hosting at his home. Although I did not know it at the time, that day on Don Diego's land would become one of the most important in my fieldwork. I would learn that a form of popular theater that I saw primarily as a tale about politics was as much about cosmology and mythology. I would come to better understand the effect of manipulating symbols in ritual and to learn of the power of kuux (clandestine liquor distilled from fruit). As with much of my fieldwork, I cannot claim such a day resulted from intentional "research design" or the like. I am fairly certain in retrospect that Don Diego invited Chepe (one of my teachers) with me, to ensure that I would attend. Lest the ethnographer from the States get lost or forget, Don Diego arranged for an escort. He seemed to have had an interest in my getting the significance of traditional dance right. He may have had a sense that we ethnographers, who pride ourselves on interpreting meaning, sometimes miss the point.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607320967
• ISBN 13: 9781607320968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 315