Nov 22, 2024
OHIO University Undergraduate Catalog 2024-25
DANC 4550 - Dance Ethnography: Intellectualizing the Body’s Motion
Surveys a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of dance from an ethnological perspective: dance as a system of communication, social structure, ethnicity, and sacred art. Methodologies used are developed in the fields of symbolic anthropology, social, history, ethnochoreology, ethnomusicology, comparative religious, and performance studies. Gathering ethnographic material, ethical dynamics of fieldwork encounters, and duties of the dance ethnographer as a cultural mediator are explored.
Requisites: Jr or Sr
Credit Hours: 3
General Education Code (students who entered prior to Fall 2021-22): 2CP
Repeat/Retake Information: May be retaken two times excluding withdrawals, but only last course taken counts.
Lecture/Lab Hours: 3.0 lecture
Grades: Eligible Grades: A-F,WP,WF,WN,FN,AU,I
Learning Outcomes:
- Demonstrate knowledge and understanding in the following areas:
- A broad conceptual and theoretical framework will be developed, allowing the student to look at dance critically across social stratification, cross culturally and historically and to evaluate critically current research in dance studies.
- Dance as both a commodity and a socio-cultural practice from the perspectives of both dancing and non-dancing participants.
- Dance ethnography as a field of study and its relation to its cognate fields: dance anthropology, ethnochoreology, dance ethnology, theatre anthropology, anthropology of performance.
- How dance ethnography operates within both multicultural and international contexts, and develops the intellectual capacity and experiential skills with which to comprehend and make use of that experience.
- Movement observation and designing ways of describing movement vocabulary and the structure of various dance genres.
- Traditional and contemporary critical perspectives within the broader field of anthropology which can be further developed to apply to dance.
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