Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in Philippine Community

by Sally Ann Ness

Series:Contemporary Ethnography

Description

In Body, Movement, and Culture, Sally Ann Ness provides an original interpretive account of three forms of sinulog dancing practiced in Cebu City in the Philippines: a healing ritual, a dance drama, and a "cultural" exhibition dance. Ness's examination of these dance forms yields rich insights into the cultural predicament of this Philippine city and the way in which kinesthetic and visual symbols interact to create meaning.Ness scrutinizes the patterns of movement, the use of the body and show more of objects, and the shaping of space common to all three versions of the sinulog. She then relates these elements to the fundamental ways the culture bearers of Cebu City experience their world. For example, she shows how each of the dance forms functions to reinforce class distinctions and to establish a code of authenticated "cultural" action. At the same time, Ness demonstrates, the dances manifest and actualize widely applied notions about the nature of "devotion," "sincerity," "naturalness," and "beauty."Throughout the text, Ness provides a close analysis of movement that is all too often missing from anthropological studies of dance. Most significantly, she works to relate the movements used in dance to everyday movement and to interpret the attitudes and values that are embodied in both choreographed and "idian movement.Important and illuminating, Body, Movement, and Culture is of particular interest to students and scholars of anthropology, folklore, dance, and Asian studies. show less

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Author Information

Sally Ann Ness

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Sally Ann Ness is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside. She is author of Where Asia Smiles (2003) as well as Body Movement and Culture (1992), which won the de la Torre Bueno Prize and the CORD Outstanding Publication in Dance Research Award. She has also co-edited, with Carrie Noland, the collection Migrations of show more Gesture (2008). Her research in Yosemite was funded in part by a 2007 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. show less