Movement and Meaning: Dance in Social Anthropological Perspective

Although is a social fact, I assume that it is derived from species-specific capacities, and that it is therefore part of the human constitution and a basic force in social life, and not merely the consequence of human invention at some particular time and place (Blacking, 1976). Its evolutionary importance as a mode of communication is borne out by the fact that it has not been superseded by verbal language, although clearly verbal language is generally more efficient for cultural adaptation. The universality and survival of suggest that it cannot be abandoned without danger to the human species; that it must be practised by all; and that its evolutionary value lies in its effectiveness as a mode of non-verbal communication. I have put in inverted commas in the opening paragraph, in order to emphasise that although dance analysts may have a broader concept of dance than dancers, it remains essentially ethnocentric or culture-specific, and is based on the common-sense concepts of dance prevalent in Euro-American cultures. We do not really know what is as a general human phenomenon. If, like ritualisation behaviour, it is a species-specific, modelling system, it could- be expressed in social forms other than those usually recognised as dance. Or it could be an interlanguage with which people encode strategic intentions specifically into movements that differ from their movements in non-dance contexts (cf. Gell, 1979: 29). Henceforth, the inverted commas will be omitted. What, then, is the value of dance criticism and scholarship, of words about dance? It seems that they have arisen in response to the need to re-establish the ancient role of dance in education and social