Into our third week and we've come to the teaching of dance, a topic which will be dealt with in week five also thus I will not delve in too deep just yet.
The reading material I looked at for the class in question presented three ethnographers' view points of what they perceive constitutes the 'correct' way of undertaking ethnographic research.
Commencing with Helen Thomas's article, which focuses specifically on dance ethnography, we get a great insight into the the issues relating to this type of research. By introducing us to various dance forms, customs, and events by means of case studies, we can perceive what challenges the ethnographer faces when it comes to description and representation. Thomas highlights to us the influence feminism had on the social sciences, but especially within the anthropoligical idiom, leading eventually (alongside postmodernism) to a self-reflexive ethnographic method, that is one in wich the ethnographic narrative is not merely a representation of an 'other' but rather a narrative of the researchers' attempts to represent others and themselves [see Thomas 2003:70-5]. Thus, by looking at several studies undertaken by dance ethnographers (with particular attention to Sklar(1991) and Ness (1992)) we come to learn the importance of self reflexive participant-observer methodologies, as Thomas argues "movement analysis by itself could not give rise to an understanding of both content and the form of the dancers' inner-focus; instead conceptual and kinaesthetic frameworks had to be combined" [Thomas 2003:84], by including the researcher in the event or act she/he is researching the opportunity for gaining insight into embodied knowledge is all the greater, as is the possibility of self-reflexivity.
Thomas's article was nicely supported by the two which followed; Jill Flanders Crosby applies the above approach to her ethnography of Jazz and Ghanaian Dance, as does Roy Dilley to his ethnography of cultural forms of learning with a focus on his experience as a novice weaver with the Mabube of Tukulor, Senegal. Whilst Crosby's article points to the "deep physical understandings" [1997:65] she gained by using participation as her research method, Dilley's article wants to examine how learning is a cultural conception, and as such uses apprenticeship to uncover theories of learning.
Both being inspiring articles, they left me sith some questions: How much deeper is the knoweledge gained through participation? And how do teaching methods affect the level of knowledge gained? Moreover can one teach oneself, or does embodied knowledge have to come from an 'expert' source?
If I consider these questions in relation to my own experiences would it reveal something of the European conception of learning?
Two days after the class relating to the above, and with these questions still very much in my mind, I found myself in our Salsa workshop - a class which uses both active mimesis (something Dilley referred to) as well as aural instruction to teach us the intricacies of cuban salsa - and I came to wonder whether there would be a difference in my learning the moves if I solely observed the class, would I be able to execute the movements several days later if I merely watched and not participated? To be honest I had answered my own question quite instantaniously, NO! And thus commenced the workshop.
I was slightly dissapointed at first as we seemed to be beginning not from where we left off last week, but rather from the very start! We seemed to be back at walking through the basic casino step. What's going on? But I soon learnt that this was for the benefit of those who had not attended last week. So after several run throughs of the casino step, we moved on to some new moves: the mambo, and the dile que no - the prior being very similar to the casino step except for the couple stepping in tandem with eachother (thus starting with same foot) and the stance being one very similar to a 'relaxed' ballroom hold; the latter steo being somewhat more intricate I find it difficult to verbalize, thus if you want it explained check the following (the 'dile que no' is approximately half way down). http://www.salsaracing.com/steps.asp
So after including these two steps in our repertoire we now had a go at practicing all four in combination with eachother, this was a challenge not because of the steps themselves but (speaking as follower) it was often difficult to interpret which step one's partner was intending to do.
Over all it turned out to be a great worshop session, and a fairly productive one at that.
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