| This dissertation examines social dancing as an interactive process involving a multi-modal sensorium of expressive activity. In two particular cases I examine the interaction of music and movement and try to relate those interpretively observable human actions to affective and cognitive expression. The dissertation draws on twenty years of dance experience as well as six summers of fieldwork in Scandinavia and two years of fieldwork among square dance communities in the United States. Nevertheless, this dissertation can only set an agenda for the process of constructing dance ethnology as a discipline rather than as a specifically site-based ethnography.;Previous scholarship forms one of a multitude of axes that, applied to dance, span a multidimensional social space of expressive culture. In this dissertation I deploy a paradigmatic axis orthogonal to those others, which has the potential to make dance ethnology more generally robust as an ingredient in the interrogation of expressive forms.;Going further, however, this work also draws in new ways on experimental and experiential tools available through the computerized methodologies of biomechanics and kinesiology. I show how the confluence of these disparate streams can set (though not bring to closure) an agenda for future analysis of multimodal and multisensory expressive events. |
