A case study on the reforms of dance in higher education in Taiwan

Abstract

This case study focuses on a group of teachers’ and students’ opinions regarding the recent reforms in the dance department of Tainan University of Technology (TUT) in Taiwan. The author uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of forms of capital and symbolic violence to probe for the motivation, process and consequences of the changes brought about by reform, and her analysis exposes a form of symbolic violence derived from social aesthetic preferences. This is most clearly manifested in the cultural capital assigned to certain dance genres (ballet, modern dance or Chinese dance) at the expense of others. A serious consequence of this has been the reproduction of an unequal power structure at TUT and in Taiwan’s dance field in higher education in general, as those dancers specialising in the perceived ‘low’ forms are unable to obtain a university degree since dance majors are not offered in these low-ranking genres. Interviews with the respondents reveal that a rising awareness of the situation has led some agents to change their practices and perceptions of dance, though the current power structure may endure well into the future.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• cultural capital
• cultural reproduction
• dance curriculum
• habitus
• symbolic violence

Notes

1. Since then, five additional institutions in higher education have been founded that offer dance as a degree for study in Taiwan. These institutions include National Taiwan University of Arts, Tainan University of Technology, Taipei National University of the Arts, National Taiwan College of Physical Education, and Taipei Physical Education College.

2. This was during the time when Taiwan, known as the Republic of China, was still a member state of the United Nations and it had a sound relationship with the US and many other western countries.

3. According to Bourdieu, the agents of a field are the social actors ‘who are socially constituted as active and acting in the field under consideration by the fact that they possess the necessary properties to be effective, to produce effects, in this field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 107). The agents in the dance field refer to individuals such as dance students, dancers, choreographers, dance instructors and dance scholars.

4. Bourdieu describes a field as a structured system constituted by the social positions which provide individuals with socially allotted spaces to build, perform, compete for, or exchange power relations (Bourdieu 1984, 226). Drawing on this definition, a dance field can be understood as, for example, a social space for performance and training that sees the relations between dancers, choreographers and institutions competing for or cooperating in the same interests.

5. Symbolic violence refers to a ‘gentle, invisible form of violence’ that pervades in all social fields and has a significant impact on most social agents (Bourdieu 1977, 192).

6. In this case study, the habitus refers to an individual’s or a group’s beliefs, attitudes, practices, preferences and values in dance.

7. Using the Marxist concept of economic capital, Bourdieu went further and proposed other forms of capital. For example, social capital refers to various kinds of valued relations with relevant persons; cultural capital refers to legitimate knowledge of one kind or another; and symbolic capital refers to prestige and social honour (Jenkins 2002, 85). In Bourdieu’s view, these other forms of capital operate in structures analogous to economic capital in the sense that they can be accumulated, invested and transferred within a social space (Bourdieu 2007, 84).

8. This term specifically refers to dancers at TUT who were involved in the reform process.

9. The ‘Associate degree’ is given to those who graduated from junior colleges in Taiwan (the junior college in Taiwan is similar to the community college in the US).

10. Information can be found on the websites of these six institutions.

11. This is a combined term developed by Michel Foucault (1980). He asserts that ‘the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information … It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power’ (Foucault 1980, 51–2).