Dancing with children in the field: on the relevance of embodied knowledge and its methodological consequences

ABSTRACT

In contexts where dancing proves a relevant daily practice, dancing with children may provide an extremely interesting strategic option for education ethnographers. Drawing from my empirical material, I describe how dancing was accidentally introduced as a role in the field (dance teacher) before later becoming an unexpectedly great ethnographic tool. Through a series of different breakdowns, I found this constituted the key to gaining better access to complicated domestic fields and thereby also attaining a closer cultural intimacy with participants, getting more easily integrated into educational contexts, overcoming communication problems and issues with reluctant informants. From this methodological insight, I here reflect on the theoretical aspects involved: should we overlook practices deemed irrelevant from the school agent point of view but essential to domestic contexts, we risk reinforcing symbolic violence through research. Therefore, I conclude by stressing the importance of focusing on apparently ‘irrelevant’ forms of domestic embodied knowledge transmission.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied knowledge
• dance enculturation
• cultural intimacy
• breakdown
• symbolic violence
• reluctant informants

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to all the children and their families, as well as teaching staff, who generously helped me in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All emic expressions appear in italics in this text. These include ethnic and ethno-national categories, such as Dominican; as several authors have stated, they are objects of analysis and not scientific categories (cf. Brubaker 2002; Díaz de Rada 2008; Jiménez Sedano 2011; Wimmer 2013).

2 All the names of people and places have been changed to protect the anonymity of informants.

3 See Jiménez Sedano (2012) for critical analysis of this problem.

4 According to Holmes (1998, 18), this is a sign of trust.

5 Actually, the relationship between these families and school stretched beyond direct conflict. It was rather ambiguous, a tension between trust and suspicion. For example, most parents sent their children to school but not every day. Velasco et al. (2006) made an interesting analysis of this kind of ambivalent relationship with bureaucratic institutions.

6 See Moscoso (2009) and Bluebond-Langner and Korbin (2007) for a statement on the need to take children’s agency seriously in the production of culture.

7 The concept of ‘attunement’ is widely used in Ethnomusicology (cf. Feld 2012) to talk about an intensified awareness of and sympathy with the surrounding sonic environment (Schafer 1993). In the discipline of Dance Movement Therapy, this concept has been developed as ‘kinesthesic empathy’ (Berger 1972) and ‘affective attunement’ (Stern 1996).

8 In this sense, this argument may also be applied to forms of embodied knowledge other than dance, such as sports, playful activities or other informal body communication codes whenever they become relevant in the field.

9 One of the mothers.

10 This does not mean that there was some common ‘pre-linguistic body language’ that they all shared (cf. Farnell 1999, 148–149 for a critique on this kind of romantic approach). For these concrete social actresses, coin scarfs were associated with moments of fun and made a spontaneous moment of common play possible.

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this work was supported by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) under grant number SFRH/BPD/87653/2012.