Intangible Cultural Heritage Beyond Borders: Egyptian Bellydance (Raqs Sharqi) as a Form of Transcultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

The 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage highlights the importance of safeguarding traditional practices. While some of these practices are only performed in their place of origin, others (such as yoga and flamenco) take place worldwide. In this paper we explore what happens when a form of ICH that originated in one place becomes global. For this, we use Egyptian raqs sharqi (bellydance) as a case study. This is a dance genre with strong cultural roots in Egypt but is also hybrid and now practiced worldwide. Theoretically, we draw on a holistic view of living heritage, Welsch's transculturality and Urry's mobilities. Research methods include one-to-one interviews, analysis of written sources and of online dance videos. Raqs sharqi emerges as hybrid and transcultural, yet strongly connected to Egypt as the origin of its heritage. We conclude that ICH can be transcultural and global, whilst maintaining a strong connection to its place of origin.

KEYWORDS:

• Intangible cultural heritage
• dance
• bellydance
• hybridity
• transculturality
• mobilities
• transmission
• online ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This refers to Kealiinohomoku’s 1970 article An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance, in which she argues that, contrary to the assumptions of anthropologists of the time, ballet is ethnic just like any other form of so called ‘primitive dances’ because it is the expression of a specific culture at a certain moment in time.

2 Movements take place through what Urry (2007: 51) calls mobility systems, which ‘distribute people, activities and objects in and through time-space’. Systems include, for example, roads, paths and railways.

3 Folkloric tableaux refer to adaptations for the stage of group dances that were danced socially across rural and urban Egypt. In particular, Mahmoud Reda is well known for having travelled across the country to document local dances and then adapt them to the stage (Fahmy 1987). One of such dances, for example, is the Al-asayah, which takes place at the end of a mock fight called tahtib. The asayah is the stick used during the tahtib, which is also used today in raqs sharqi dance performances.