Dance, Racism and Anthropological Knowledge

Vionnet, Claire (June 2021). Dance, Racism and Anthropological Knowledge (Unpublished). In: Contested Imaginaries. Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Conference. Concordia University, Montréal Canada. 17-19 June 2021.

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This paper questions creative modalities for conducting ethnographic research within artistic contexts. Drawing on a project involving Senegalese dancers and musicians using dance to address racism in choreography and youth centers (ciekunda.com), the author advocates for research-creation as an epistemological tool to raise anthropological knowledge, meanwhile engaging within society. Influenced by collaborative ethnographies considering informants as co-researchers (Ingold 2011, Lassiter 2005, Schneider 2016), the anthropologist shows how the trusting space of dance creates the conditions for an authentic experience of otherness, revealing proximities and divergences. As an invitation for encounters beyond language, dance creates the opportunity for intimate encounters between cultures, reaching the depth of human experience. In doing so, dance becomes an entrance door to exchange on the condition of life. It also reveals asymmetrical hierarchies and politics of exclusion: in this specific case, colonialist residues in North/South encounters, and the invisibility of black bodies within the Swiss dance scene. The paper not only highlights the potential of phenomenological engagement for anthropological theory on the body, senses and affects, but also how it prevents ethical issues and the epistemic violence of ethnographic encounters (power asymmetry between researcher and “informants”). This collaborative research-creation shows one possible way of creatively running research, while ethically engage with fieldwork’s interlocutors.

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