Chapter One

Frameworks, Sources, and Identities of Past and Present

THERESA JILL BUCKLAND

Ethnography and history, as methodologies through which dance may be researched, suggest contrasting spheres of space and time. For the dance ethnographer, her or his usual territory is that of the field, where source materials are created through the researcher's systematic description of the transient actions and words of people dancing in the present. For the dance historian, the familiar realm is the archive, where extant sources, often fragmentary and sparse, have been created by people other than the researcher, who now employs their surviving artifacts as testimony to the dancing of the past. Stereotypically, the dance ethnographer investigates the customary dance practices of an aggregate of people, such as an ethnic or cultural group. The dance historian more frequently focuses on individuals or perhaps a dance company, often seeking evidence of innovative rather than consensual activity.

In the twenty-first century, such a neat division into mutually exclusive territories no longer holds; nor indeed, as this book demonstrates, were such strict demarcations ever wholly operative in dance research. Some branches of ethnography, in the Eastern European and Scandinavian disciplines of ethnology, ethnography, and folk life studies, explicitly aimed to document dances from the past by seeking out older ways of life to record for posterity. From the middle of the twentieth century, some histor