Now in paperback, Anthropology and the Dance is a lively, controversial examination and discussion of theories of the dance by the pioneer of the anthropology of human movement. Drid Williams's definitive text is intended for graduate students in anthropology who are faced with the wide spectrum of theories of human movement, including the dance, sign language, martial arts, and rituals. With its groundbreaking approach to this previously unexamined field, this book also brings the study of human movement to readers in fields such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethnomusicology,...

Despite the tremendous multi-disciplinary upsurge of interest in "the body" of late, little or no attention has been given to the moving body or rather, the moving person, a situation that is remedied by this book. For the first time, leading scholars in the anthropology of dance and human movement come together to provide a rich sample of their current work, introducing theories and methods that move well beyond the more familiar "proxemic" and "kinesic" approaches to body movement and space. Part 1 consists of ethnographic studies as diverse as Hawaiian dance and poetry, Tai Chi Chuan,...

Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains, who spoke very different languages. Although some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the widespread adoption of English, Brenda Farnell discovered that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture.
Farnell's research challenges the dominant European American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language...

This book presents a series of ontological investigations into an adequate theory of embodiment for the social sciences.