sick or life: Does Anthropology Belong to the White Man?

posted by the ghetto intellectual 2/27/2010

Update 1: Katherine Dunham timeline

Update 2: Katherine Dunham biography and photo gallery

Update 3: Another good Katherine Dunham website

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The "A" Word

Comrade: You say you're an anthropologist?

Kwame: Yes.

Comrade: My brother, don't you know that the white man used it to colonize Africa!? How can you call yourself an anthropologist?

Kwame: Have you ever heard of Katherine Dunham?

Comrade: Katherine who?

Kwame: If you have never heard of Katherine Dunham then you only know the white man's version of anthropology. When I claim anthropology I invoke great Ancestors like Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston.

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"How can you be down with black/Afrikan people and call yourself an anthropologist?" I get that question occasionally. It's a good question. It's an important question. I sometimes go into long ass explanations. But now that I have fielded this question many times, I have concluded that it makes more sense to name anthropologists I admire and do my best to produce work that honors their efforts, reflects our heritage and advances our political aims. The formal practice of anthropology was a child of colonialism, no doubt. But our Ancestors appropriated anthropology in ways that could never have been anticipated by those early white male founders. Furthermore, curiosity about cultural diversity is very Afrikan and fundamentally human. So imma take the good, the bad, and the ugly and try to create things that are more good than bad.

Axé!

Katherine Dunham (1909-2006)

"It was never just about steps--it was about your soul" Dunham student (click on video or here)

The Dunham Technique (excerpt from SF Gate article)

As a graduate student in anthropology during the mid-'30s, Ms. Dunham spent nine months in Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica and Martinique filming indigenous dances. "When I got to Haiti," she said in the 1988 interview, "I saw that some of the body movements in their dances resembled the body movements I had seen in the black storefront churches of Chicago."

Ms. Dunham returned to the United States and incorporated the motions she had observed into the vocabulary of modern dance and ballet. "What I tried to do," she said in a 2002 interview, "is take the meaning and the feeling and the intensity of the things that were portrayed and prepare them with a well-trained company so that they would convey to the audience the full meaning of that particular ritual or act."

What resulted from this synthesis became known as the Dunham Technique. It proved influential not just in dance but also in other performing arts. "Miss D.," as Ms. Dunham was known to associates, oversaw for many years the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts, in New York. Among its students were the choreographers Arthur Mitchell and Peter Gennaro, the ballerina Nora Kaye, and the actors James Dean, Marlon Brando and Chita Rivera.

Ms. Dunham saw the Dunham Technique as a spiritual as well as physical discipline. "Anyone who seriously works in Dunham Technique," she said in 1988, "comes out not only a good professional dancer, but also a humanist."

Such a melding of motion and morality was central to Ms. Dunham's life. One of her most famous dances, "Southland," portrayed a Southern lynching. Ms. Dunham, who would not let her company perform before segregated audiences, was enraged to find out during a 1944 appearance in Louisville, Ky., that no blacks had been allowed in the auditorium. Upon learning this, she went on stage wearing a "White Only" sign attached to her bottom.

For full article go to SF Gate.

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There are many Gods in the Vodou spiritual system. The Yanvalou dance honors the Ayisyen (Haitian) Lwa (God), Damballah ("Snake God"). For a demonstration of the Dunham Technique's interpretation of Yanvalou, click here. Incidentally, while I was in Ghana conducting dissertation research I had some fascinating conversations with Australian Aboriginal cultural performers touring in Ghana. One of the members explained to me that the indigenous people of Australia have a reverence for snakes. I can't recall all of the various qualities he named but they included the observation that snakes were nurturing and protective. This was all fascinating to me given that many Americans have a dreadful fear of snakes and snakes are literally demonized in Christianity. [Also check this link which claims that Australians are "well afraid of snakes." The entry should have said white people in Australia are "well afraid of snakes."]