ABSTRACT

Although dance is inseparable from music in most cultures, their relationship has been most thoroughly navigated from ethnomusicological, ethnochoreological and anthropological perspectives. Comparatively little has been written at the interstices of sociology and music studies. This chapter considers the ways in which dance and the body more broadly have been conceptualized, and how the productions of meanings thus generated can be accessed for sociological studies of music. Particular attention will be paid to ethnography as a sociological method. In doing so, traces of the body and embodied experience within sociological studies of music are also held up as signs of a nascent but as yet underdeveloped area of great significance: the sociology of movement. As a foundation for all this, the following section surveys various disciplinary approaches to dance, and the issues to which such approaches have given rise.