ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses ethnographic works that recognize the dancing body as a complex cultural phenomenon. In these works, the bodily practice of dance illuminates some of the complexity of contemporary culture where the meanings of bodily, lived dance experiences can be difficult to translate into words that, nevertheless, often act as entrance points to scholarly analysis. In addition to dance ethnography, Theresa Buckland's book highlighted what has now become commonly termed as "anthropology at home": The anthropologist's own culture opens as political space within which the ethnographer needs to continually negotiate her own position. Considering that several dance ethnographers came from the performance studies background, one could assume that performance would constitute a part of representing their findings of embodied dance knowledge. Similar to Barbara Browning and Sally Ann Ness, Eluza Maria Santos emphasized the importance of participating in dance practice to detect the meanings of culturally specific dance practices.
