ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, there has been a plethora of publications on dance that use ethnographic methodology. This literature and its associated research are often grouped under the rubric of ‘dance ethnography’, whether emanating from long-established disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, ethnology and folklore, or from the newer fields of dance studies, performance studies and cultural studies. According to the research aims of dance ethnography, all movement systems are viewed as socially produced by people in specific temporal-cultural circumstances; the people’s conceptualisations, values and practices, which may, or more often may not, coincide with those of the researcher, form the principal focus of inquiry. Distinguished by intensive fieldwork, dance ethnography in the early twentyfirst century admits no restriction on the kind of dancing to be investigated or on its participants, whether performers, observers or both.1
