ABSTRACT
The transnational world of the Egyptian style of belly dancing includes an affective and kinaesthetic orientation toward the ‘Orient’. This orientation offers a rich object for a feminist and postcolonial analysis of kinaesthetic encounters, where gendered, sexual, cultural and ethnic differences intersect, and where the subjects with different histories are moved by music and dance, and where embodied knowledge is constructed. My interest is to study these encounters from a dancer-ethnographer’s point of view and to contribute to the epistemological discussion on the possibility of an embodied, affective knowledge. In this chapter, I name this orientation an ‘Egyptian feeling’. I will explore the ways ‘Egyptian feeling’ has been circulated among belly dancers and the feeling’s connections to the concept of tarab in Egyptian music culture. To a dancing ethnographer ‘Egyptian feeling’ opens paths to the ambivalent nature of getting moved by dance and to the histories of bodies that encounter in belly dance events. My interest lies in the role of emotions and kinaesthesia in the production and transference of knowledge in dance. In order to develop affective and kinaesthetic dance ethnography, I ask how emotions and kinaesthesia can be put to use in dance ethnography? And how does this operate as micropolitics?1 I see micropolitics as the ‘politics of hybridity which emphasizes an accommodation of cultures and peoples at the local level’ and which ‘is a necessary condition for the very possibility of larger social and political transformation’ (Ang 2001: 71). The context of the discussion is not confined only to Egypt, but also to the
global network of belly-dancing people, and the ideas and affects concerning Egyptian styles of dancing. To be more precise, I draw on my emotionally loaded, ambivalent and sometimes disturbing experiences in the Finnish bellydance scene as a dancer, teacher and participating researcher. I am writing from a dancer-ethnographer’s position, which I see as one having orientations and interests to provide a useful and pleasurable piece of study for the academic audience, and to provide kinaesthetic-visual pleasures and hopefully some food for thought to a dance audience. The profound ambivalence of (auto)ethnographic encounters guides my narration. I wish to materialize the feminist declaration ‘the personal is theoretical’
(Okely 1992: 9) by relating subjective experiences to cultural and social in a
way that works as something more than confessional navel gazing and proclaiming one’s lived experience as truth (see Okely 1992; Probyn 1993, 2005: 40). Elspeth Probyn’s suggestion works as my guide:
As a modest proposal, I want to posit the self as a theoretical movement into the text that carries with it the ontological traces of its local origins. This is to say that the self spoken invokes a particular moment of being, but that in its speaking it demands an acknowledgement of the conditions of its possibility, of its very existence.
