Description: Concentrating on the Caribbean Basin and the coastal area of northeast South America, Yvonne Daniel considers three African-derived religious systems that rely heavily on dance behavior--Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahamian Candomble. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing's embodied knowledge, Daniel examines these misunderstood and oppressed performative dances in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Review Quotes:
Winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize (2006).
"[Daniel] advances dance anthropology through ambitious meticulous scholarship, acute comparative analyses, riveting ethnographic description and a sensual sense of the dancing body that makes one feel the movement of the muscles and spirit."--Dance Research Journal