The Last Dance

In this article I analyze one area that has for a long time interested anthropologists: the way in which dancing and dancing rituals—part of traditional life-ways—change and eventually disappear. I utilize here the terms “dance” and “dancing” principally to mean not only biologically or psychologically (emotionally?) motivated and combined corporeality and events in society but, together with Foucault, rather as discursively constituted and agency-transformed entities that individuals think and live with in their culture. Recent studies have shown that dance and dancing, in fact movement systems in general, form an integral part of the cultural territory within which the human body is structured and manipulated (Farnell 1999, 2003). For my purpose, however, I view both dance and dancing, here to entail not only structured movement systems and body representations but activities in specific kinetic and space-time dimensions that are culturally controlled, negotiated and constructed. [1] Dance, thus, is not only a formal body language, as Bloch has argued earlier (Bloch 1989), but a politically formalized system that is part of the controlling mechanism of authority. [2] In fact, it is often one of the most revered legitimating forces of authority in uneven power relations. At the same time, dance and dancing activity could be a source of as well as a force for resistance against such legitimacy (Howard 2001). I use here dance to mean a single form of a specific movement system, and dancing as a referent reserved for social events that include various dances. At times, we find that a single dance may be a source of conflict between individuals and the state, or between various ethnic groups. An individual dance may or may not symbolize an ethnic or national group, and dance events could also become a source contestation between majority and minority ethnic relations. It is a tautological comment that the body is culturally understood, constructed and monitored by individuals and groups but one of the least discussed but, to my mind, most important aspect of the body is its conditioning and the way in which it is anchored to the discursive practices between the state and individuals. [3] The body both a source and an object of control has not been addressed by anthropologists studying Hungary or Hungarian dance. Even though Marcel Mauss has made a rather innocent incursion into Hungarian ethnographic studies, the idea of the technique du corps has not, we must admit, gained a sure footing in the anthropological study of dance. With regard to Romania, anthropologists have faired exceptionally well: folkloric representations (Kligman 1977, 1988), reproduction, sexuality and gender relations (Kligman 1998; Roman 2003), and political forms of funerals and reburials (Verdery 1999) are monographic themes privileging the body, both collective and individual. However, the use and representation of the body in dances and dance events in Hungarian minority culture in Romania, especially as a source of power discourse, has not, we must admit, been attempted by anthropologists. [4] Therefore in this analysis I consider questions of what happens when the state defines the dance event, what, if any, are the differences when it is not the state, or the Romanian majority, but the elite of the minority who defines it. For scholars it is intriguing to ask how symbolic representations, such as dance and dancing, follows various socioeconomic transformations from World War II, the various Romanian dictatorships to the multi-party democracy in Romania. Under Ceausescu ethnic dance events were tightly controlled and monitored by the watchful eyes of the state; in fact the secret police were entrusted with watching and reporting on all such events. Most aspects of minority national identity were scrutinized as musicians were requested to offer their repertoire to bureaucrats; many were fined if it contained songs and tunes deemed unfit for “public consumption.” But under the democratic climate such state control has subsided considerably and even though those laws concerning minority language and culture were passed, they leave a lot to be desired as far as their actual implementation on the local level.