Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...

Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...: Wither ‘race’? There is an issue I set aside last time for reflection: does the race of belly dancers matter? How does it affect the ge...

Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile cultures, II

Wither ‘race’?

There is an issue I set aside last time for reflection: does the race of belly dancers matter? How does it affect the genre’s mobility in global consumption domains?

I think it does, albeit in a less straightforward, if not reverse, way. The Euro-Oriental pop teachings of famous dancers, such as Isadora Duncan, who introduced a hips-free, torso-and-head dominated choreography, blended alleged Grecian with alleged Egyptian movements to make an alien dance palatable to Westerners. Victorian antics had their global equivalents back then. Since shaking any part of the body that connected to domains of reproduction (hips, breast) in front of spectators was de facto indecorous, Duncan’s whiteness should retain its bodily relationship with ‘civility’ in some other way. Though never dissociated from the budding 1920s femme fatale cinematic persona, Grecian stylistics could at least cast an alien genre in archaic European culture’s familiar colours and ‘pass’ as the female dare-nots’ fashion.   

Orientalism redoux

Duncan’s innovations barely reached the folk terrain of the true ‘Orients’ that they cannibalised to generate the aura of professional respectability in the European and transatlantic West. As I explained before, in these contexts, danse du vetre or raqs sharki continued to be associated with prostitution and other forms of generous female mobility. Its subsequent romanticisation in Western pop domains either ignores its twin Orientalist and sexist associations or stresses them to the point that it shunts its artistic uniqueness aside in favour of some bizarre activist discourse. There is, to be sure, ample truth in the twin racist and sexist crux of the dance style’s histories. But its contemporary global commoditisation requires a different approach that allows space for an investigation of new hybridisation, new border-crossings and exchanges between ‘East’ and ‘West’ – if there ever were such uniform geopolitical spaces.

Image R. Tzanelli, 'Helena Bellydancer (Leeds, UK)'

Appearances

I grew up in a country proudly advertising its own feminine poetics through a version of belly dancing called tsifteteli (literally, ‘of two strings’ to refer to the musical instrument that accompanies the music). Feminist politics abound, the style’s history is sieved through several chapters of persecution, migration and dictatorship moralism (Stavrou Karayanni 2004). However, now that I do not partake in its rituals any more (being an Anglicised migrant myself and living at the other end of Europe where is also ‘home’), I am struck by the significance of ‘appearances’ in the dance’s execution back then. By this I refer to the spectators’ expectation that the dancer (amateur or professional) looks the part phenotypically: that she is a brunette, with long luscious hair and a brown complexion. Belly dancing beauties (conventionally koúkles, dolls) had to be domesticated versions of the Oriental imaginary, for their performance to acquire verisimilitude. This paradoxical expectation is not dissimilar from that which English professionals encounter, as I recently found out. It is as if their Northern whiteness robs them of their bodily skills, their ability to communicate art to students or even be attractive enough to neo-Orientalist consumers (more correctly, ‘attractiveness’ may be dissociated from skill, thus degenerating into harassment).

It seems then, that there is still a politics of race at work in belly dancing discourse, only it is a politics of reversal: the white subject appears to ‘lack’ in essence, in need of providing ‘proof’ (professional credentials) to be granted ‘passing’. In the same context female ‘blackness’ transforms into a phenomenological standard only as ‘surface’, ready to be voraciously consumed by audiences. Entertainment aside, the politics and poetics of belly dancing are to be treated seriously – for their surface is depth in need of investigating in the social sciences. 

        

REFERENCES

Stavrou Karayanni, S. (2004) Dancing Fear and Desire. Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...

Interdisciplinary Journeys: Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile...: Profession or social practice? It is probably common knowledge amongst sociologists of art that belly dancing as a social practice is bas...

Belly dancing and embodied answerability in mobile cultures

Profession or social practice?

It is probably common knowledge amongst sociologists of art that belly dancing as a social practice is based on more than meets the eye and the ear in terms of historical development. By discussing it as ‘social practice’ I refuse to consider it solely as a monetised activity (to dance and be remunerated for it by clients), thus allowing some space to reflect on the ways its performance in public enabled human interaction. Once the profession of migrant working-class women in Eastern urban cultures and in the emerging economic centres of the West alike (raqs sharqi and hootchie-cootchie as the sensation of the first nineteenth-century Expos and the nomadic groups of circus caravans; danse du vetre as the past time of French colonisers in Algeria and Tunisia), this hybrid form of embodied art or craft allowed its performers to acquire some sort of social presence.

We could, of course, connect the histories of belly dancing to the socio-cultural standing of its historic performers: as moving people, invariably female and less frequently male artists from the urban metropoles of the East, Spain and Northern Africa, ‘belly dancers’ were differentiated from the local aristocracy and the emerging middle classes, who progressively became their consumers/clients. But this is history; I am more interested in discerning how a different sort of differentiation and social exclusion would eventually develop in postmodern contexts into a technique of dialogue between gazers (consumers) and performers (professional dancers); and how performance itself is, today, a form of power over those who gaze, thus balancing a once unequal exchange.

Image: Velvet Peacock Designs

Diachronic looks: belly-dancing as disenfranchised mobility

Note that at least until the nineteenth century (inclusive), in Eastern and North African urban consumption sites the so-called Ghaziyah (female dancers bearing the stigma of mobile invaders/outsiders, as the term denotes; or that of prostitution, as the term’s root in ghawa or enamoured means) would not be seen as reputable citizens. Their very movement and theatrical performance (though not presented in bikini attire but in costumes covering the whole body) was the negative equivalent of that of much-respected awalim (literally the educated women), the female story-teller or poet, singer and musician who could safely entertain an audience without risking accusations of obscenity (Buonaventura 2010). This phenomenon, which conforms to a hidden ‘aristocracy of the senses’ (hearing vs seeing, aurality/orality vs. visuality-with-kinaesthetic performance), is not what happens today in most developed contexts.

Image R. Tzanelli, 'Helena Bellydancer (Leeds, UK)'

Synchronic observations: beyond the trap of ‘professionalism’

I watch belly dancing these days and note how the professional dancer uses her body (around the midriff, the swinging hands and lifted legs) and her face (smiling, smirking, inviting or teasing) to tell a story; how people respond in various ways to the immediacy of her gaze and movement (exhilaration, pleasure, embarrassment or even lust); but, above all, how she commands a dialogue with her ‘clients’ that redirects their gaze and ear from any (wrongly perceived as) sexual innuendos to what truly matters: the skill. The focus on ‘skill’ both connects the dancer’s embodied movement and intellectual knowledge into one complex, which gazers cannot access or comprehend without effort. This is why many professional dancers are also teachers/instructors these days.

And then there is the question of what audiences get out of watching other dance. I would argue that what I primarily consume, amongst other people, is not a narrative of female sexual emancipation, but a demonstration of control over the means of communicating with strangers (or friends in the crowd). The Ghaziyah of old (or those still using belly dancing as a professional feminist statement against female oppression) would develop with the help of artistic movement a ‘speech situation’ conforming to what Spivak calls ‘answerability’ (Spivak 1988; Landry and MacLean 1996; Inoue 2006). Simply and contextually put, embodied story-telling would establish a connection with those watching the performance, alerting them morally to the presence of the dancer as a human being in the flesh, not different from them (for contemporary dance genres see Wieschiolek 2003; Keft-Kennedy 2005). 

Bridging social distance through the immediacy of performance, Ghaziyah’s ‘answerability’ would create an imagined togetherness, even though in reality the dancer would be treated as of a ‘lower breed’ (Ong 1982; Bakhtin 1990:32). Contemporary professionals move beyond this limited objective: not only are they de facto humans, they substitute in consumption contexts the old awalim: because they possess the techniques of artistic mobility, appropriate ornamentation and athleticism, their story-telling is a priori that of an empowered subject.

Much can be said about the conditions of consuming the body per se, the site this takes place and the objectification of female dancers – especially, but not exclusively those who are not white. But race and gender hierarchies open up a new chapter, which does not provide straightforward answers to social representation and inequality, so I reserve such analysis for another time.

References

Bakhtin M.M. (1990) Art and Answerability, edited by M. Holquist, translated by V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Buonaventura, W. (2010) Serpent of the Nile. London: Saqi.

Inoue, M. (2006) Vicarious Language. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keft-Kennedy, V. (2005) ‘How does she do that?' Belly dancing and the horror of a flexible woman’, Women's Studies, 34(3): 279-300.

Landry, D. and G. MacLean (1996) ‘Introduction’, in D. Landry and G. MacLean (eds) The Spivak Reader. London: Routledge.

Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.

Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Wieschiolek, K. (2003) ‘Ladies, just follow his lead! Salsa, gender and identity’, in N. Dyck and E. Archetti (eds) Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities. New York: Berg.

Auto-biography: losing your tools in the digital age

From Photocosmos, Facebook

Interconnections between biography and travel are many in published scholarly fora, but they usually do not endeavour to discuss the burden of such projects’ execution in too much detail. The ‘details’ I am mostly concerned with are not slides of pen and intimate revelations, but epistemologically ingrained omissions during and after different forms of fieldwork – including both terrestrial and virtual ethnographic journeys.

First things first: the so-called ‘ethnographic tourist’ (Graburn 2002) is, today a venerated subject area in anthropological and tourism theory. But today we also deal with cyber-ethnographic imaginaries, which are not as well represented in tourism research (e.g. Germann Molz 2012; Tzanelli 2013). As a result, there is little mention of the traveller’s progressive reliance on technological tools to convey their mobile discourse to the public (e.g. D’Andrea 2006). These tools (cameras, mobile phones and tape recorders) tend to figure as supplementary of the traveller’s hermeneutics rather than as centrepieces of their mobile show. There is still some prejudice over actor-network theory approaches, probably because they tend to consider ‘networks’ as inanimate formations. As a result, travel autobiography does not always take seriously its ‘auto’ prefix, focusing instead on the grammar of the traveller’s mobile articulations – that is, the art of re-presenting their trajectory in space and time. But what happens to the tools used in such articulations in the digital age? Do we have to habitually discard them for their alleged instrumental value – or should we examine their validity as travelling connectors per se?  

There is certainly a danger in such a move, when certain semiotechnologies (Langlois 2012) are prioritised over other ones. Hermeneutic uses of camera-work tend to focus on the technology’s ocular capital, turning for example auditory signs/messages into auxiliary ‘things’ in the travel narrative. Phenomenologically, it seems, so to speak, that such selectivity follows the original script of ethnographic mediation, which articulates our humanity on the basis of our ocular capital. It is difficult to refute that the ethics of travelling are, methodologically and epistemologically, connected to our attitude towards coordinated sensory-as-aesthetic input and output while we are on the move.  

References

D’Andrea, A. (2006) ‘Neo-nomadism: a theory of post-identarian mobility in the global age’, Mobilities, 1 (1): 95-119.

Germann Molz, J. (2012) Travel Connections. London: Routledge.

Graburn, N.H.H. (2002) ‘The ethnographic tourist’, In G.M.S. Dann (ed) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, Wallingford: CABI.

Langlois, G. (2012)’Meaning, semiotechnologies and participatory media’, Culture Machine, 12: unpaginated. Available at: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/437/467.

Tzanelli, R. (2013b) Heritage in the Digital Era: Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause. London: Routledge.

The hero and the plot of mobility

Photo: Inner Journey by Hartwig HKD
(Flickr/Creative Commons)

Tourism scholarship has always sought to prioritise the two ends of the leisurely system of global mobility: at one end stands the tourist, the person that moves across borders and through time and space to reach the desired destination, the holiday, the accommodation, the beach, the sightseeing complex. At the other end stands the system itself, the hotel, the resort, its labour organisation and bureaucratic structures. In terms of narrative, a dated business model placed the tourist at the centre of research for reasons other than scholarly investigations (customer satisfaction, maximisation of profit). Beyond this model, social scientists sought to elucidate the nature of individual experience in terms of authenticity, originality and adventure (e.g. Cohen 1979). Cultural anthropologists took an extra step towards examining communal constructions of experience as perceptions of authenticity, but with the individual as a starting point, contemporary tourism theory did little to bridge the collective with the individual in terms of plot.

By this I mean that the prioritisation of human capital (the tourist, the tourist group, the host community) constantly shunts aside the actual scheme of movement. The urgency to rescue the human from the pressures of ultra-modernity, post-modernity or trans-modernity (Ateljevic 2008) – no doubt, humanism’s offspring – suggests that the ways the travel’s quotidian aspects are assembled into a ‘plot’ are less important – nay, they are parts of an evil structure preying on human agency. We tend to forget that even hermeneutic movements by people sit on the structural lattice of experience. However, the belief that, by shedding light on the tourist-subject as the journey’s hero (Tomazos and Butler 2010), we manufacture a ‘Holy Grail’ to narrate social research plausibly does no justice to the social webs of movement as such. There is a ‘stronger program’ (Alexander and Smith 2001) of tourism analysis still waiting to be discovered, investigated and developed as an epistemology and methodology of mobility – the politics and poetics of movement (Cresswell 2006, 2010) enacted by everyday heroes but with movement claiming centrality in the narrative and humans populating it with meaning. Should it be passed in silence?    

References

Alexander J.C. and P. Smith (2001) ‘The strong program in cultural theory: Elements of structural hermeneutics’, in J. Turner (ed.) The Handbook of Social Theory. New York: Kluwer.

Ateljevic, I. (2008) ‘Transmodernity: Remaking our (tourism) world?’. In J. Tribe (ed.) Philosophical Issues in Tourism, Bristol and Toronto: Channel View Publications.

Cohen, E. (1979) ‘A phenomenology of tourist experiences’, Sociology, 13 (2):179-201.

Cresswell, T. (2006) On the Move. London: Routledge.

Cresswell, T. (2010) ‘Towards a politics of mobility’, Environment and Planning D, 28 (1):17-31.

Tomazos, K. and R. Butler (2010) ‘The volunteer tourist as “hero”’, Current Issues in Tourism, 13 (4): 363-80.

Anatomies of academic passion

I hate bureaucracy but cannot live and dream without it. This is especially true during my study leave, which I can mostly spend dreaming the possibility of a harmonious world in vivid, ordered colours, sounds and delicious smells. Visit and browse through my Google-locked Artsite’s ‘Poetry and Poetics’ for past daydreaming records.  

IMAGE: Bürokratie / Bureaucracy II by Christian Schnettelker www.manoftaste.de and Flickr 

There is an element of bibliomancy attached to study leaves

Nobody feels particularly eager to divulge.

Instead, she’s buried under piles of hints and applications,

Promises that she’ll find the map of lost scholarly treasures

Mornings which turn to evenings of ideas in motion.

The bureaucratic prophet whispers in her ears

And she departs on journeys with a lot of unrelated baggage

She sheds half way to undefined but glorious destinations.

Meanwhile, the ring of academic inspiration

Partakes in wedding rituals for which it never was intended

It decorates the finger of those brides who loved someone else

And run away with them before the priest completes his pitiful prayers.

The bibliomancy of study leaves is destined to achieve a happy ending

Only because the applicant crafts her destiny

Only because she captures beautiful ideas in her pages’ magic net

Only because the study leave will never acquire fixed purpose

Before her pilgrimage calls into being that temple

In which the ring will rest until its new proposal.

Leeds, 06 February 2014