Abstract
As both scholar and dancer, Jonathan S. Marion has studied and taught a variety of partnered-dance forms including ballroom, salsa, and Brazilian zouk throughout the USA, Europe, and in Brazil. Based in his research concerning how different dance styles index different attitudes, understandings, and values relating to the body, touch, posture, and movement, he has developed a variety of classroom exercises to facilitate students’ understandings of culture as embodied. In this chapter, he describes the pedagogical value of four such exercises—concerning body posture, non-verbal greetings, in-class demonstrations, and ethnography-based skits—and the utility of each for helping students develop insights and build understandings in ways that purely textual representations cannot. Including students’ experiences and perspectives in describing how he uses each exercise, Jonathan highlights the role of experiential engagement in helping students develop more holistic and nuanced anthropological understandings.
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Marion, J.S. (2020). Dance Lessons: Performance as Engaged Experiential Embodiment. In: Frese, P., Brownell, S. (eds) Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41995-0_9
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