Abstract
How do we explain the contradiction between the centrality of African-American culture in the U.S. and the simultaneous marginality of African-American people in contemporary American society? Pursuing an answer to this question through my ethnographic work on the Lindy Hop led to a radical rethinking of current approaches to cultural appropriation. This article serves as an intervention into ethnographic research on race and ethnicity by synthesizing Wacquant's carnal sociology with his call for the formation of an analytical theory of racial domination. This synthesis, in which theory and method work reciprocally, offers a new model for undertaking research in the areas of race and ethnicity by which we are able to differentiate and dissect the material and symbolic mechanisms that generate racial domination in particular historical contexts.
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Notes
While beyond the scope of this paper, it is the process of the dance going underground or off the popular consciousness for several decades and creating a cultural absence that allows for this particular de-racialized revival of the Lindy Hop to occur, as opposed to contemporary African American cultural forms like hip-hop which are clearly marked as Black in the contemporary popular consciousness.
See Penner (1999) and Vale (1998).
I use the symbol *** to designate the use of my fieldnotes within the text.
In this way a formal analysis of the rules of dancing, or the instructions of how to go about doing particular steps or patterns will not be sufficient for understanding the practice of the dance, nor will mere observation allow us to understand the anxiety and tension that the dancers undertake consciously or unconsciously, in the ways that race gets refracted through culture in learning how to dance.
This use of carnal sociology differs from Wacquant's Body and Soul, in that the main object of analysis is not about the literal phenomenon in question (the pugilistic habitus); rather than focus on the habitus of the dancer in learning and performing the dance, this study seeks to understand how the racial mythologies that become embedded and naturalized in our conceptual and mental schemata of the world and reproduced and materialized through the cultural practices of enacting the dance through our bodies. While the focus is on the racial mythologies that are naturalized, it still works within Wacquant's framework of how these work beneath the level of consciousness and discourse to create the orientations and dispositions of the dancers.
I discuss the acquisition of the Lindy Hop habitus in detail in Hancock (2005). While the notion of how the dance habitus is acquired is a necessary component to understand how racial mythologies are internalized, it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss this aspect in detail.
For a detailed analysis of cognition on racial categorization, see Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov (2004) and Loveman (1999a, 1999b). See also Wacquant (1997b), Brubaker and Cooper (2000), Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999), and Jenkins (1994). For studies of group formation through racialization, see among others, Omi and Winnant (1994), Roediger (1991), and Ignatiev (1995).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Javier Auyero, the anonymous reviewers at Qualitative Sociology, as well as Mustafa Emirbayer, Charles Camic, Philip Gorski, Ronald Radano, David Yamane, Ada Cheng, and Casey Oberlin for their insightful comments and encouragement. I would also like to thank Steven Mitchell and Virginie Jensen, Kenneth and Helena Norbelie, Ryan Francois and Jenny Thomas, the members of Swing-Out Chicago (Howard, Penny, Julee, Andrew, Dana, Kristen, Chris, and Chachi), and Harry Saito. A special recognition goes out to Tanarra Schneider for her inspiration and support.
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Black Hawk Hancock received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at DePaul University. He has recently published an article in Ethnography on Steppin’ and is completing a book on the cultural and racial politics of the social world of dance entitled American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination.
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Hancock, B.H. Learning How to Make Life Swing. Qual Sociol 30, 113–133 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9059-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-007-9059-8