A Framework to View Dance
A Trade Like Any Other by Karin Van Nieuwkerk is an expansive ethnographic work on the Egyptian dancer and the contradicting societal conceptions of the dancer as both the dishonorable and the mystical. Her book examines this paradoxical view of the dancer by looking at the history of dance in Egypt, the role of religion, the idea of Orientalism and the theory of liminality among other interviews and anthropological analyses. The goal of this analysis is to humanize the dancer and allow both Egyptian and Western audiences to “sympathize” with the condition of the female dancer in Egypt (1). One important note is that this book is centered on Egyptian entertainers’ dancers, however; the ideas in chapter 1 can apply to all dancers.
This project will examine Chapter 1 of this ethnography titled “Introduction”. Van Niewkerk begins by briefly discussing historical views of the entertainer, however; she points out a gap in the literature on the idea of “dishonor”. Niewkerk then describes certain dishonorable positions and the ideas that tie them together from their appearance to tension with religious and societal authority figures and their flimsy legal status. An important part Niewkerk’s argument is then introduced and this is a theory constructed by Blok in which the infamy of the dancer is intertwined with their liminality. The entertainer exists in seemingly contradictory categories that places them on the margins of society. The baring of flesh by dancers is thought by Blok to potentially place dancers in a liminal position between man and animal. However; she deconstructs aspects of this argument, namely the binary classifications it operates on and its lack of a general application for all entertainers. Niewkerk then contextualizes Egyptian dancing by discussing the relation of Islam to entertainment. The “religiously acceptable” forms of music include religious chants, songs of family, travel, and work, while songs on “illicit” subjects such as alcohol are unacceptable. These categories are not as firm as they seem, as other factors such as time, place, audience and more influence what’s percieved as acceptable. For women, their innate “temptation” makes it so that their art forms are always more controversial because of the reactions they elicit in male viewers.
There are several ways this information will serve my project. Firstly, I want to tie this idea of “innate” temptation with the theory of liminality and argue that these two ideas operate as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Society attributes women with sin and they then associate that sin with females operating on the margins of society to confirm the previous idea. The colonizers treated the Ouled Naïl and Devadasi women as sinful creatures based on their liminal position in society as dancers. However; their fear of falling into temptation drove the colonizers to control these “sinful” women and to show them and the world that they were above falling into sin. In the colonial response section, I will discuss how the postcards and dance revivals allowed them to prove the aforementioned statements.
Citation: Nieuwkerk, Karin van. "A Trade like Any Other": Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt. Univ. of Texas Press, 2008.
Link: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/vantra