Dancing Culture Religion

[T]his welcome and stimulating volume. . . .is tightly packed with both descriptive and theoretical material and incisive insights. . . .The book is equally useful as a handbook and a monograph. I have gone back and read several sections repeatedly.

Gill’s text is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study of the dancing of dance. The text in eminently readable with each chapter opening and closing with mini-case studies linked to the subject of the chapter. These case-studies act to provide examples for Gill’s arguments as well as strengthening them. Equally, the author is very present in the text, drawing on his previous ethnographic work, his years of dancing and teaching dance, which makes for a very enjoyable read.

In close personal touch with his subject, Sam Gill takes the reader on a global journey through dance and religion guided by philosophy, ethnology, and intuition. His book reveals how the body has its own truth that cannot be read or spoken, only danced.

In Dancing, Culture, Religion, Sam Gill weaves together ethnographic and historical accounts, personal experience and theoretical discussions of dance traditions in order to develop and articulate an approach to the comparative study of dance that has substantial implications for not only dance theorists and dancers, but also scholars of religion and culture, philosophy and the humanities more broadly.

It is gratifying to see a senior scholar of religion write with such energy and enthusiasm for the philosophical and cultural significance of dancing. Gill’s movement-based, ontogenetic ‘conversion’ to dance provides a tantalizing, playful glimpse of a vibrant theoretical niche that the art-form might eventually come to fill within the field of religious studies.

Pairing his experience of dance traditions from around the world with his readings of select philosophical texts, Gill sets in motion a provocative whirl of ideas that demonstrates what the early American modern dancers also knew: the practice of dancing proves a potent catalyst for thinking about religion.

Perhaps best known as a scholar of Native American religions, Gill expands his investigations of rituals and myths to include dancing and its significance for religious studies. His research travels have taken him to a wider world from Bali to Mali and beyond. In his new book, filled with philosophical and phenomenological insights, Gill engages his readers both experientially and in the experience(s) of dancing. He emphasizes activity over spectatorship by using the term dancing instead of dance in his title and from page one throughout all six chapters. He expands the boundaries of ritual study from body and gestures to include movement, rhythm, and the dance-induced experience of trance. The innovative style of his text is balanced by scholarly acumen; however, like others who span the great divide between the intellectual and the experiential dimensions of religion, he offers a selective bibliography. Gill’s work suggests an exciting new methodology. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Sam Gill leads us in a playful and provocative dance, weaving gracefully between the oft-estranged partners of Western “mind” and “body” to draw out tantalizing, seductive glimpses of person moving, engaging–dancing–with the world. Dancing Culture Religion is a work long overdue that promises to move discussion in our field in new and exciting directions.