Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé

by Yvonne Daniel

Concentrating on the Caribbean Basin and the coastal area of northeast South America, Yvonne Daniel considers three African-derived religious systems that rely heavily on dance behavior--Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahamian Candomble. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing's embodied knowledge, Daniel examines these misunderstood and oppressed performative dances in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction

324 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2005

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book. Dance is a huge and crucial part of African and Diasporic religions and not a whole lot has been written about what the dances do and how they fit into the larger scheme of the religions.

I'm sure this information was present in this book, but I had an awful time accessing it. I did find some of what I was looking for, but it was lost among the author's disjointed narrative and timeline that jumped all over the place.

I was surprised that the author was cramming two Orisha religions and Haitian vodou into one book, as the practices are very different, and the author's bias for Orisha practices shines through like an Orisha bat signal. She reports that her base of folkloric dance is Haitian, but you wouldn't know it for the comparatively little space she gives the rich Haitian dances and their place in vodou.

The author seems happy to expose her fumbling and mistakes, which is honorable in an anthropological way, but it makes for cringe-y awkward reading. The moment where she explains that she thought she could finish her initiation into Lucumi via initiating into Candomble (this isn't done for purely logical reasons--one religion doesn't satisfy another) is painful at the very least, and she doesn't even note in a footnote that this was a product of her just not knowing and instead leaves it as a perfectly reasonable possibility.

While there is a lot of information here, it is hard to sort out and it really isn't an exploration of the dance styles as they are used in their respective religions. Instead, it is a narrative that waters down the meat of the material in a big way and falls to the obvious desire to produce a body of work ala Maya Deren. It didn't happen here, unfortunately.

[Shomeret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was interesting, but I thought that the author's perspective limited her. She was interested in the African elements in African Diasporic religion, so she decided to ignore Umbanda and the Caboclo religions in Brazil. She might have been surprised by what she found if she had examined them. On the other hand, I liked her idea that those who preserve musical and dance traditions are "experiential librarians". Perhaps that needs to become a branch of information science.

[spooky · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was illuminating and detailed. it was also full of the author talking about herself, which annoyed the hell out of me. to be fair, i didn't make it all the way through.