Spiritual Herstories: Call of the Soul in Dance Research
This book brings together women in higher education with an emphasis on academic and inspirational leadership in dance and spirituality. The chapters in this collection provide scholarly reflection and inspiration for those interested in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of dance and spirituality. Augmented through epistemologies of embodied thinking, this book may be of interest to those working in the often private, lived and sensed meeting points between academia and spirituality. Written by women whose research proficiency extends into areas such as philosophy, anthropology and ethnography, biblical studies, psychotherapy, embodied education, feminism and diasporic studies, the scope of the book travels across multi-directional spiritual geographies. The writers in this volume have either centred their life’s work on spirituality and dance, or ebbed and flowed across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, expanding the theorization and documentation of spirituality in dance studies through innovative scholarship. The book follows the edited collection, Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives (Williamson et al. 2014); however, it is broader in its cultural and methodological diversity. Chapters decisively dive into, or gently drift across disciplinary areas such as African-American spiritualities, Native-American spiritualities, spiritual feminisms and Jungian spirituality. Readers travel the excavated and rived landscapes of the Goddess – the fresh ravines of thealogy and spiritual feminism, and spiritualities developing through what Arjun Appadurai (1996) refers to as ‘ethnoscapes of migration’. A number of authors offer spiritually orientated historiographies, challenging colonial inscription. Chapters are geographically and religiously diverse; research topics range from Hindu Mythology, Zen and Buddhism, Caribbean and Afro-Latin divinity in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, and indigenous dances rooted in symbols of North America, Mongolia and China.
|
|
