Ecrire “la danse” en anthropologie: la violence de la recherche au bout du stylo [Writing "Dance" in Anthropology: Research Violence at the Tip of the Pen]

Abstract

Writing is a central activity in dance anthropology, but it is neither neutral nor innocent. The movement presents challenges in transferring it to paper, and exposes the anthropologist to ethnocentric risks. How can she overcome the categorization mechanisms that have constructed one's knowledge and tend to guide one's gaze? How can he account for practices and use graphical forms that transform the studied content? The act of "writing dance" presupposes an inevitable part of violence in what? To address these different aspects, an angle of reflection will be developed from questions raised during writing about the dances of the Wodaabe, a Fulani subgroup in Niger. The challenge is to associate the problems of writing in dance and in anthropology, and to think about the relationships between the questions posed and the tools used, the movement and the sign, and the researcher and the agents.