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• Independent Block of Macha Caporal: The Challenges and Restrictions in Female Dancing

  103-122

  Pamela Santana

  Views:

  233

  This paper explores the experience of six Macha Caporal dancers belonging to an independent female block in La Paz, a recent and still unexplored mode of associa­tion to dance. This article analyzes and makes visible the challenges and restrictions women face in endeavoring to sustain an independent dance practice in the context of urban folk dance in Bolivia. Through the accounts of the women and the ethno­graphic material gathered from fieldwork in 2018 in Bolivia, the study portrays the women’s dancing context revealing the challenges and restrictions linked to the condition of being women in a society that is traversed by chauvinism. In the task of dancing, the women’s performance reveals a complex negotiation of gender roles, ideas, and expectations; processes that highlight the women’s agency and determina­tion to carry on with a practice that ultimately grants them feelings of self-validation and autonomy.

• Post-UNESCO Effect: Chhau’s journey from Cultural Sentiment to Commercialization

  69-88

  Ayantika Chakraborty

  Views:

  162

  Chhau, a traditional masked dance form of West Bengal has been enlisted as ‘UNESCO- Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, 2010’. In 2015, UNESCO along with the MSME of Government of West Bengal developed a ‘Rural Craft Hub’ in Chorida village of Purulia district centring Chhau. Consequently, tourism in the area got international and national patronage. This entire phenomenon encouraged the commercialization of the traditional dance and craft form associated with Chhau as a result of heritagization. Unfortunately, the implication of the heritagization happened in a flawed fashion which eventually led to folklorization and institutionalization while compromising their contextual significance. The paper explores how heritagization ensures the sustainability of intangible tradition like Chhau while leading to folklorization and institutionalization of performance and craft. The paper also documents the history and ritualistic significance of Chhau to draw a lucid comparison between the traditional form and the form which is the result of folklorization. The paper establishes that the Heritagization- Folklorization- Institutionalisation are intertwined with each other in the context of Chhau.  From the interviews of the tourists and locals associated with Chhau, it is evident that the organization concerned with policy making should keep it in mind that an enormous distortion of craft and performance comes along when the target buyers in the market are alien to the traditional context. In such a scenario, the contextual significance of a craft form can be kept intact if the targeted buyers can be made aware of the contextual and functional relevance of the folkloric element that they are consuming in its modernized version.

• Lore and the Process of Tradition: Locating the Place of Belief Narratives in Ka Phur Nongjri and Sohbar

  89-102

  Auswyn Winter Japang

  Views:

  132

  Since the earliest times, the villages of Nongjri and Sohbar, located in the Southern Khasi Hills of North-Eastern India, have had their own religious ceremonies, customs, ways of behaving and beliefs that they share in their practice and narration. Their beliefs in certain village deities are linked with the well-being of the entire village, and are said to have existed from the time these villages were established. In the beliefs of the inhabitants of Nongjri and the village of Sohbar, the deities, mani­fest themselves in various performances and folksongs, and therefore, have become part of the performance itself. Deities, often in the form of human beings, engage in conversation with the villagers. Folklore also tells us that during festivities the ap­proval of the celebrations by village deities becomes the key aspect to foretell the particular nature of the coming year.

  The lore gathered from the places considered for this study would provide us with a new perspective on belief narratives existing in the Khasi community, while continu­ally locating the position of lore and various processes of tradition in the socio-cultural and religious milieu of both Nongjri and Sohbar. The narratives explored in this paper will also provide – in the Khasi cultural context – the essence of War-Khasi beliefs and rituals that have remained largely undocumented.

• Anthropology in Dance: Gesture Systems of the Body

  123-148

  Nóra Ábrahám

  Views:

  127

  My paper outlines an anthropological approach to dance focusing on the body’s interpretation within the contexts of space, sensuality, theater, fashion, aesthetic quality, and the development of gesture systems of the body. The study addresses the question whether the bareness of the body and space may be defined as a form of emptiness or rather as a case of sincere manifestation and revolves around the issues of social and personal attitudes related to dance performance, including mimetic performers, limits of social body norms, and the possibilities of survival, especially the changes in the female body’s perceptual and social roles and strategies.