World Dance Cultures: From Ritual to Spectacle

From healing, fertility, and religious rituals, through theatrical entertainment, to death ceremonies and ancestor worship, the updated and revised second edition of World Dance Cultures introduces an extraordinary variety of dance forms and their cultures, which are practiced around the world.
This highly illustrated textbook draws on wide-ranging historical documentation and first-hand accounts taking in India, Bali, Java, Cambodia, China, Japan, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Türkiye, Spain, Native America, South America, and the Caribbean, with this second edition adding new chapters on the Pacific Islands, Southern Africa, France, and Cuba.
Each chapter covers a certain region’s distinctive dances, pinpoints key issues and trends from the form’s development to its modern iteration, and offers a wealth of study features including:
• Spotlights zooming in on key details of a dance form’s cultural, historical, and religious contexts
• Explorations―first-hand descriptions by famous dancers and ethnographers, excerpts from anthropological fieldwork, or historical writings on the form
• Think About―provocations to encourage critical analysis of dance forms and the ways in which they’re understood
• Discussion Questions―starting points for group work, classroom seminars, or individual study.
Offering a comprehensive overview of each dance form covered with over 100 full color photos, World Dance Cultures is an essential introductory resource for students and instructors alike.