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Dance and Non-Dance: Patterned Movement in Iran and Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Anthony Shay
Anthony Shay*
Affiliation:
Department of Dance, University of California at Riverside
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Extract

Much Scholarly Ink has been Spilled over the Question of What constitutes dance in different societies. Several attempts have been made to create a universal category for dance that would enable dance scholars to transcend this fundamental question and get down to the business of conducting research, secure in the knowledge that all of their colleagues understand the basic definitions of “dance.”

None of the current definitions takes into account dance and dance events in societies such as those of the Islamic areas of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa where the term for dance (usually the Arabic word raqṣ) can possibly bear powerfully negative or, at least, ambiguous connotations. While dance, and a word to denote that activity, exists and we can perhaps come to an agreement over what constitutes dance, an even more crucial issue is what dance is not in an Islamic environment.

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Articles
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Iranian Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1-2 , Spring Winter 1995, pp. 61 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1995

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References

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