Eric Mullis provides a rigorous demonstration of interdisciplinary scholarship, merging performance theory with theology, philosophy, and autoethnographic and historical research methodologies. Mullis's Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance: Interdisciplinary Dance Research in the American South addresses the value of combining research modalities and drawing on embodied research as part of a process model of dance philosophy. Mullis examines ecstatic states within Appalachian charismatic Pentecostal churches and the ethics of researching and representing these traditions through performance.
His work differs from recent publications on dance and philosophy in its emphasis on pragmatism and somaesthetics. For example, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (Farinas and Van Camp Reference Farinas and Camp2021) and Midwest Studies in Philosophy's December 2019 issue dedicated to dance philosophy feature a wide range of philosophical topics, theories, and methodologies, including Mullis's discussion of political dance and Richard Shusterman's somaesthetic perspectives. Mullis's monograph brings a renewed focus on pragmatism, which has been overwhelmed in the American context by phenomenological, analytic, and continental philosophical approaches. However, Pragmatist Philosophy shares a focus on philosophical approaches to dance and religion with Kimerer LaMothe's Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (Reference LaMothe2004) and an emphasis on relationships between dance and religion with Sam Gill's Dancing Culture Religion (Reference Gill2012). Simultaneously, Mullis draws attention to autoethnographic methodologies in the dance field, aligning with work such as the edited collection Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance (Davida Reference Davida2011), Karen Schupp's (Reference Schupp2017) autoethnographic studies of dance competition culture, and Lliane Loots's (Reference Loots2016) “The Autoethnographic Act of Choreography,” to name but a few.
Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance's interdisciplinarity governs its structure, offering a journey that feels, at times, segmented by research modalities and disciplinary methodologies, while drawing varied methodologies into dialogue with one another across eight chapters. Pentecostalism and charismatic states link autoethnographic field notes to philosophy, choreographic analysis, and religious history. Chapter 1 performatively enacts a historical and pragmatist justification for autobiography as a valid form of philosophical inquiry, while also conveying Mullis's positionality within his ethnographic research of Southern Pentecostal churches. Beginning with an autoethnography of Mullis's journey to choreographing Later Rain and its development into formal sections that also function as standalone performances (Paw Creek, This Falls to Us, and The Land of Nod), he provides theoretical, religious historical, and methodological background before closing with a standard outline of chapters.
Mullis frames the book's remaining structure around issues arising from his creation of Later Rain and its stand-alone sections, identifying his choreographic methodology as process-based (similar to “postmodern artists” Deborah Hay and Jonathan Burrows) and linking this practice to pragmatist philosophy's emphasis on the role change and context play in theory and its applications (23). Chapter 2 opens by articulating Mullis's ethnographic methods in relationship to John Dewey's notions of a “problematic situation” and “experimental inquiry.” Mullis quickly moves into an evaluation of Shusterman's somaesthetics in relation to Dewey's pragmatist theory and Shusterman's failure to adequately consider dance.
Drawing on somaesthetics's emphasis on embodied experience, chapter 3 investigates historical shifts in Protestantism's theological approaches to ecstatic states and demonstrates how they rely on differing understandings of the Holy Spirt. Mullis also addresses religion's effect on social conventions resulting from Pentecostalism's “decentralized, interracial, and multicultural” approach within the United States (24) and offers an analysis of ethical and aesthetic conventions developed within ecstatic Protestantism's improvised embodied theology. This social history includes a discussion of race within Pentecostalism's US history but does not attempt a sustained analysis of racism or colonialism. However, Mullis occasionally places Protestant ecstatic practices in relationship to other embodied religions, such as the practice of spirit hosts found among the Ewe people of Togo. The chapter concludes with Mullis's Paw Creek and Later Rain's relation to the history of charismatic Protestantism. Contrastingly, chapter 4 offers a choreographic analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance works representing Shaker dance practices. The Shakers’ history is woven throughout analysis of the works, ranging from Doris Humphrey's choreographies to the Wooster Group's performances, positioning his dances in relation to theatrical strategies employed in the works he analyzes.
The discussion of previous dance and theater work leads to the fifth chapter's detailed account of Mullis's ethnographic research and his application of Richard Schechner's anthropological performance theory in the analysis of rural and urban Pentecostal church services. As in the previous chapter, Mullis places his work in relation to his research, examining dramaturgical strategies as a tool for positioning his viewers. Delving further into his embodied research, chapter 6 performs an autoethnography of the techniques Mullis employed to produce dissociative states, sharing personal accounts by himself and his dancers, as well as providing theoretical context by discussing philosophical treatments of auto-affection and their relation to Pentecostal ecstatic states.
Chapter 7 undertakes an in-depth critical discussion of William James's religious philosophy, The Varieties of Religious Experiences (1985). The chapter highlights James's theory and how his pragmatic analysis of mysticism, religion, and altered states informs Mullis's performance research. Establishing how his work differs, Mullis notes limitations in James's attention to the body and a failure to address how community functions in ecstatic religious experiences. Notably, he articulates an ethics of witnessing that rests on a recognition of the limits of our ability to know the experience of another person and suggests how this work might inform ethnographic research into spiritual embodiment within religious practices outside Christianity, such as Candomblé. Mullis argues that fieldwork requires an ethics beyond recognition (an acknowledgement that others’ experiences are real, even when one does not comprehend them), before moving to consider possible critiques of Pentecostal practices and the ethics of his performance research.
In conclusion, Mullis discusses performance philosophy, examining existing philosophical theories of dance grouped into five methodologies (illustrative, analytic, poetic, phenomenological, and contextualist) and ending by advocating for the pragmatic instrumentalism he employed in creating Later Rain. This position aligns with pluralism, which advocates for artistic research that draws on various theoretical approaches at different stages in the process depending on the “problems” encountered. Introducing performance philosophy, he advocates for its approach as a valid form of philosophical inquiry. The conclusion, chapter 4, and chapter 6 are the most broadly applicable to dance studies. The examination of choreographic representations of the Shakers, and Mullis's embodied research into dissociative states, paired with the third chapter's examination of embodiment within religious history, contribute to dance history and its understanding of dance's relationship to Christian religious practices.
Notably, Mullis's analysis of dance/theater works portraying Shaker culture forms the framework for a discussion of performative strategies that support his choreographic treatments of ecstatic Protestantism. Focusing on ethics and efficacy, Mullis argues for dialogic engagements with theology that avoid reducing religious embodiment to a set of aesthetic principles aligning with modernism. This examination of historical works concludes with an analysis of Mullis's own The Land of Nod, which he uses to demonstrate (1) strategies for performatively engaging with theologies that allow for critical reflection and (2) ethical concerns arising from working with a living religion. Calling attention to how theatrical representations of the Shakers live at a historical distance from the sect, Mullis demonstrates how this leads to idealized representations and a focus on decontextualized material culture that “mythologizes” religion (112). Further positioning his examples, Mullis argues that his treatment of charismatic Pentecostalism in Later Rain faces different ethical concerns because it could offend existing practitioners, and focuses on theatrically presenting ecstatic movement, rather than a specific religion or religious community. Instead, Later Rain and The Land of Nod offer a model for how dance might critically and ethically engage with religious praxis.
Overall, discussions of his performance works and choreographies either begin or end chapters, and are sometimes quite brief. This aspect of the text reflects the overall organization, which shifts between perspectives and methodologies. Eric Mullis's Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance offers a rich treatment of pragmatism, theology, and somaesthetics, placing these bodies of thought in relationship to one another and dancerly embodiment in significant and fruitful ways.
