Autoethnography and Somatic Modes of Attention

Abstract

Somatic autoethnography integrates a materialist perspective that positions a dance ethnographer’s personal history--ethnicity, race, class or national origin—with modes of attention that highlight the impact of perception. From a contemporary neuro-science perspective somatic autoethnography can be articulated as an embodied form of research in which an act of mimesis in learning a dance form in a specific cultural context engages the neuro structures of the ethnographer to evolve new states of embodied cognition and an integration of perception, context/place, memory and imagination. In phenomenological terms, ethnographers transform their experience of their ‘lived-body’ through an intensive engagement in which the body of the performer through imitation becomes the object of the learner’s subjective identity. This project considers this topic from a historically contextual perspective of the author’s personal experience across three dance forms and cultural locations—Middle Eastern Raqs el Sharqi, dance among the Azande of South Sudan, and Japanese Nihon Buyo.