Politics of representation, identity and minorities as portrayed through local dance in the Banat Region
Keywords: Identity

This paper will examine the politics of representation and identity as portrayed through dance by the co-located ethnicities in the Banat region of Romania using three main parameters, the ‘representation’ that the dancing is portraying, the context in which the dancing takes place and the adaption of the dancing to the context. Theoretically it drawn on Barth’s work on ethnic identities, Hall’s “counter politics of the local and Harrison’s expressive differentiation through “symbolic practices. Through ethnographic examples from the authors’ fieldwork among the co-located ethnicities it reveals that in social contexts local dances predominate, whereas as in presentational contexts the material presented ranges from presentations of local dances of their ethnicity, to drawing on their national ‘image’.