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

Keywords:

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’.

Mellish, Liz, and Nick Green (2021). “Politics of representation, identity and minorities as portrayed through local dance in the Banat Region.” Vivien Apjok, Kinga Povedák, Vivien Szőnyi and Sándor Varga (editors), Dance, age and politics – Proceedings of the 30th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology 28th July–3rd August 2018, 181-192. Szeged, Hungary: Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Szeged; Hungarian Association for Ethnochoreology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology.