The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:159)

Movement as Cultural Knowledge: The term “ethnography” literally means “portrait of a people.” Perhaps “portrait” is too thin and two-dimensional a metaphor to represent the goal of ethnography, for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's words, “a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1973:89). The ethnographer wants to know nothing less than how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning.

To examine dance from an ethnographic perspective, then, is to focus on dance as a kind of cultural knowledge. Dance ethnography depends upon the postulate that cultural knowledge is embodied in movement, especially the highly stylized and codified movement we call dance. This statement implies that the knowledge involved in dancing is not just somatic, but mental and emotional as well, encompassing cultural history, beliefs, values, and feelings. If movement encodes cultural knowledge then, for example, ballet can be examined for the messages it embodies about enduring gender conventions derived from the court society of Renaissance Europe and performance art can be examined as a response to the demands of survival in urban America.