Communities of practice: Traditional music and dance

Western Folklore, Spring 2001 by Jordan-Smith, Paul, Horton, Laurel

Etienne Wenger's 1998 study of insurance claim processors delineated a number of useful terms and concepts about what he calls "communities of practice," groups united by a common activity, which in itself may not have any importance to its members--such as a job that offers nothing more than paid employment. Over time, individuals in such groups often develop techniques and practices independent of those stipulated for the principal activity. They may also develop a stable network of interpersonal relationships and a common body of semantically important resources for producing meaning. The factors that unite a community of practice

are not easily reducible to a single principle such as power, pleasure, competition, collaboration, desire, economic relations, utilitarian arrangements, or information processing (1998:77).

Moreover, as with Turner's "star-groups," homogeneity is not a require ment of mutual engagement, so joint enterprises do not imply agreement:

In fact, in some communities, disagreement can be viewed as a productive part of the enterprise. The enterprise is joint not in that everybody believes the same thing or agrees with everything, but in that it is communally negotiated (Wenger 1998:78).

Several important monographs using a somatic approach have dealt with vernacular dance, each focusing on the ways specific dance forms have helped shape a community. Notable among these are works by Cynthia Novack on American contact improvisation (1990), J. Lowell Lewis on Brazilian capoeira (1992), Sally Ann Ness on Philippine sinulog (1992), Yvonne Daniels on Cuban rumba (1995), and Deidre Sklar on Matachine dancing in Tortugas, New Mexico (2001). Studies of American contra dance include Mary Dart's Contra Dance Choreography (1995), the first published formal study of the subject, and three doctoral dissertations (Bealle 1989, Hast 1995, and Jordan-Smith 2000).

Most of the papers here deal with stable, consistent, and coherent groups with dense, multiplex relationships. We no longer see them as groups that are emerging as communities: they already fulfill, in the complex dynamics of interaction, those criteria which justify applying the term. They are "communities of practice," even if the feelings of communality do not define in full the lives of their individual members. It is in this sense that the term is justified in the papers that follow.

The present collection opens with Rebecca Sachs Norris's "Embodiment and Community," in which she discusses the role of the body as the locus of "shared somatic experience." Drawing on examples from contra and English country dance, she then expands this theme to include the emotional aspects of the impulse towards forming stable and coherent associations that participants (such as contra and English country dancers) refer to as "community." This discussion provides a ground for including "bodylore" as a key to understanding why and how communality is experienced by those engaged in sustaining a community of practice.