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The Representation and Reality of Religion in Dance
Judith Lynne Hanna
 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
, Vol. 56, No. 2. (Summer, 1988), pp. 281-306.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7189%28198822%2956%3A2%3C281%3ATRAROR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P
 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
is currently published by Oxford University Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgFri Feb 22 18:58:19 2008
 
Journal
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the American Academy
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The Representation and Realityof Religion in Dance
Judith
Lynne Hanna
A
SYSTEM OF PALPABLE, vital signs, dance is a barometer of theol-ogy, ideology, world view, and social change. Yet dance does not figureprominently in religious studies or other nondance scholarly disciplines.Words take pride of place over kinetic images. Although there areestablished traditions for the study of texts, nonverbal communication,sociolinguistic, and semiotic studies developed only after World War 11,and perspectives from these fields have only more recently been appliedto dance (Hanna, 1979, 1987a, 1987b, 1988a, 1988b). This articleexplores the relationship of dance to divinity,' and aims to call attentionto a neglected form of expression in the comparative and critical exami-nation of religion. It offers, from the ethnographic/historical record, ananalytical typology of some of the ways in which dancers and spectatorsdraw the power of the supernatural to the human world and reach out tothe holy.
CONCEPTS
A religion's position on two issues affects its use of images of thedivine in dance (cf. Wach, 1958). First, is the deity knowable in bodilyform? If the answer is affirmative, then it is likely that a dancer, creatingspecific images in space, time, and with effort, can temporarily meta-morphose into a god or subtle suggestions or attributes of an awesome
Judith Lynne Hanna is Senior Research Scholar, College of Human Ecology, University of Mary-land, College Park, MD 20742.'This article is a revised version of papers presented at the New Ecumenical Research AssociationConference on God: The Contemporary Discussion, August 10-15, 1984, held in Seoul, and theEastern Society for Aesthetics, March
22,
1986, held at George Mason University. 1 wish to thankBetty Rubenstein for the opportunity to learn more about art and religion; Doug Adams, DianeApostolos-Cappadona, Alf Hiltebeitel, and William Murray for directing me to relevant literature;and Jean Cunningham, William John Hanna, Lois lbsen al Famqi, Lauri Honko, Doug Adams,Brenda Dixon-Stowell, and Sally Ann Ness, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of thisarticle.
 
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numinous reality. Among the polytheistic religions of the Greeks,Romans, Hindus, and Africans, participants tend to think that the godspossess anthropomorphic attributes and are subject to the same weak-nesses that plague humans2 Tlius, these religions have a tendency topresent static or kinetic (danced) images of the divine.However, if one's god is considered to have a hidden face, a con-sciousness unlike our own, and an inscrutable aim, then, at most, danceis likely to manifest only essences of divinity. Some congregationsrooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition follow the biblical injunction ofnot making any graven image of God (Exodus, 20:4-5). Similarly, Islamhas canonical prohibitions against human-made imagery of God andperceives idolatry/iconolatry sinful, including the three-dimensionalimages of dance (a1 Famqi, 1984). The absence of visible representationof divinity in dance often symbolizes the invisible transcendence of agod3Second, a religion's attitude toward the body, especially emotionalityand sexuality, affects its use of dance in religion and other aspects of life(see Wilson, 1982:65).Consider the contrasting attitudes toward the body generally foundin Christianity and Hinduism. Viewing the human body as a templehousing the Holy Spirit and calling its church the "body of Christ,"Christianity's attitude toward the body is inconsistent but generally neg-ative. In earliest Christianity, dance flourished among some gnosticgroups and more recently among the Shakers, whose dances were sup-posed to shake off evils associated with the flesh. Although early Chris-tians described dance as an imitation of the perpetual dance of theangels (training to enable one to enter heaven) and built upon theHebrew tradition of demonstrating through pious dance that no part of
2Polytheistic faiths may have supreme gods who have unknowable forms or are known onlythrough incarnations. Some polytheistic religious groups with bodily religious behavior, followingthe universal human practice of creating signs to distinguish between and among people and torally their followers, reject danced images of divinity to set themselves apart from competing reli-gions that accept them.3The position of the unknowability of the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem gods has been chal-lenged. Bennett
(1976:3)
speaks of the "putative theology of non-human deity issued in distinct butradically related Hebraic, Christian, and Moslem forms as the most insistent anthropomorphism theworld has ever known, in willful Jehovah.
.
.,
in crusading Allah, and in the Father of a given manin history." He raises "serious doubt in regard to clarity and honesty in the contemporary apprecia-tion of the history of religion, as it applies to Greek anthropomorphism versus the unknown Chris-tian God, when the first sees god in man but never man as god, and the second can posit unknownand unknowable deity in the unique genetic relation of Father to Son." Nevertheless, the wide-spread acceptance of belief in the unknowability of the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem gods affectsthe representation and reality of divinity in dance.
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