Publications

Authors:

Arcangeli, Alessandro

Title:

Dancing savages: stereotypes and cultural encounters across theAtlantic in the age of European expansion

Year:

2010

Type of item:

Contributo in volume (Capitolo o Saggio)

Tipologia ANVUR:

Contributo in volume (Capitolo o Saggio)

Language:

Inglese

Format:

A Stampa

Book Title:

Exploring cultural history: essays in honour of Peter Burke

Publisher:

Ashgate

ISBN:

9780754667506

Page numbers:

289-308

Keyword:

dance; travel literature; cultural encounters; images of the savage; stereotypes of the Other; early modern Africa America and Europe

Short description of contents:

From the editors’ Introduction, pp. 26-7: “Alessandro Arcangeli considers stereotypes about dancing savages in the early modern Atlantic encounter. He raises the question of whether the European experience at home, in front of the stage, conditioned how exotic dances were represented, and whether negative prejudices about culturally unsophisticated peoples determined their interpretation. In a hierarchical view of the scale of civilization, the equation of the dancing peasant and the dancing savage easily became associated by the elite European observer. However, Arcangeli’s analysis seeks to separate the empirical description of dancing practices by naked peoples – what we might call ethnography – from its negative valuation as an example of disorderly behaviour and loss of moral control, which only belongs to specific observers; although the tendency to do this seems to have increased over the period to the times of Lafitau. In effect, the discourse on dancing savages enhanced the European sense of a growing distance in relation to their own ancient past – the construction of the savage led to the construction of the primitive.”

Product ID:

57536

Handle IRIS:

11562/343433

Deposited On:

October 8, 2010

Last Modified:

October 28, 2022

Bibliographic citation:

Arcangeli, Alessandro, Dancing savages: stereotypes and cultural encounters across theAtlantic in the age of European expansion Exploring cultural history: essays in honour of Peter Burke , Melissa Calaresu, Filippo de Vivo e Joan-Pau Rubiés , Ashgate , 2010 , pp. 289-308

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