Cultural sustainability—Art and Ubuntu as rationales for dancing

Abstract

AbstractThis article scrutinises the rationales for dancing in the world and how they affect dance sustainability. These rationales are assumptions about societal values of dance that underlie national as well as international cultural policies, so basic that they are rarely challenged. The authors bring a challenge by asking if there is one universally valid and sustainable rationale for dancing, which makes sense to the totality of the global population, given the extreme difference in living conditions. It is written out of a concern that some economically privileged parts of the world’s population are promoting the story of a universally valid rationale for dancing under the term dance art. It draws attention to an alternative rationale for dancing based on the Ubuntu philosophy of the Bantu peoples of Africa.

Keywords

• Dance art
• Ubuntu
• sustainability
• ethnochoreology
• dance anthropology
• Robert Read, Economics, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, UK