In the twentieth century, modern dancers drew on the natural sciences to construct what they understood as essential bodily truths, imagining that their practices retrieved lost corporeal capacities still evident in supposedly “primitive” societies. My project investigates the earlier epistemic conditions that made such claims possible. I examine a corpus of writings produced during the colonization of the Americas, focusing on descriptions of dancing in the naturalist studies of explorers, scientists, and clergy who traveled there during Europe’s Age of Exploration. In the project, I thus trace the early history of scientistic colonial thought which, by the nineteenth century, constructed a “natural history of dance,” framing dance as a natural and universal human practice that might therefore be used to assess the evolution and development of cultures. At the heart of the project is an inquiry into the civilizational politics that inform how the dancing body has been historically understood. Further, I investigate how scienstistic theorization of dance was transposed between Europe and the Americas, and between the natural sciences and dance art, informing political address of embodied practices on both sides of the Atlantic.
