Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé

Concentrating on the Caribbean Basin and the coastal area of northeast South America, Yvonne Daniel considers three African-derived religious systems that rely heavily on dance behavior–Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahamian Candomble. Combining her background in dance and anthropology to parallel the participant/scholar dichotomy inherent to dancing’s embodied knowledge, Daniel examines these misunderstood and oppressed performative dances in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics.