When I first started teaching Hinduism classes at Emory University, Hindu students sometimes commented that their parents \u201cdidn\u2019t know anything\u201d about Hinduism. I often asked these students whether their parents performed the ritual of\u00a0puja<\/em>\u00a0(offerings) to Hindu deities; the answer was \u201cyes.\u201d I responded that their parents, then, knew something\u2014through their bodies\u2014even if they could not always talk about what they knew discursively\u2014i.e., explain why they were doing the things they were doing.<\/p>\n These interactions led me to think about ways to learn and teach about how knowledge is created and expressed through the body. More specifically, I looked for a body practice that we could incorporate into a class in order to address the issue of \u201chow bodies know.\u201d My assumption was that students would learn how their own bodies carry and learn new forms of knowledge if they actively engaged in a specific body practice. Sasikala Penumarthi was already teaching the classical Indian dance form of Kuchipudi in the Dance Department, in a class on world dance forms, and she readily agreed to participate in the class both as a conversation partner in our discussions and teacher of the dance form. After several iterations of the class, we added one week of yoga practice (taught by Emory dance professor and yoga instructor Anna Leo) and discussion, in which we address differences in the goals and audiences of dance and yoga and what was created for the students in the practice of these forms of movement.<\/p>\n We structure the class to meet three times a week\u2014with one day dedicated to dance instruction and practice and two days to lectures and discussion. For the latter, we begin the course by reading Hindu mythologies of the dancing deities Shiva and Krishna, asking what happens (or is created) when a god dances. We read these stories as a narrativized performance theory. In this section of the course, we also look at paintings, lithographs, and sculptures of Krishna and Shiva dancing and ask what each mode of visualization creates differently from both the narrative and choreographed dances of the same narratives. In the practice part of the class, we dance Krishna and throughout the semester reflect on what we learn and experience about Krishna through our own (unique) dancing bodies in this Emory classroom context. We also discuss the ways bodies are used and reflected in other Hindu devotional (bhakti<\/em>) poetic and dance traditions; the ways the dancing body became a site of contestation and identity in colonial and postcolonial India; and the ways in which Indian dance in diasporic contexts creates identities in different ways than it does in India.<\/p>\n One reading that has been particularly generative in helping the students think through the ways in which their own bodies carry knowledge has been Greek anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis\u2019s essay \u201cThe Memory of the Senses\u201d.1<\/u>\u00a0Seremetakis identifies and analyzes three embodied practices in Greek culture that she calls \u201cresting moments,\u201d which create and perform memory: drinking coffee, picking wild greens, and embroidery. Students have written creative essays identifying similar modes of embodiment that they had not previously thought of as \u201cknowledge\u201d and analyze through performance studies’ frameworks what these practices create. One student who grew up in India wrote about what he had learned through walking barefoot through muddy rice fields, on hot pavement, and through cool home interiors in India. Another student, unused to going barefoot in public settings, reflected on what she had learned through the simple act of taking off shoes and socks in a university setting and through the feel of her bare feet on the wooden floor of a dance studio.<\/p>\n Other students have written about the knowledge body practices and material culture have created at communal events such as Thanksgiving dinners, Catholic confirmation rituals, and bat mitzvahs, as well as through personal moments, such as childhood foiled-wrapped chocolate eggs, a train journey, and a high school art project that unconsciously reproduced a childhood chair. After one student described and analyzed what was created through the body practice of her grandmother having fed her with her hands as a toddler, we invited the class to my home to eat Indian food with our hands, seated on the floor\u2014which led to an interesting discussion right there on the floor about what assumptions are made and what is created through where and how one sits to eat and whether one eats with one\u2019s hands, is fed by the hands of others, or uses utensils.<\/p>\n The class introduces three primary analytic frameworks within which to consider dance and embodied knowledge: western analytic performance theories (Catherine Bell, Richard Bauman, Richard Schechner, Phillip Zarrilli), Indian classical aesthetic (rasa<\/em>) theory (Natyasastra<\/em>), and theories of emotion (Paul Eckman, Keith Oatley). We read sections of the classical Indian dance manual, the\u00a0Natyasastra<\/em>, which prescribes certain body gestures, facial expressions, etc. to create particular\u00a0rasas<\/em>\u00a0(aesthetic emotions). This performance theory assumes an idealized audience (rasikas<\/em>) educated in the performance traditions they are witnessing; and it is prescriptive (what performers need to do in order to create particular\u00a0rasas<\/em>), in contrast to western performance theories that analyze and describe, rather than prescribe. During the semester, students attend at least one performance of Indian dance in Atlanta to analyze the ways in which\u00a0rasa<\/em>\u00a0may be performed and embodied by professional dancers, as well as what is created for different audience members who may be familiar or unfamiliar with the dance genre they are witnessing. When the audience includes non-specialists, western performance theoretical frameworks help students to analyze what else may be created through the performance, if not\u00a0rasa<\/em>.<\/p>\n As beginning dancers, in their own practice and final performance, it is rare that students will experience or create\u00a0rasa<\/em>. Rather, they learn other things about their bodies. It becomes clear to the class, for example, that the bodies of students who are dancers are trained to learn and remember movement sequences much more easily than those of us who are not dancers. These same dance students, however, are embodying new Kuchipudi movements that are very different from ballet or modern dance, which raises questions for them about\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0their dancing bodies learn and with what assumptions they come to dance.<\/p>\n We end the semester by performing a short Kuchipudi dance piece for friends, professors, and other dance classes, for which we have practiced all semester. We dress (for the first time) in practice saris, wear dance ankle bells, and wear dance makeup. Many \u201cnon-dancers\u201d (myself included) are surprised at the ways in which this costuming itself helps to reinforce and elicit memory of the choreography, the differences having a live audience makes in what dance creates, and what our bodies learn through performance itself (rather than just practice).<\/p>\n In the most recent iteration of the class in 2011, my co-instructor Harshita Kamath suggested that, instead of writing a final take-home exam, we give the students an option to choreograph and perform a short piece using Kuchipudi gestures and footwork and write a short essay discussing their choices and challenges. Several dance majors chose this option: two dancers performed a piece based on William Yeats\u2019s play\u00a0At the Hawk\u2019s Well<\/em>, and another student choreographed (to her own reading) Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s short story \u201cHarrison Bergeron,\u201d for which a video is included (figure 1).<\/p>\n In his essay in the \u201cRoundtable on Ethnography on Religion\u201d (included in this issue of\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>), Robert Orsi encourages scholars of religion to \u201cdo religious studies with our whole bodies.\u201d This theory-practice class is one step in that direction. By dancing with our whole bodies, we have learned the kinds of questions and emotions body practices can raise and the spectrum of identities and relationships they can create. We study and apply the theories that have developed both in Indian and non-Indian contexts that have attempted to account for these. As (mostly) novice dancers, we cannot fully know through our own bodies what professional dancers and \u201ceducated\u201d audiences (rasikas<\/em>) of Indian dance experience and know, but we learn that body practices \u201cdo\u201d something and \u201ccount\u201d as knowledge.<\/p>\n![\"Dancing](\"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/danceembodiedimage01.jpg\")
<\/a>Embodying Knowledge in the Dance Studio (Harshita Mruthinti Kamath)<\/strong><\/h3>\n