Anthropology Professor Wins Fellowship to Study Tango

CONTACT: Margot
Dimond
PHONE: (713) 348-6775
EMAIL: mdimond@rice.edu

ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR WINS
FELLOWSHIP TO STUDY TANGO IN ARGENTINA

Many years ago during her first year at Harvard, a professor talked
Julie Taylor into switching her major from dance to anthropology on the grounds
that she would have a longer career.

Now a professor of
anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Taylor has managed to combine her
love of dancing with her work in anthropology. She has just won a prestigious
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which she will use to move to Argentina for a
year to research the tango.

Taylor will study how
tango, the national dance of Argentina, relates to violence in that country.
When she returns, she plans to write about her experiences.

Taylor is no stranger to
Argentina–or the tango. She has spent more than half her adult life in
Argentina, working on political terror and violence. While there, she learned
the tango in academies and dance halls. “I had been trained as a dancer, so it
was the natural thing to do in Argentina.”

Eventually, she took up
tango as a research subject. Before she could do the research, however, she had
to become a very good tango dancer, or the other dancers “wouldn’t talk to
me–wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

As it is, the dancers
tell her their sad stories–almost all relating to the near collapse of the
Argentine economy and the country’s high unemployment. Paying the $5.00 entry
fee into the dance hall is a big sacrifice for them.

The traditional theme of
the tango is lost love, she says, but with the problems Argentina has
experienced, “the lost love theme has shifted to a general disorientation in
life, a mourning for lost opportunities.”

She emphasizes that the
tango is a dance of power. “In a violent society, people use other forms of
dominance to channel their anger,” and the tango is empowering to both men and
women, she says.

Taylor, who holds a
Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, has written several
books–most recently Paper Tangos (1998), which she describes as “a memoir of
learning tango in Argentina.”

She leaves for Buenos
Aires on May 31.

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