It is appropriate that Brenda Farnell has written the foreword to Drid Williams’s 2nd edition of Anthropology and the Dance, Ten Lectures. Farnell displays a clear grasp of not only the basic tenets of Williams’s work and the trajectory of her career but also Williams’s now-mythical sojourning into the realms of dance and anthropology under the prestigious tutelage of that famous Oxford don, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (“E-P,” as he was fondly called). E-P told Williams, “Regardless of how it turns out, it will be the first thesis written on this subject in this university for eight hundred years!” (p. vii).

Farnell’s tone is respectful, almost to the point of being reverential. It is through her eyes that readers are invited to share, vicariously, in her experiences as a graduate student under Williams’s mentorship, through the ten lectures that make up Williams’s book. “The courses and the individual tutorial sessions she gave us remain memorable to this day, twenty years and a Ph.D. degree later” (p. ix).

Williams, as well, initially gives one the impression that the book will have autoethnographic and biographical insights, as she firmly claims that one of its distinctive attributes is that it is written from a “dancerly” point of view—that is, from the perspective of someone who is a practitioner of various dance forms and who has reflected deeply on what makes “dance” what it is, different from movement or gesture. Williams insists that the chapters in the volume are not simply the result of “navel gazing” but are “the results of thought that took place while sweating over a ballet-barre or attempting to master a Calypso dance in a New York studio or a North Indian Kathak tukra, paran or ghat in a similar context, and so on, including years spent in the field in West Africa and Australia” (p. xvi).

The book fails to deliver, for the most part, on this apparent promise of a “personal anthropology,” as it emerges as mainly analytic in its orientation, using tools of sociolinguistics and logical argumentation. Snippets of personal narratives occasionally pop out, such as the humorous story Williams recounts of an airline magazine piece regarding an American English teacher in Japan who thought “body language” is “universal” and transcends all cultural boundaries. The teacher was proven wrong very quickly when she pointed to her chest and was shown to a bath (in Japanese culture, pointing to one’s chest, rather than one’s nose, means “I want a bath”; p. 64). This analytic orientation is not necessarily a weakness, as a genuinely critical review of the most important texts in the field, serving as a guide for nonspecialists, is very much needed, and Williams consistently states that providing such a review is one of her main aims. One strength she displays is her ability to parse out the hidden, flawed syllogisms that underlie popular arguments regarding the “timelessness” and “universality” of dance. For example:

All human beings move.

All dancing is movement.

Therefore, all human beings dance. [p. 34]

Another appealing attribute of her writing is her deployment of strategically located, down-to-earth examples that illustrate crucial points, such as the difference between a purely “physical” description of a movement versus an “intentional” one, which dance, as a semantically laden and culturally embedded form of movement, requires. For example:

Her arm moved rapidly forward and made contact with his face (movement only)

She slapped him angrily (Action). [p. 21]

In an academic universe in which camps typically polemically divide into modernists and postmodernists, she astutely takes a middle position regarding the construction of social knowledge. She acknowledges that theory “partly” constructs reality (p. 32) but also that dancing bodies ontologically precede the activity of dancing (p. 198). To her credit, à la Keali’inohomoku, she is highly suspicious of ethnocentrism, and à la Langer, she differentiates carefully between a symptom (a “natural history” of the dancer’s real feelings) versus a sign (which is close to Langer’s notion of “virtual emotions,” culturally encoded). There is much to admire in this book, yet it is still clearly not written for a general audience, as it has a high degree of theory in it; furthermore, Williams, in my view, waits too long to give a positive alternative to the extensive and impressive literature review that frontloads the book. By the time she gets to her own philosophy, rooted in the term semasiology, the reader has been so mired in so many theoretical epicycles as to find it difficult to sustain engagement. Nevertheless, precisely because it is far from a typical “textbook” or “how-to” handbook, the volume is well worth reading.