Session Name: [Humanities Across Borders] Knowhow in a Shifting World
1 - Interrogating knowhow in corporeal practices—the case of Odissi dance in Odisha, India
Thursday, August 1, 2024
11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper proposes to examine the question of what is knowhow, in particular, corporeal knowhow, by drawing on ethnographic data on the transmission of Odissi dance in the Indian State of Odisha. The object that is created through corporeal knowhow, the expertise involved in its creation, all coincide with the body—and therefore the subjectivity—of its creator. Moreover, the appreciation or recognition of this type of knowhow necessarily involves interpersonal relations with other individuals. As the object that is created does not have any existence independently from the social relations that generate it, it appears relevant to observe the transmission of dance, in order to examine the social dimension of the production of knowhow.
Discursively, Odissi practitioners (i.e., any person engaged with dance activity in a practice-oriented manner) may have diverse perspectives on what, in their view, constitutes the knowhow of their dance. Yet these do not correspond to the ways in which knowhow is actually taking shape, concretely, in live situations. For example, discursively, knowhow may be described as a kind of “knowledge” that is captured in individual bodies, supposedly acquired by attending formal teaching and learning situations. In everyday life, however, different identity factors such as gender, class or caste appear to be linked with particular bodies having a better ability than others to gain recognition as being “knowledgeable”. What, then, happens in the transmission process, leading to a socially situated recognition of the knowhow of individuals? And what does this reveal about knowhow?