Repertoire, Values, and Social Meaning in the Wedding Dances of a Yemenite Jewish Village in Israel

Abstract

Despite the popularity that the Yemenite Jewish dance has achieved among a general public, through Israeli folk dance and stage adaptation by groups such as the Inbal Dance Theater, scholarly treatment of this dance tradition is still in its early stages. 1 My intent in this paper is to address an area neglected by other researchers: the examination of Yemenite Jewish dance in the context of village life in Israel, and further, the consideration of the social significance of the dancing. I will identify the significant social subsets of the village, examining the similarities and differences of dance repertoire and criteria for aesthetic tvaluation arrfong these groups as seen in the course of wedding celebrations. These similarities and differences will introduce the dimension of social meaning the intersection of form and function, symbol and meaning, dance and culture. A moment for definition of basic terms: I use the term culture in its sense as a common conceptual framework, including beliefs, values, and symbojs. Culture, as a common conceptual framework, is constantly enacted and re-enacted in actions, events, and symbolic expressions. This formulation is similar to Geertz's definition of culture as ' 'a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life." 2 1 approach dance as one such symbolic form. Dance style is not arbitrary. It is a learned and patterned activity. By carefully investigation native attitudes, it is possible to learn how dance operates as symbolic and expressive behavior. I am not using dance as a "mirror" or culture or as a cultural "index." Dance is a symbolic system providing one communicational channel which can articulate the values and beliefs of a culture. When one symbolic form, such as dance, is viewed in relation to others, such as language use, modes of dress, and religious behavior, one sees that the range of symbolic forms in a culture may overlap, intersect, reinforce, or even contradict one another. The understanding of the relationships among symbolic forms is the key to investigating social meaning. 3 The material for this paper was gathered during a fifteen-month period of resident ethnographic fieldwork from 1975-1976 in a Yemenite Jewish farming village located in the Jezreel Valley of Israel. During that field