Summary: Island Possessed

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It was at the age of 6 that I first learned of Katherine Dunham through dancing Dunham technique. After reading Island Possessed, I came to realize Katherine Dunham was not just dancing but remembering, an approach she took to performing in her professional life as an anthropologist and dancer. What interests me in Island Possessed is Dunham’s creative feminist ethnography.
Dunham trained in anthropology at the University of Chicago, one of the first African Americans to do so. She is the author of several books, including Journey to Accompong (1946), Kasamance (1974) and Las Danzas de Haiti (The Dance of Haiti) (1983). At the University of Chicago, Dunham studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield and took classes at Northwestern, where …show more content…
Coupled with her analysis of race is a gendered lens, where she describes marabou as being “a blend of beauty that is hard to find elsewhere” and mulatto as “cream-colored and honey-colored queens”, which are praises specific to the Haitian mixed-race woman. Dunham places herself within the functionalist tradition of anthropology, with an analysis of dances of vaudun as erotic, but not for the purpose of consummation. She concludes that while Haitian vaudun dances involve sexual gestures, they cannot be taken as direct sexual advances. The book’s shortcoming is that in time it was written, sexist and convoluted language plagued the field of anthropology, excluding gender pronouns other than “he, him, his” and readers outside of the ivory tower.
Island Possessed is of particular interest as a feminist ethnography before its time. Dunham’s attempt to do something that was virtually unheard of in the early 1930’s forced her to reflexively approach her positionality as a light-skinned, African American, woman, dancer, and student anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago. Dunham’s deep reflection on her position allowed her to recognize her power as it related to her research and collaborators in reporting the intimate experiences she observed in dance, culture, and
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