Embodied understandings: Dance, movement, and discourse in India’s international cultural relations

This dissertation examines the role of embodied practices such as dance and yoga in India’s cultural and public diplomacy, a foreign relations strategy that aims to connect people abroad with the heritage, people, or cultural practices of India. Cultural relations and related discourses (soft power, public/cultural/arts diplomacy) propose that international engagement in educational, scholarly, and cultural activities will foster goodwill and mutual understanding. Yet, justifications of states and transnational organizations often center ideological assumptions about the transparency of somatic communication and gloss over complex semiotic problems of power and translation. This multi-sited ethnographic project engages movement practitioners in India, Fiji, the United States, and the United Kingdom to investigate how movement classes and performances become sites of relationship building and diplomacy that multiply situate India in the global political imagination. I find that such ‘intangible cultural heritage’ programs turn embodied practices into vectors of relationship building that accomplish multiple, at times seemingly incongruous goals through the labor of embodied persons and interactions mediated by the tangible and dynamic human body. The study is based on ethnographic and archival research conducted between 2016 and 2020 in the U.S., the U.K., and Fiji. It addresses the lived experience and intentions of movement practitioners in India’s international cultural relations programs, and the communication of state institutions about the intentions and productivity of such programs. Conducting research across these multiple sites allows for consideration of factors such as imperial legacies, post- and neo-colonial dynamics, and present-day mobilizations of media, power, and industry in India’s varied cultural relationship with old-, new-, and non-diasporic publics abroad. I find that Indian government discourses promote the ideology that India’s aesthetic, spiritual, scholarly, and wellness practices are invaluable ancient traditions of global relevance that will increase openness to joint economic and security projects when shared with publics abroad. Through this dissertation I also argue that 1) a primary focus on the body in movement practices makes movement diplomacy a unique political resource; 2) India’s movement diplomacy functions because of the resulting polysemic entanglements in semantically rich spaces, not despite multiplicity and contradiction; and 3) engagement with cultural practices is an intentional part of India’s strategy for shaping international public imaginaries of India as a global leader in the 21st century, and builds from a longstanding state recognition of the power of cultural movement practices as a form of international engagement.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Cox, Nicole A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Farnell, Brenda M
• Desmond, Jane
• Greenberg, Jessica R
• Koshy, Susan
• Chakravorty, Pallabi

• Embodiment
• India
• Diplomacy
• Movement Practice
• Transnational
• Fiji
• U.S.
• U.K.
• Dance
• Yoga

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Nicole A. Cox

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122244

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F122244