1980s: Ritual, Social Structure, and Performance as Communal Technology

1980s: Ritual, Social Structure, and Performance as Communal Technology

The early Sudanese work frames dance as a social and ritual structure. In the study of the Zande Pumbo, Sellers-Young argues that dance must be analyzed with its full event-context: kinship labor, mourning, leadership, music, spatial arrangement, gender relations, food, alcohol, and social participation. This is her first major methodological principle. The Pumbo’s changing form registers colonial disruption, war, altered authority, shifting gender relations, and changing beliefs about witchcraft. Dance is both expressive and diagnostic.

The zar work extends this view to possession ritual. Here performance transforms private female crisis into public, theatrical, communal action. Sellers-Young draws on social drama and the ritual/theatre continuum to show that healing, role-playing, trance, sacrifice, music, dance, and feasting form a structured process of redress. Her early view is therefore anthropological and functional, but already attentive to embodiment, gender, and temporary solidarity.

Continuity: dance is never isolated movement.

New emphasis: performance as a mechanism for producing concord, recognition, and temporary social reordering.