peer-reviewed article / 2023
Autoethnography and Somatic Modes of Attention
Barbara Sellers-Young
Description
This article develops Sellers-Young's somatic autoethnography as a method. She examines how attention is formed through body structure, sensory capacities, childhood place, trauma, religious inheritance, and movement training. Autoethnography here is not self-display; it is a disciplined inquiry into how the researcher's body becomes the medium through which cultures are perceived.
The work gathers several strands of her career: belly dance, Azande dance, Nihon buyo, contemplative practice, and rural Oregon memory. Each becomes a somatic mode of attention, a way of sensing and organizing relation. The article is significant because it makes reflexivity bodily rather than merely positional. It asks scholars of movement to account for how they move, feel, remember, and desire, while also preserving the ethical limits of outsider participation.
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Autoethnography and Somatic Modes of Attention” belongs to the mature phase of a long intellectual project: the effort to understand dance not merely as representation, style, or technique, but as a discipline of perception that alters the terms on which a life is lived. The article is concise, but its reach is large. It revisits concerns that have animated Sellers-Young’s scholarship for decades—embodied knowledge, intercultural transmission, the limits of ethnographic authority, the shaping power of technique, the persistence of place and memory—while bringing them into a newly reflexive alignment. Here the researcher’s own body is not simply acknowledged as situated; it...