Barbara Sellers-Young’s account of the zar in southern Sudan belongs to the earliest stratum of her scholarship, yet it already displays the intellectual habits that would define her later work: an insistence that movement be read as social process rather than decorative residue; a refusal to isolate dance from ritual, ecology, gender, or power; and an increasingly explicit recognition that the scholar’s own body is implicated in what can be known. In the chapter’s Azande section, “Dancing with the Earth,” these commitments are sharpened through an ethnographic scene in which funeral dance becomes the site where grief, suspicion, embodiment, and belonging are worked through together. The Pumbo, the funeral feast at the center of her analysis, is not treated as a survivance of “traditional culture” nor as a bounded choreography available for formal description. It is understood as an event through which a community manages the social danger of death, reincorporates mourners, and experiences itself, however temporarily, as rhythmically and affectively one.
That argument unfolds slowly, beginning not with theory but with the sensory and historical conditions of life in Yambio. Sellers-Young writes from her year there, from July 1981 to July 1982, and the prose makes clear that the setting is not incidental background but constitutive ground. The Azande “lived in mud-thatch homes without running water or electricity and grew what they ate”; except for rare rides on lorries, “they walked from place to place.” The contrast she draws is not a sentimental opposition between modern alienation and premodern authenticity. It is an epistemological shock. “Life in Yambio was profoundly confronting,” she writes, because it forced her to realize that she had learned to walk “on the earth not with the earth.” That distinction, deceptively simple, does considerable work. It names a mode of bodily relation to land that exceeds scenery or environment in the abstract. The earth is not the inert surface on which culture happens; it is the medium through which life, labor, danger, rhythm, and ritual are apprehended.
The chapter is therefore organized by an expanding recognition that what a Western scholar might divide into domains—politics, family, agriculture, ritual, dance—does not present itself as separate in Azande life. Sellers-Young begins with roads destroyed by war, costly transport, market exchanges, thunderstorms, dangerous darkness, the daily timing of work and rest, the sensory force of equatorial weather. She dwells on these details because they shape bodily knowledge. To live in Yambio is to live with contaminated water, malaria, blackflies, snakes, drought, flood, limited medical care, and the possibility of violence at checkpoints. The body is exposed, dependent, alert. Such exposure is central to her eventual understanding of dance, which emerges not as an autonomous aesthetic practice but as one modality within a larger somatic adaptation to land, season, and uncertainty.
This broadening of the frame also marks a shift away from an older anthropology that might have treated Azande belief chiefly as a cognitive system. The Azande are, of course, familiar within anthropological writing through classic studies of witchcraft, but Sellers-Young does not return to that archive in order simply to rehearse what the Azande think about causation. Her emphasis falls instead on what ritual performance does under conditions in which death is socially dangerous. When someone dies, she explains, death is not presumed to be natural. Male relatives consult an oracle to determine whether illicit magic or witchcraft was involved; if so, vengeance magic may be initiated against an unknown perpetrator. The problem is not only metaphysical. It is relational. If death is thought to have been caused by another person, then neighbors become suspect; grief is accompanied by distrust, and communal life is strained by hidden accusation. In that context, participation in the Pumbo is not merely pious attendance at a funeral rite. It is a public sign of goodwill, even innocence, and thus part of the practical labor of restoring damaged social relations.
Sellers-Young’s treatment of the Pumbo is especially effective because she never detaches ritual function from event texture. The feast is held either when the grave is sealed with cement or when mourning clothes are removed, sometimes much later; poor families may delay until they can gather the necessary resources. Funeral observance is therefore shaped by economy as well as cosmology. Graves are placed in or near the family compound, in keeping with the continued social presence of ancestors. Most Pumbos occur in the dry season after harvest, when food is available. Known roles structure the occasion: the “secretary of the feast,” typically a male relative, oversees food and drink; a chief or his representative may attend; women and boys may sell alcohol, cigarettes, or gum. The instruments—pinginbajk, gaza, guu guu—are learned informally, handled by young men, and embedded in communal rather than elite musical life. Songs move quickly across the region; a melody heard in one place may appear at the next feast, aided now by tape recorders. The chapter’s ethnographic exactness matters because it locates dance in a complete social ecology. Movement is inseparable from cooking, feeding, visiting, drinking, flirting, sleeping, grieving, vending, witnessing, and listening.
One of the chapter’s most telling conceptual interventions turns on the Azande word gbere, literally “to play.” Educated Azande may gloss it as dance, but Sellers-Young is careful to preserve its wider scope. Gbere names a fused phenomenon of singing, instrumental rhythm, movement, and social play. Here she begins to unsettle the categories through which Euro-American dance scholarship often secures its object. To ask where the dance is, as opposed to the music, the ritual, or the conviviality, is already to ask the wrong question. The Azande answer to her inquiries about learning steps—“People just dance”—is not evidence of shapelessness or lack of technique. It indicates that form is socially incorporated rather than codified. Movement is carried in shared style, embodied imitation, rhythmic familiarity, and situational responsiveness. There is no fixed choreography, yet neither is there arbitrariness. The common step may be a side-to-side shuffle with hip emphasis; the pelvis and torso are central; new movements are imitated; some spread and some vanish. Men and women are expected to dance differently, though over time their movements should “align.” With a beloved partner one dances otherwise than with a merely acceptable one. The dance is patterned, but the pattern is relational and kinetic rather than notated.
At this point the chapter could have remained a persuasive piece of ethnographic analysis. What gives it additional weight within Sellers-Young’s corpus is the way she allows her own failed and partial participation to become part of the method. Her fieldwork is not narrated as uncomplicated access to local truth. Entry is slow, mediated by household staff, translators, and repeated attendance. She is acutely conscious of occupying an unstable social position: a white woman in pants, attached to a government project, treated locally less as a conventional woman than as a figure closer to a chief’s functionary. The line between observer and colonial overseer troubles her. At the first Pumbo she sits in a chair at the edge of the compound, served alcohol by men, avoided by women. The scene makes visible not simply personal awkwardness but the historical arrangement in which “Azande performed, and the British who were in control of the government watched.” One of the chapter’s understated strengths is that it does not present reflexivity as absolution. To acknowledge positionality does not dissolve it. Her body remains marked by race, clothing, institutional affiliation, and the visual politics of who sits and who dances.
Yet the essay also insists that understanding movement from the outside is not enough. At Tambura, in moonlight and firelight, she studies the circle more closely: dancers moving clockwise around the musicians; no synchronized ensemble in a Western sense; small groups forming and dissolving; older participants watching and smoking; others slipping away into the bush. What she learns there is formal but also theoretical. Coherence does not arise from fixed spatial design or collective unison. It arises from “the fluidity of personal interpretation” integrated with shared musical phrasing. This is already an important contribution to dance analysis. It distinguishes between choreographic order and rhythmic-social order, and it suggests that communal form need not depend on visual symmetry or predetermined composition.
The crucial turn comes later, at another Pumbo in Yambio, when the social circumstances of her participation have changed enough for bodily release to occur. Dancing with her translator among people she now recognizes, she feels her attention shift from self-consciousness to pulse. “The more I relaxed,” she writes, “the more my somatic attention released into my feet. I felt grounded with the earth.” This grounding permits the torso to sway; she begins to move “in sync with the complex yet repeated patterns.” The description is careful and modest. She does not claim insider transformation, nor does she romanticize trance. What she records is a temporary loosening of the boundaries by which she ordinarily experiences herself as separate. Surrounded by dancers, each with “their somatic interpretation of the music,” she nonetheless experiences a shared rhythmic field in which “my physical boundaries seemed to dissolve into the collective movement.” When the music stops, time and space themselves feel altered.
This passage matters far beyond its autobiographical immediacy. It supplies the chapter with an embodied theory of ritual efficacy. The Pumbo’s social work is not merely symbolic, not simply the representation of reconciliation. It acts through coordinated sensation. Rhythm, repetition, and collective motion produce what might be called a somatic commons in which persons experience themselves as less sharply bounded than in ordinary life. Sellers-Young’s language here anticipates later preoccupations in her career—kinesthetic empathy, embodied knowledge, somatic attention—yet the chapter remains anchored in the specificity of Azande life. The dissolution of boundaries is not a universalized mystical claim. It is socially consequential in a setting where death threatens to fracture community through witchcraft suspicion. If grief and accusation isolate, then dancing together offers a bodily arrangement in which trust can be felt again before it can be fully argued.
Her distinction between manifest and latent functions clarifies the point without reducing the ritual to utility. Manifestly, the Pumbo incorporates the dead into the world of spirits and marks the living’s return from mourning through the removal of white clothes. Latently, it enculturates children, creates opportunities for social and sexual interaction, permits displays of status, and generates small-scale economic exchange. But the chapter gives special emphasis to a further latent function: the production of goodwill. Dance “engaged the dancer’s entire muscular system,” coordinated sight and hearing, evoked pride, and through repetition and percussive intensity often created “a light trance state.” In responding with “voice and body,” individuals “forfeited their sense of self in favor of a unifying collective experience.” That sentence could be read as a generalized account of rhythmic entrainment, but Sellers-Young locates its historical force quite precisely. In earlier periods, when witchcraft anxieties were more socially central, attendance at the Pumbo indicated innocence and communal dancing helped repair distrust among neighbors. By 1982, that older function had not vanished but had shifted. The Pumbo had also become a way of expressing “Azandeness,” especially in public settings where different groups staged their distinctive dances under conditions of political instability.
This historical movement is one of the chapter’s most sophisticated features. Ritual is neither static tradition nor pure modern invention. Sellers-Young notes that other Azande dance contexts—circumcision ceremonies, witch doctors’ dances, annual celebrations for chiefs—had by the early 1980s altered drastically or declined. Some had become individualized medical procedures; some survived as demonstrations for dignitaries; some were recombined into school and political performances as “tribal dances.” Against this changing background, the Pumbo remained central. Yet even this continuity contains internal transformation. A rite that once managed local suspicions around death increasingly also serves as a marker of ethnic identity in a multiethnic and conflict-ridden polity. The chapter thus offers an event-based model of cultural change: declared function may endure while social emphasis shifts from one historical pressure to another.
This concern with transformation without essence would later animate Sellers-Young’s writings on diasporic Japanese dance, belly dance, and intercultural transmission. Here, in one of her earlier ritual analyses, it appears as an insight into how performances persist by changing what they organize. The Pumbo is still a rite of incorporation, but the “incorporation” now includes a more overt consolidation of collective identity. What is being made sensible in the dance is no longer only the restored harmony of immediate neighbors; it is the felt difference of Azande culture itself.
The chapter’s final pages are notable for the way they convert ethnographic description into a meditation on knowledge. “I approached their way of life by compartmentalizing it,” Sellers-Young admits, but “a Zande’s life is not lived according to categories.” This is not simply an anti-Western gesture. It is a critique of disciplinary habits that treat dance as an object detachable from subsistence, season, danger, kinship, or spirit. Her understanding of “soma” is expanded accordingly. What she had previously associated primarily with dance training or performance becomes, in Yambio, “a unified embodiment”: dependence on ecosystem, weather, agricultural rhythm, and social interdependence. Dance is somatic not because it intensifies private bodily awareness, but because it participates in a lived sensorium shared with land and others.
That extension is crucial within Sellers-Young’s broader intellectual development. Her later work would repeatedly argue that somatics without historical and cultural specificity collapses into abstraction. “Dancing with the Earth” is one of the places where that conviction is forged. The body is never merely body; it is a body in a compound, on a road ruined by war, in darkness without ambient light, among snakes, under thunder, in mourning white, under the sign of ancestors, within structures of suspicion and obligation. Somatic knowledge is therefore inseparable from ecology and polity. To move with others at a Pumbo is to enter a field where environment, culture, and social tension are already in the muscles.
Just as importantly, the chapter refuses the consolations of ethnographic mastery. Sellers-Young insists that she “never truly lived the life of the Azande.” She spent more time than a tourist, but remained “at heart, an outsider.” This acknowledgment becomes sharper in the retrospective coda that recounts her return to Oregon, her studies with Obo Addy, and her early teaching of what she then called African dance. The honesty of this passage is striking. She no longer claims that she was “authentically teaching or performing African dance,” because she lacked the depth of cultural knowledge such a claim would require. What she now understands herself to have been preserving was not authentic transmission of a culture in full, but “the memory of living each day attuned to the rhythms of nature” and the “profound connection” she felt dancing at a Pumbo. The distinction is not defensive; it is ethically clarifying. Embodied learning can be real and consequential without authorizing false claims to cultural possession.
This tension—between transformative bodily experience and the limits of outsider participation—would become one of Sellers-Young’s most durable contributions to intercultural performance studies. Already here, the chapter holds together what many accounts separate: the reality of bodily change and the persistence of historical difference. She can be altered by Azande rhythm without becoming Azande. She can carry something of the Pumbo into later pedagogy while also recognizing the inadequacy of the label “African dance” to name what she taught. Such admissions do not weaken the chapter’s argument. They give it methodological seriousness.
If the zar named in the chapter’s larger title is a possession-healing ritual that stages private crisis as public social drama, “Dancing with the Earth” supplies a complementary scene in which funeral dance performs a related labor of redress. In both cases, ritual is neither reducible to belief nor opposed to theatre. It is a structured enactment through which what cannot be resolved in ordinary discourse is given collective form. The Azande material makes this especially vivid because the social problem at stake is not spectacular conflict but the corrosive aftermath of death: suspicion, isolation, uncertainty, the possibility that hidden violence has entered the neighborhood. The Pumbo responds not by explaining death away but by bringing bodies together into a temporally extended field of food, drink, music, and motion where relation can be re-felt.
For dance studies, the chapter remains valuable because it shows how formal description gains force when linked to event, history, and sensation. The clockwise circle, the torso emphasis, the fluid entry and exit of participants, the absence of fixed choreography—these are not merely stylistic markers. They are the means by which communal life is enacted. For performance studies, the chapter offers a persuasive account of ritual as processual social drama rather than symbolic text. For somatics, it insists that embodied transformation is always culturally and materially situated. And within Sellers-Young’s career, it stands as an early and still resonant articulation of a principle she would elaborate for decades: movement is a way communities know themselves, manage tension, and enter forms of relation not available through language alone.
The title phrase “Dancing with the Earth” is therefore not a lyrical flourish. It names the chapter’s deepest claim. The earth here is literal ground, ecological condition, ancestral site, and the basis of a less individualized sensorium. To dance in the Pumbo is to move not above or apart from those conditions, but through them—through grief, through land, through history, through others. Sellers-Young’s chapter asks readers to recognize that what looks, from a distance, like a funeral dance is in fact a dense enactment of social life itself: a rhythm in which mourning becomes reintegration, suspicion becomes provisional concord, and personhood briefly loosens into collective form.
Reflect with VABS