The Darkside of Raqs Sharqi.

In the middle of a commentary about the rise of "ironic/urban crafts", Amanda over at Pandragon hits square on something that's been bothering me about the rise of "pure" Raqs Sharqi as not just an artistic movement, but also a concept. I'm going to quote at length from her article, which I highly recommend you read:

The thing I don't about a lot of these academic nostalgia trips is that people get that a lot of folk culture comes from necessity, not desire, and yet they still seem to think that the best way to honor these traditions is to preserve them as if the constraints were still there. From Somerson's article:

While it's important to acknowledge the constraints on women's lives (many women were forced to sew, cross-stitch, quilt, and knit, like it or not), it's also important to connect this history to communal creativity, rather than insist on an ahistorical, uberhip conception of knitting.

Earlier, she holds up sites that distinguish their patterns from the cloying ducks and milkmaids crap you see in a lot of more "working class" crafts, which alone irritated me, because the biggest lovers of those designs are often upper middle class people infatuated with the pastoral. That aside, I don't think the fact that women felt constrained to countrified nature of a lot of older designs is something to be brushed aside. People really chafed against those constraints sometimes. My grandmother, when telling me about her childhood in the 30s, told me that all their clothes had tedious flowery designs, because they made their clothes out of flour sacks. Now, the flour sack manufacturers did try to vary it up, but still, what you had to work with was pretty limited. (Example of the conformity by necessity here.) The truth of the matter is that if you want to really keep these arts alive, it's better to live in the tradition of using the skills for the life you are living now, and to make it authentic to you. That we have the ability to take the skills that turned flour sacks into dresses in the past and turn them into skills to make the sort of glamorous clothes our grandmothers couldn't afford does more honor to them than to pretend that you're living in some poverty-stricken past that they strove to escape.

I've mentioned, in a couple of online fora recently, what I call the Elephant in the Room of Raqs Sharqi. Those in that world treat the dance, as we know it and see it, as this everlasting gob-stopper of a cultural artifact. We see Gamal and Carioca as eternal symbols of a grand past, the ultimate artists of a form we can only hope and pray to touch.Isn't it funny, though, how the evolution of Raqs Sharqi, the actual process by which it was created, processed, and built is given such short shrift? In deifying those artists, we ignore the work it took for them to . we avoid discussions on the manipulation of the dances we have left of them on film, how the process of filming changed the dance, in ways that are diffcult to re-construct today. And we ignore the severe modifications on the native forms that Badia worked to create Raqs Sharqi. Worst of all, we ignore that those modifications were not made for them, and for their enjoyment...but for our rich white forebearers, more interested in skin than skill.
In short, we pretend to be following authentic, native dance...and avoid the implications that the native form isn't so native. And then, we wonder why we struggle with finding acceptance with a modern, Western community...and wonder why American Tribal, and it's offshoots, do so well.