Effects of manganese toxicity on the protein profile of tomato (Solanum

The following table summarises the above material and provides an immediate comparison of each differing value-profile of the four Belly Dance styles referred to in this chapter:

Capital/Values Egypt England America Oriental

Social Low High High High

Educational Low High High High

Cultural High Low Low High

Economic High Low High High

In the table, “high” represents where a style has a particular value invested in it by its culture. At the same time, it is in areas of high value that myths/narratives of authenticity are constructed. It can easily be seen from the table that the Egyptian and Oriental style have strong narratives in both the cultural and economic value categories, and it is this which allows them to export themselves so successfully within the global Belly Dance community (ethnoscape). Oriental

Belly Dance, in contrast to Egyptian Belly Dance, however, has a high value in all areas. It shares around the world an imagined romantic past so that the Middle Eastern Belly Dancing woman is repetitiously reconfigured through individual figured-worlds and the Belly Dance style of each geographical location.

With high cultural and economic value, Egyptian Belly Dancers are able to secure regular performance work and high wages overseas. By contrast, there is however low social value to the role of a Belly Dancer in Egypt and low educational value for Egyptians in formally acquiring a Belly Dance skill in Egypt. American and English practitioners travel, like other non-Egyptian performers of Belly Dance, to Egypt because of the high cultural and economic value to be found through this location. With the low social and educational value given to Belly Dance in Egypt, however, these itinerant Belly Dancers return to their own countries to teach and realise added value, currency and status.

The educational value in both America and England is high and the cultural value is low. The low cultural value of Belly Dance in America is relatively higher than that found in England, due to the length of its history in America since the 1950s (Waldie, 2006), and according to Maira (2008) the political and economic power exerted by imperialist America in the Middle East.

American Cabaret style Belly Dance (AmCab) is exported around the globe, providing

performance and teaching expertise in Europe, Australasia, Canada and South America (and new Belly Dance markets are opening up in Japan, the Far East and South-East Asian territories).

The expansion of AmCab globally suggests a higher cultural capital to that of English Belly Dance, regardless of the low cultural value given to AmCab within American borders. There is even an origin myth related to the inception and creation of AmCab in America (Waldie, 2006 &

Varga Dinicu, 2011), whereas this thesis is the only document narrating an English Belly Dance

tradition. The low cultural value of Belly Dance in both America and England witnesses English and American Belly Dancers seeking tuition and employment outside of their own countries.

Both England and America share a high social value of Belly Dance, where women generate a community of shared practice with attributing political, cultural and economic value. With its history, the economic value of American Belly Dance is relatively high, albeit not as high as the economic value given to Egyptian Belly Dance practitioners, and certainly higher than that found in English Belly Dance practice. In England the low cultural and economic value of Belly Dance emphasises the community-based arts practice of the majority of English Belly Dance

practitioners, many of whom have to move to Egypt in order to gain more employment

opportunities and increase their cultural capital by association with the Egyptian style of Belly Dance.

4.7 Conclusion

All three practitioners working within the English Belly Dance community may share the commonality of being mediated by English cultural life, but their responses to it differ. In order to establish a sub-community of shared Belly Dance practice there needs to be aspects of a shared Belly Dance point of reference with an established knowledge base from which an

“authentic” Belly Dance performance can be constructed. As will be shown these aspects come in the form of narratives of authenticity. In this case, English Belly Dancers not only have an identifiable English Belly Dance tradition from which they position the educational and social value of their work in the community, equally they share a global community of shared practice

with which they exchange cultural meaning and economic value thus producing further narratives of authenticity in relationship to those encountered abroad.

As a consequence, the Orientalist version of Belly Dance provides grand myths and meaning which all global forms of Belly Dance refer to in order to establish cultural and economic value.

Undoubtedly, English Belly Dance practitioners reference various imagined pasts and fantastical Belly Dance figures. They also offer variations on the theme, and in some cases (myself) an active attempt to transgress it. With reference to Said (1978) there lies a tension between what has been established over several centuries pertaining to what the Middle East is concerning a fantastical and Western narrated Orient myth and what, in reality, constitutes contemporary life, dance and cultural exchange with Middle Eastern practitioners of Belly Dance. All three case studies present varying degrees of self-branding and narration of the dance found in the Orientalist Belly Dance construct of the Middle East, while seeking to circumvent, confirm or transgress in performance.

The imagined history and reality of Belly Dance has been extensively covered in Belly Dance scholarship, but the identification of the methods and techniques used by practising artists to develop their narratives of authenticity to develop a distinctive Belly Dancing-Self and therefore a form of economic and cultural value within the field is one of the contributions to knowledge this thesis offers. Similarly the gender politics of Belly Dance have been discussed widely but the gender politics found within the performance of Belly Dance and its active relationship to the Orientalist form within the act of producing an “authentic” Belly Dance performance have not been identified and discussed within scholarship. With reference to what constitutes

“authenticity” in Belly Dance performance, in chapter seven I will highlight the performance strategies adopted by English Belly Dance practitioners in response to the Orientalist mythos.

Chapter 5