You have a point, yet it does matter to a point to know if we want to be taken serious in the art world, knowing as much as you can about an art style is very important I think, Dance is a hard area to locate who started what style when, but thats not where we are what I think should be known is where it came from, if this is not located people will never stop saying it came from here and here. In the end if that is what will be then thats fine But should we not try? I do wish for this dance to become a true art.
Oh, I'm not saying it's not worth studying. Heck, I've spent most of my schooling and significant chunks of my working life in the fields of history, anthropology and archaeology.
But it's important to remember that dance, as with most forms of intangible cultural heritage, does not leave a record that is traceable for very far back into the "days of yore". We can speak with authority about the development of modern belly dance over the last hundred years or so. We can study the dances of modern tribal cultures and their oral histories of their dance forms, and often in combination with written records/photographs and drawings of explorers, adventurers, and invaders we can develop credible theories of pre-"belly dance" dance for several generations further back. Anything past that, and it's really just an interesting speculative exercise.
One of thing that drives me mad is the notion that for something to be credible, it has to be older than old. Cultural expressions change all the time and with frightening rapidity. There's no shame in that. We're people...that's what we do.
ETA: I also think that the popular failure to recognize belly dance as an art form has less to do with the documentation of its origins, and more to do with the way our current cultural milieu regards things that are culturally "other" and matters related to our perceptions of gender and sexuality.
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