Chapter 6 in Williamson, A. & Sellers-Young, B. (eds.) Spiritual Herstories: Soulful research in dance studies: Intellect, pp. 180-206., Jan 15, 2020
Eline Kieft closes part 1 with a chapter titled, ‘Soul Loss and Retrieval: restoring wholeness th... more Eline Kieft closes part 1 with a chapter titled, ‘Soul Loss and Retrieval: restoring wholeness through dance’. Kieft shares her journey from a professional highly trained technical dancer, into the improvisational and the soulful realms of neo-shamanic dance practices. While studying cultural and medical anthropology, she became fascinated with healing techniques and other ways of knowing found in shamanic traditions. She combined her interests in her PhD on ‘Movement Medicine’, a contemporary shamanic dance practice of which the movement lineage is inspired by the work of Anna Halprin, Gabrielle Roth, and Helen Poynor (Darling Khan and Darling Khan, 2009, Kieft, 2013, 2014, 2017). Kieft is working at the forefront of emerging neo-shamanic dance traditions developing at grass-roots levels in community in United Kingdom and beyond. Anthropology is often associated with the far-away exotic but has, over recent decades turned the to the unfamiliar within the familiar, in conducting ‘anthropology-at-home’. Kieft utilises the disciplines’ methods to look at ‘anthropos’ as beings-in-relation to visible and invisible, tangible and intangible phenomena that surround us. This chapter works with the intelligence of soul, lensed through the revival of one of the oldest healing methods in the world – soul retrieval. This is ‘soulful research’, explicitly concerned with the ‘invisibles’, and the deepest part of being (see also Kieft, 2018). Although not obviously situated within the spiritual feminism strand, Kieft, through her postpositivist approach, reflects Bacon’s and Williamson’s concerns by drawing attention to the importance of research processes that are ‘supportive of the whole person rather than the ‘academic’ who is shaped by a societal image of objectivity and rationality’ (Bacon, this volume).
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