University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2010 Speaking and Sensing the Self in Authentic Movement: The Search for Authenticity in a 21st Century White Urban Middle- Class Community Seran E. Schug University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Schug, Seran E., "Speaking and Sensing the Self in Authentic Movement: The Search for Authenticity in a 21st Century White Urban Middle-Class Community" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 110. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/110 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/110 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Speaking and Sensing the Self in Authentic Movement: The Search for Authenticity in a 21st Century White Urban Middle-Class Community Abstract Speaking and Sensing the Self in Authentic Movement The Search for Authenticity in a 21st Century White Urban Middle-Class Community Seran Endrigian Schug Asif Agha and Rebecca Huss-Ashmore This ethnography is about Authentic Movement, a ritual form of dance and self-narrative in which a participant performs free association through trancelike movement in the presence of a “compassionate” witness as a means toward the discovery of an authentic self. Rooted in anti-modernist social movements in late 19th century urban middle- and upper-class communities in the United States, Authentic Movement brings to light a central paradox of modern life—though it is through liberal social institutions of modernity that individuals are purportedly able to achieve the freedom to be who they aspire to be, it is to an imagined non-modern past that many look toward to know and define the authentic self.