When you look back at what "social research" was at the New School for Social Research after the very first efforts faltered, you find the arts everywhere. You've heard us natter on about "Arts as Social Research" because that was in fact an emergent reality at the New School! One shouldn't be surprised to find articles on arts in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited out of the New School, such as John Martin's on "Dance" - or to learn that his discussion parallels a course he was teaching at the New School with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.
religion! Martin finds dance all over the life of "primitive" societies, an essential expression of individual and communal experiences. And in these societies (this usage of "primitive" doesn't mean incomplete, let alone less than fully human) it's all religious, too! Martin's history of the dance parallels the histories of religion of secularization theories.
In modern societies, though, dance has accepted a marginal position divorced from the flow of life in the ultimately sterile forms of the courtly ballet and the theater. Yet there is a kind of revival going on, especially in the Protestant-shaped societies of Germany and the United States: the "new movement in the dance" whose "object is not only to develop new
theatrical forms but to restore dancing as a social element to its
former condition." Where better to learn about this than the New School for Social Research?!
This course ran in Fall 1931 (p39), the same time year the Encyclopaedia volume with Martin's "Dance" article appeared. But when you look at that, you find another thing that's constantly making an appearance:
John Martin, "Dance," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences,
ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, vol. IV (Macmillan, 1949), 701, 705, 706
