This communication aims to present a first effort to organize what we could call a “genealogy” of Dance Anthropology in Brazil. In the first, second and third sections, based on interviews with dancer-anthropologists and anthropologist-dancers, representatives of the 4th, 3rd and 2nd generations – in dialogue with the academic paths of the authors of this paper –, the trajectories and contributions from female researchers who came into contact with research approaches and methods in Anthropology of Dance and who made this field of anthropological knowledge an important tool for reflection and analysis of dance and other expressive forms, in different cultural contexts. In the fourth section, we present the contributions of the 1st generation of Brazilian female researchers (all folklorists) to formulate a systematic discourse on expressive forms of popular culture, opening the way for us to think of dance outside hegemonic standards and integrated with other social factors. Without this first movement, even if the approaches and methods were quite distant from an anthropological research practice, as we currently understand it, perhaps we would not have a ground on which to walk – and why not, dance? – and reflect on dance. Finally, we bring a reflection on how the entry as university professors, of some of these women from the 2nd and 3rd generations of anthropologist-dancers and dancer-anthropologists contributed to the advancement of Dance Anthropology in Higher Education institutions, in Brazil. We highlight, on the one hand, the enormous contribution of the Anthropology of Dance to Anthropology, in general, with its discussions that thematize the role of the body in movement, in different cultures; and, on the other hand, the importance of inserting the discipline Anthropology of Dance – taught, mostly by women –, as well as its ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, in dance graduations in the country.
