This research is about five women who contributed to the field of Anthropology in the mid-20th century, especially to the sub-discipline anthropology of dance. It is about the African-American artist-anthropologists Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), Pearl Primus (1991-1994), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the Jewish-Ukrainian experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961), and the American dancer and dance therapist Franziska Boas (1902-1988). Even if not all of them had formal anthropological training, like Maya Deren, they stood out for their creative achievements and theoretical approaches to accomplish an intersection between cultures, dance, education, social justice, and racial equality. Myself as a female researcher in anthropology of dance and the body, I find it particularly interesting to reconsider their innovative forms of doing ethnographic research, applied methodologies which include the active incorporation of their bodies, creative ethnographic writing, and the production of visual material challenging the anthropological canon. The aim is to delimit key contributions of each ethnographer, and to propose a strategy how this provides a useful base to develop post-colonial approaches for research on popular dances. I will emphasize the innovative proposals regarding ethnographic fieldwork, documentation, visual anthropology, and a highly reflexive perspective combined with autoethnographic methodologies, at this time, usually not applied or not even developed yet. In this way, this work helps to reinforce that these female anthropologists were visionary and whose work we should revalue in the field.
