Faculty Member

Sally Allen Ness
(Professor, Ph.D. 1987 University of Washington)
Office: 1304 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-6452
sally.ness@ucr.edu

Sally Allen Ness is a full time faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and a Cooperating Faculty Member in the Department of Dance. She has worked primarily in urban provincial centers in the Philippines, specifically in Cebu City, Cebu, and Davao City, Mindanao. Her research has focused on various forms of symbolic action, both in the practice of everyday life and in extraordinary ritual and secular performances. She has written on the symbolism of Philippine festival life and dance ritual in the context of Cebu City. In Davao, she has focused primarily on tourism development and its consequences for cultural practice and cultural identity. She has also interpreted the post-colonial and transnational symbolism of Philippine concert art, as embodied in its premier ballet company, the Ballet Philippines.

Selected publications: Where Asia Smiles; an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism (2002); Body, Movement, and Culture; Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (1992); Trouble in Paradise; The Impact of Tourism on Philippine Dance at Pearl Farm Beach Resort, The Korean Journal of Dance Studies (1988); Originality in the Postcolony; Choreographing the Neo-ethnic Body in Philippine Concert Dance, Cultural Anthropology (1997); Observing the Evidence Fail; Difference Arising from Objectification in Cross-Cultural Studies of Dance, Moving Words; Re-writing Dance (Gay Morris, ed., 1996); Dancing in the Field; Notes from Memory, Corporealities (Susan L. Foster, ed. 1996); When Seeing is Believing; The Changing Role of Visuality in a Philippine Dance, Anthropological Quarterly (1995).