This dissertation takes as its subject foundational methodological approaches to contemporary cultural research in the American academy and asks how these approaches might be extended toward supporting a current research trend in dance studies, a trend which investigates dance practices as multicultural entities that regularly cross cultural landscapes. In doing so, this dissertation explores theoretical paradigms used in dance studies drawn from a broad array of disciplines in the humanities including: cultural anthropology, cultural history, cultural studies, and literary criticism. By asking the questions, "what is going on when people from one culture embody the dances of another culture?" and, "what constitutes a productive research approach to these multicultural and crosscultural dance events?" this dissertation assembles a set of methodological considerations indicated as relevant by the theoretical paradigms these questions engage.

The three main methodological areas this research queries and extends are: (1) the localization of a subject through the acts of situating and positioning (2) the conceptualization of dance materials as textual (enabling the necessary work of "reading" and "understanding") and, (3) the role of a researcher's perspectives, culturally and politically speaking. All three areas are viewed as fundamental considerations which directly affect data gathering, data analysis and interpretation. Chapter One: Situating explores temporal and spatial configurations including diachronic and synchronic time, Foucauldian genealogy, national and diasporic constructions, Stuart Hall's positioning, and M.M. Bakhtin's chronotopes. This chapter ends with a discussion of live contexts, ie. cultural locations, which constitute the grounds from which a dance performance is efficacious and meaningful. Chapter Two: Textuality surveys the territories of semiotics, Roland Barthes's mythologies, Bakhtinian heteroglossia and double voiced discourse, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s signifyin(g), and indeterminacy by Derridian freeplay all through the lens of dance. This chapter culminates with a discussion of "reading" a dance within a politicized context for its double voiced discourse of parody. Chapter Four: Viewpoints looks at emic/etic, naturalized, and centric research perspectives and discusses the strategies of decentering, "busting normatives," and defamiliarization. This chapter recommends and effects a borrowing of Gayatri Spivak's transnational literacy as a means for developing and broadening cultural perspectives for research purposes.

This study's findings suggests that researching crosscultural and multicultural subjects requires investigations into relational interactions at several important levels. Therefore, this study addresses and theorizes the following: the relationship between discreet cultural subjectivity and a diversified multicultural ontology (which necessitates completing a shift in the conceptualization of "multiculturalism"), the study of subjects as culturally interactive and engaged in continuously changing relationships, and a reconfiguration of the researcher/research subject relationship. This research concludes with a call for collaborative research ventures. In the pursuit of knowledge and understanding about the crosscultural and multiply-cultured dance practices that circulate in our globally available world such research action is indicated.