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Space and Culture
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The Dance Floor

Nightlife, Civilizing Process, and Multiculturalism in Canada

David Mario Matsinhe

University of Alberta

This article is based on a study of dance floors of Whyte Avenue in the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As extended cases, the life processes on the floors are interpreted as manifestations of Canada's emotional history in the form of multiculturalism. Building on observations combined with informal and casual conversations, the study focuses on arousal and expression of emotions through bodily movements on the dance floors. The readings of these spaces along with their life processes are informed by the theoretical concepts of the "carnival" and the "grotesque" (Bakhtin), "liminality" (Turner), and the "civilizing process" and "informalization" (Elias and Wouters). In this theoretical framework, the particular emotional life processes that occur on the dance floors are rendered orderable as historically contingent phenomena that incarnate the wave of multiculturalization that shaped and has continued to shape the cultural, geographic, political, social, and psychological (emotional) landscapes of Canada since the 1960s.

Key Words: dance floor • emotions • figuration • informalization • liminal spaces • multiculturalism

This version was published on February 1, 2009

Space and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, 116-135 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331208325604
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