Embodied Transmission

This chapter answers questions about the transmission of pasts through dance among the female Bangladeshi diaspora in Tower Hamlets. Once a social encounter takes place, memories can be created, transmitted, and adapted. Observations of such processes took place in Tower Hamlets’ community centres as well as private WhatsApp and Facebook groups, which revealed entanglements between different embodied mnemonic practices, spaces, and actors. The tangible nature of mnemonic transmission through dance will further be evidenced by the embeddedness of dance in a complex set of embodied communication strategies, including verbalisation, physical enactment of memory, and display of affect. These transmission techniques can be part of intended and unintended forms of mnemonic communication, making the body a somewhat unruly mnemonic vehicle and generative of mnemonic proximities. While British Bangladeshi women value the ephemerality of embodied transmission processes through dance, this chapter will also discuss moments in which the research participants desire technology-assisted archivisation.