Thus, ethnochoreology reflects the relatively recent attempt to apply academic thought to why people dance and what it means.
He interprets the socially predetermined and meaningful ways of movement and, of course, the history of dance groups in specific societies.
The first observations of dance in Indigenous and non-Western societies were not necessarily due to dedicated study, rather emerging as byproducts of other anthropological research.
Many of these observations were speculative, lacking in qualitative or quantitative analysis, and assumed false dichotomies between 'civilized' and 'primitive' societies.
However, his data was often insufficient or misleading, and therefore his work is no longer considered a viable basis for the study of dance anthropology.
[5] In 1962, the International Council for Traditional Music established a working group that laid the foundations of the field and defined ethnochoreology as a science.
[8] For early anthropologists and missionaries, the research of non-Western cultures and subsequent categorization into Western terms and canon was a method of colonization.