"The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours"
About this Quote
That’s the subtext: by translating ceremony into schedule, he makes it legible to a late-19th-century scientific audience primed to treat Indigenous life as data. The insistence on “commonly,” “usually,” and “always” signals classification. It offers the reassurance that this isn’t chaos; it has rules. Yet that reassurance comes at a cost. The language flattens meaning into procedure, turning embodied practices into a timetable. “Intermission” is especially telling: it borrows the vocabulary of theater, quietly recasting participants as performers and the ritual as entertainment, even if Mooney doesn’t say so outright.
Context sharpens the stakes. Mooney worked during an era when anthropology was entangled with salvage ethnography and federal projects aimed at controlling Native communities. In that climate, meticulous description could be a form of preservation and a form of possession. His attention to the “work” of painting and dressing reveals genuine observation, but it also frames cultural expression as labor that can be clocked, segmented, and ultimately managed. The passage works because it shows how power can hide inside neutrality: the sentence structure doesn’t argue, it inventories.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mooney, James. (2026, January 16). The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dance-commonly-begins-about-the-middle-of-the-99101/
Chicago Style
Mooney, James. "The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dance-commonly-begins-about-the-middle-of-the-99101/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dance-commonly-begins-about-the-middle-of-the-99101/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
