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>>Ericksen My name is Julia Ericksen and I'm a professor of sociology at Temple University.
When you're a sociologist, almost everything in your life you tend to analyze. I mean,
my children say they were little sociological examples from the get go because I was always
observing things that they did and thinking Oh, that means that or that means that. So,
I think sociologists in general look at life through a particular lens. I did dance when
I was a teenager. My parents were really devoted ballroom dancers and in fact, and they met
on a blind date ballroom dancing. Most dancing, it's about the performance, not the performer.
And in most dancing, the connection between the couple isn't necessarily palpable or real
so I became interested in the way in which dance used intimacy and I developed this idea
of instant intimacy. It's a very sociological book; it's not a book about how to dance or
a book about the fun of dancing. It's a book about the place of dancing in a world where
there is a search for intimate relationships. Social scientists call that autoethnography.
That you really can't understand the world that you're in unless you actually experience
it. I don't think top professional dancers would have talked to me unless I had been
a dancer. One of the things when I interviewed the students was I actually thought that people
would find the physicality difficult because it is. You know, you're touching, you're holding
- particularly in ballroom, your legs are intertwined with your partner in a very intimate
way. I thought people would find that hard and what I found is all these students saying
Oh no, that's what I love. That's the best thing about it. That's what I like. So that's
also made me realize how kind of needy for intimacy some people are. In the modern world,
there's a loss of intimacy in ways. More people are living alone, people are busier, they
don't have time to develop long, slow relationships and this is a very safe kind of intimacy.
You can wrap it up and put it back on the shelf and go back to work.