Sexualising the Erotic—Marco Polo’s Gaze Distorting Our Understanding of Religious Dances

Abstract

This article commences from a transdisciplinary research setting where students, artists, activists, and researchers come together to investigate medieval travelling accounts. The article is structured in two main parts. The first part presents an exploration of the theoretical framework of an hermeneutics of charity and suspicion as well as a development of a methodology that probes at the “cracks” of colonial pedagogical and scholarly structures. In the second part, the article uses critical inquiry and shared learning experiences to examine Marco Polo’s The Travels, focusing on his descriptions of dancing. Specifically, it investigates what Polo’s text conveyed—and omitted—about the relationship between intimacy, eroticism, and dance for a European audience. Combining auto-ethnographic reflections with stories from the communal learning process, the article invites readers to consider how collective inquiry reshapes our understanding of historical texts. In addition to questioning Polo/Rustichello’s portrayal of religious dance through his mercantile and sexualised gaze, the author also challenges some previous scholarly interpretations of Polo as an agent of European colonial endeavours. Finally, the paper offers a method for rethinking how researchers approach dance and university education, as well as practical tools for how historical accounts can be explored in a way that prevents discernment from overshadowing what can be gained from attunement.

1. Prelude

It was one of the final days of our symposium, and we had been reading excerpts from The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo 2016). His accounts, based on both personal experiences and second-hand reports, are filled with exoticised depictions of treasures, animals, and mythological beings such as the cynocephali (dog-headed people), blemmyae (people with faces on their chests), sciapods (one-footed people), and anthropophagi (cannibals). Yet, up to that point, we had not encountered explicit links between racialization, physical features, or climate theory in the text. This led us to reflect on Geraldine Heng’s claim that Polo’s mercantile gazetile capitalism reshaped the European gaze toward “unknown others”. According to Heng, Polo’s narratives—serving the interests of the Mongol Empire and the Great Khan—introduced a new evaluative lens—one that commodifies lands and peoples by measuring their productivity and ownership. As a result, she argues, “race-as-skin-color ceases to be assigned fixed values” (Heng 2018, p. 348). To test this hypothesis, we returned to the text, searching for signs of dehumanisation, objectification, or racialising tendencies. We explored these themes individually or in groups and later reconvened to share and discuss our findings.

Each participant had chosen a specific method of deepening their reading of the text, and it was now time to share the findings. When it was Aalto’s turn,1 they had us read a section they had found describing the men and women of Zanzibar. More explicit references to physiognomy are hard to imagine, and these descriptions were coupled with statements like “Anyone who saw them in another country would say that they were devils” (Polo 2016, p. 397), “The women of this island are very ugly to look at”(Polo 2016, p. 398), and “Altogether, their appearance is quite repulsive” (ibid.).2

As the facilitator of this reading session, I sensed a slight notion of anxiety growing in my belly. Hearing these kinds of descriptions read out loud in a room filled with diverse bodies, genders, ages, sexualities, and ethnic backgrounds, made them more visceral than when I had encountered them silently in my own head. While pondering how to respond, I reflected on the fact that medieval stories were typically shared aloud. A tale like Marco Polo’s would likely have been performed—with dramatic intonations, sound effects, and shifts in voice. What impact might such performative elements have had on how the text was received?

Even now, I could sense that the reading was affecting those in the room. What made the text especially unsettling was how Polo’s descriptions of the island’s inhabitants were interwoven with depictions of its animals—layering human and non-human imagery in ways that felt dehumanising. As Aamu3 commented in the discussion, “it’s as if the people living on the island are just another species of animal, not actual humans” (2 August 2023).4 In the section where this layering of descriptions is most prominent, the text starts with describing the men as abnormally strong and able to carry heavy loads; then it shifts into describing elephants, after which it goes back to describing the women of the land. Most disturbingly, the end of the section on elephants, before moving to the women, describes a scene where a male elephant is mounting, or in my experience of the reading, raping, the female elephant. This is described as elephants having sex in the same way as humans (Polo 2016, pp. 397–98).

In her article “The Blackness of Medieval Dance” (2025), Kathryn Dickason refers to Marco Polo’s depictions of Zanzibar to exemplify how pre-modern notions of race were constructed out of a variety of different patterns of otherisation. In “The Colonization of Medieval Dance” (2023), she scrutinises Marco Polo’s The Travels as well as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1360/1370), together with a wide range of images from illuminated manuscripts from the late medieval and early modern period, finding that dance is deeply enmeshed in power and politics. In her analysis, she argues that descriptions of dance often depict otherisation and even evokes dancers as subhumans, which she calls (proto)colonisation (Dickason 2023). Even though the section describing the people of Zanzibar, which was the focus of our communal discussion described above, did not directly describe dancing, the argumentation formed by Dickason can well be used to analyse what happens in the text. The comparison made between elephants and humans alludes to sub-human otherisation. Particularly regarding the presented imaginaries of the Mongol empire, Dickason states that the images and texts “do not describe or record deliberate acts of colonial domination, they conjure proto-orientalist fantasies of consumption and exploitation” (Dickason 2023, p. 330).5 Anyone familiar with Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) knows that this includes the erotisation and sexualisation of women, along with an exoticisation of the pleasures and delights that “the East” has to offer (Said 2002). In a similar fashion, the rendering of a violent mounting of a male over a female could be argued to depict a suppressed form of a sexual fantasy.

At the same time, Geraldine Heng argues, in her seminal work The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018), that Marco Polo’s stories, in contrast to John Mandeville’s travels, were not a strongly racializing and explicitly colonial accounts.6 Thus, a field of tensions can be depicted between Heng’s and Dickason’s readings. It is in this tension that this article takes its starting point. On the one hand, my aim is to scrutinize what Heng calls Marco Polo’s “mercantile gaze” (Heng 2018, p. 6) and what effects it had on his descriptions on dance. On the other hand, and more importantly, this article starts where Dickason’s work ends. She concludes her article by sharing that, even though her work has brought forth the colonial valences of medieval dance, next, we need to unveil the strategies of resistance and resilience that lay hidden in the historic dance depictions (Dickason 2023, p. 350). In other words, the work done both by Heng and Dickason moves within a framework that I call an hermeneutics of suspicion. In order to study the strategies of resistance and resilience found in dance, I argue, along with Willie James Jennings, that we first need to unlearn the approaches to discernment that we are used to. Then, we need to re-train our capacities of sensing, so that we can engage in what has been called an hermeneutics of charity or love.7

This article thus has two main parts and offers two contributions to the research community. The first part centres around giving a theoretical background to the methods of investigation used in the Praxis of Social Imaginaries research project and to the practices of unlearning, which I argue are needed both in theological historical inquiries and in teaching embodied tools of engagement with sensitive materials. Through showing how our communal learning happened and exemplifying the auto-ethnographic insights that unfolded when engaging with historical materials with the help of practice-based methods of inquiry, my aim is to give concrete tools for how an hermeneutics of suspicion and charity works in an educational setting.

In the second part of this article (from 4. Marco Polo’s gaze, forward), I offer a re-reading of the stories in which Marco Polo describes dance. For that re-reading, the auto-ethnographical experiences of unlearning that I describe in 3. Methodology and Key Concepts, are expounded upon and further clarified. The aim in the second part is to join the developed methodology with critical inquiry of the textual source presented. Such a presentation shows how artistic research practices and theological inquiries can be combined into working methods of transdisciplinary research that open new vistas to historical inquiries and colonial encounters. It is for this latter part of the article that questions of Marco Polo’s gaze, dance, intimacy, and the erotic become important. However, substantial groundwork must be laid first regarding the theoretical frames and methodological practices that have been used to arrive at such inquiries.

2. Theoretical Background

Willie James Jennings writes in After Whiteness: An education in belonging (2020), that Western education, specifically referring to theological programmes at universities, is deeply troubled. The formation that happens in these institutions distorts our desires into admiring and striving for practices of possession, control, and mastery, where characters of self-sufficiency are promoted and advanced. Because we have lost the capacity to cultivate belonging, which needs a profound re-working of how we imagine intimacy and eroticism, theological education cannot do its task of opening up “sites where we enter the struggle to rethink our people” (Jennings 2020, p. 10). The inquiry that informs this investigation asks questions about intimacy and the erotic, not only in educational situations, but particularly at the intersection of dance and theological formation practices. The community learning situation described in the opening of this article is part of a project in which students, artists, activists, and researchers come together to investigate medieval travelling accounts. In the described setting, we made joint efforts to read Marco Polo’s (1254–1324) The Travels (2016), also known as a journey written by Rustichello da Pisa under the name, Le Devisement du Monde or The Description of the World (1300). By scrutinising the sections in which Polo describes dancing, I probe at the question of how a Western theological social imaginary about intimacy was formed, and how this formation still affects the practices at theological institutions of education.8 Before we get there, however, let us look at some of the theoretical frames and choices of methods that hold this inquiry.

First of all, as indicated, part of this research is informed by field notes taken from participatory observation sessions during communal reading practices.9 When such materials are shared, they function primarily as a heuristic and auto-ethnographic tool. In Heuristic Research, Design, Methodology and Applications (1990), Clark Moustakas explains that the main tenant of heuristic research is to move away from the notion of research as a process that requires the researcher to remove their “self” to validate their findings. Instead, he emphasises that in-depth knowledge is acquired only when we let intellect, emotions, and spirit inform our inquiries (Moustakas 1990, p. 16). To this, Cecilia Nahnfelt adds that auto-ethnographic tools are important for theological investigations as they create space for scrutinising our embodied experiences and an increased awareness of spaces, places, and specific situations where learning happens. She explains

An important point is turning the ethnographic gaze inward to the self (auto) while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein the self-experience occurs (Denzin 1997, p. 227). This self-experience is found in the reflexive notes and serves as a resource for critical analysis connected to existentialist and theological theory. This method of performing observations increases the possibility of avoiding stereotypes, which is a high risk in conceptual quantitative studies. It is a powerful method for working with topics of diversity and identity.

(Nahnfelt 2021, pp. 66–67)

For the purpose of this study, where insights from a communal learning experience are shared and much of the learning that happens raises not only existential and theological questions, but concerns related to topics of racism, exclusion, and sexism, it becomes particularly important that the investigation involves an open process of reflexivity. The dual approach of involving the full self, while also keeping a critical stance towards one’s own blind spots through dialogue is not done to avoid stereotypes and biases altogether. I concur with Sarah Coakley, that claiming such abilities would be to ignore the limits of spiritual discernment and to over-estimate the power of reflexivity. Still, she holds the beacon, as do I, for the possibility that despite the deeply rooted tendencies of Western academia to be entangled in practices of racism and misogyny, there is also an unlearning which can happen (Coakley 2022). Coakley speaks about contemplative practices like deep listening and sitting with the discomfort of the unknown, while being open to change. She envisions a slowly enfolding process of purging one’s desires, which can help untangle the knowledge arising from the practices one takes part in, to move towards wisdom (Coakley 2013; Coakley 2002).

As a white, Western scholar, I am also deeply aware of the troubled nature of theological ethnography and the history of using the ethnographic gaze as a tool of supposed discernment processes of the capacities and spiritual states of “the Other”, that Jennings and many others have criticised (Jennings 2010; Campbell-Reed 2016). The main idea behind participant observation and ethnographic research methods is that, by living closely immersed in a phenomenon, and with the people being studied, the researcher is initiated in the practical, sensuous, and direct experiences and perceptions of the fellow participants in the study. Through such processes, the researcher ideally gains situated knowledge about the experiences of others (Gunnarson 2019). However, as examples in this article show, even though I am capable of sensing tensions in the room and noticing shared experience of discomfort, my understanding of how such situations should be approached might not be shared by all the participants in the same space. If one takes such an experience a step further, as classical forms of anthropological studies do, the researcher is not just to record what happens in field notes, but is expected also to make informed judgements or interpretations about what meaning these events have for the participants (Ingold 2014). It is towards this point in the ethnographic research process, that I am particularly critical. If Jennings is right about the troubled nature of theological education, there are equally strong reasons to be sceptical towards ethnographic research processes. Through examples drawn from the comparative studies written by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), Jennings explains how closely linked anthropological studies and theology were to each other. Through his missionary travels to the Far East, Valignano studied the people he encountered and created a practice for how to discern, not only who was apt for Christian ministry, priesthood, or ecclesial leadership, but also who was capable of salvation (Jennings 2010, p. 34). Drawing on a similar pattern that had been used on the Iberian Peninsula, where “At the bottom, chained to the deepest suspicion of incapability, are the conversos (or marranos) and moriscos” (ibid.), from Jewish and Muslim background, one could now find the African Black bodies. And, even though today we might not accept the racialised logic behind these statements, the more important point that Jennings makes here, is that it was in the practice of reading native bodies, and interpreting the practices of the non-white bodies into a drama of redemption that training for discernment happened (Jennings 2010). Furthermore, the capacity of passing judgement on the spiritual and moral state of another is a skill deeply ingrained in theological training. It is for these reasons that I do not aim to engage in ethnographically informed theology, but rather to use auto-ethnographic materials for raising critical questions, centring topics in need of scrutiny passed to me by others on request and to record my own journeys into uncomfortable territories of insight.

At times, the encounters I had during the communal learning experiences led to deeper discussions around a topic. In these situations, I engage with retelling or narrating the mutual dialogue; however, the purpose is not to cast judgement on what is “really” happening in a given situation, nor is it to share my informed discernment of ontological “facts” or some kind of simple representationalism where another person’s worldview is described. In these cases, I instead engage in what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls perspectivism and equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2015). With this, I mean that I use fiction to bring us into a story. Viveiros de Castro states “It is not a matter of imagining a form of experience, if you like, but of experiencing a form of imagination” (Viveiros de Castro 2015, p. 17). His point is that we cannot get to the “pure” shared experience of an event. Instead of promoting a form of cultural relativism with a diversity of subjective and partial representations referring to an objective nature, Viveiros de Castro suggests a radical and real diversity, where the bodily differences between species becomes the “site and instrument of ontological differentiation” (Viveiros de Castro 2015, p. 59). In a similar way, I imagine that within humans, our embodied sense of a specific situation determines how we imagine it. Thus, particularly writing on the topic of dance, intimacy, and the erotic, within the field of theology, my sensory felt experience of the world is the only place from which I can start. What is shared in this article is thus a combination of auto-ethnographic materials and stories from the communal learning situation that are used to question, highlight, and invite the reader into an exploration of our mutual learning. Once the format for unlearning is established, the vignettes are used to probe into a scrutiny of what Marco Polo narrated around the topic of religious dancing in The Travels. Before we can move into the section where I exemplify how the stories of our communal learnings can be used to critically analyse what Polo’s text communicated—and what it did not communicate—to its European audience, a few more aspects of the methodological approach need to be clarified.

In the next section I particularly aim to show how the relationship between intimacy, eroticism, and educational practices have been construed in a European theological social imaginary. I also explain how and why attunement and new ways of sensing with each other are central to the unlearning that needs to happen.

3. Methodology and Key Concepts

By the time we had read the section where elephants were compared to people living on Zanzibar, the apparent tension and mutual sense of unease was growing in the room. By reading the facial expressions of the people sitting around the table, I could conclude that I was not the only person caught in internal turmoil. To deal with the emotional burden that came with this reading, I suggested a technique I was familiar with from my own dance practices. I suggested that everyone stand up and move around in the room. I also invited people to try out one or two of the exercises I had read about in Resmaa Menakem’s book My grandmother’s hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies (2017). There, Menakem brings up the importance of using techniques for embodied trauma release: practices like letting oneself put voice or breath to the emotions one is feeling, or creating tension in the muscles of the body and then releasing them, by either shaking or just letting go, whenever we are faced with potentially stressful experiences (Menakem 2017, pp. 176–79). My instructions were for each participant to go to a part of the room where they would be alone and try out some of the movements. My intention was to create a space where people would get some privacy for processing, and where they would not disturb each other, while engaging in these body-centred exercises of awareness.

Once we were done with the exercises, it was time for a feedback session. I was struck by a comment Aarre,10 a non-white student, made to me. They said, I find it interesting that you instructed us to keep a distance and to be respectful about each individual’s need of personal space for these kinds of exercises. My immediate and natural inclination would instead have been for us to get together and hug each other or to do a communal interaction or ritual of some kind (2 August 2023). Aarre’s comment became one of those profound moments on this research journey, when something shifted in me. I realised, on a completely new level, how my white, Western, and often secular, upbringing, combined with institutional educational practices that foster rational autonomy and self-sufficient individualism, have formed me into following a specific format of how things “should be” done, when it comes to instructing embodied exercises. With new insight, I saw that, independently of how I consider myself being trained as a dancer, where communal movements, emotional expression, and bodily awareness techniques are an important aspect of how I am and move in the world, my preference for doing things alone instead of gathering into community informs my choices in tough situations.

The communal learning experience was not intentionally created with the pedagogy of belonging—which Jennings speaks about—in mind.11 As a facilitator of the reading, with listening and storytelling sessions at the core of the practices of the research environment, I had not consciously planned that we would draw a crowd of people together with the aim of “forming erotic souls that are being cultivated in an art that joins them to the bones” (Jennings 2020, p. 13) and creating a communion where we attune to life together (Jennings 2020, p. 14). Instead, I carried a vague desire of learning together, inspired by the works of Paolo Freire. Particularly in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), Freire emphasises that, for education to be liberating, it needs to move away from banking models of learning where some individuals are seen as experts and others as receivers of knowledge. Instead of dehumanising students, Freire’s vision builds on creating a space of dialogue where the students lead the discussions with their questions and interests in mind. He is also keen on stating that education should never be only about probing ideas and thoughts; it should also lead to (or arise from) action and deeper reflection (Freire 2000). Simultaneously, in the study circle where this learning was happening, we had agreed that we would strive to apply ethical guidelines to our work together that was sensitive and that it would be open not only to transdisciplinary research, but first and foremost, to indigenous research principals and methods of knowing (Utsi 2021; Nickerson 2019; Smith 2013; Heikkilä et al. 2024).12

Freire’s pedagogical tools and my rudimental understanding of indigenous research were the two main reasons for why I brought exercises into our reading sessions and for why I, along with my colleague who led the sessions with me, strongly emphasised that the readings would be communal and that we would do as little lecturing as possible. However, when Aarre brought up the question of doing embodied exercises individually or as a community, the question of which role intimacy plays for these interactions rose to the surface of my pedagogical consciousness. As Audre Lorde so keenly reminds us, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1979; Lorde 2007, pp. 110–13). Was it so that my tools of teaching were insufficient for addressing questions of racism and sexism in our community? Was I even part of a pattern of afflicting harm when I did not dare to be drawn more closely into communion with my fellow learners in the room? Jennings argues that, when we move away from colonial practices formed by traders, explorers, missionaries, merchants, and soldiers, where individuals exchange goods and services guided by a rationality that is free from communal obligations, we come closer to the world of friendship (Jennings 2020, pp. 144–45). Many educators today would say that being friends with your students is too high of a demand to put on teachers. Jennings, on the other hand, warns, particularly students of colour, that the plantation logic of master and slave easily turns students to service providers in a search of shared knowledge.13 At the same time, constantly asking what I may gain from the people and places one comes in contact with just deepens the sense of exhaustion and isolation that educational institutions bring upon people today (Jennings 2020, p. 122). So, clearly something else is needed. Jennings suggests a different kind of social fabric, not demanding communal cohesion, yet opening up for a way of relating to each other where friendships can be formed and long-lasting relationships be made.

Reflecting on the community reading sessions and the suggestion of moving more closely in each other’s presence as a measure to create ease in an emotionally challenging situation, I realised that I would have been comfortable approaching certain individuals with a hug. I am also aware that Resmaa Menakem, in chapters entitled “Reaching out to other bodies” and “Harmonizing with other bodies”, gives lists of exercises like humming or singing together, rocking back and forth, sitting in silence, everyone rubbing their own belly simultaneously, and even dancing as a group (Menakem 2017, pp. 186–88). So, there were ample examples of exercises we could have done that would have joined people together instead of splitting us apart. Still, I sensed that, even though these exercises would have felt more appropriate to do in a dance class or even church, in the educational space of a university setting, I felt uncomfortable with how others would perceive such invitations, if I would have ventured to suggest them. What has become increasingly clear to me is that I was not willing to combine bodily intimacy and theological formation practices as a paradigm shift.14 The reason for my discomfort is most important to explore, particularly in light of the intriguing fact that some of my students would not have been as troubled as I was by this kind of intimacy.

Not only did Aarre suggest it. Another student, Aava,15 also shared some insights about dancing, that further forged my new path of awareness around intimacy and belonging. Instead of probing ahead with a dance, I opted for making slower adjustments, where more experimenting and reflecting upon our joint practices would be at the core of our activities. While I wanted to work towards strengthening the social fabric of the community, I also wanted to be mindful that such re-structuring of the classroom space might not be appreciated by all the participants. In more concrete terms, we ended our last reading session by holding each other’s hands, with the option of using a pen, phone, or other non-human matter, as the point of connection between people. After some moments of silence together sitting like that, words of gratitude started to pour into the centre of the circle. I think calling this an attunement practice would be too strong of a classification, in the sense that Jennings speaks about such (Jennings 2021a, 2021b). However, something new did come into being in that situation.

Still, the question of my own resistance kept haunting me, and part of the purpose of this article is to probe at what Catherine Walsh calls the “cracks” and fissures in the colonial structures of our pedagogical practices, university cultures, and society at large (Walsh 2014).16 Even though she frequently refers to resistance and upheaval, even “pedagogical-intellectual militancy-activism” (Walsh 2014), which would indicate that the forceful breaking of old patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting are welcome in de-colonial modes of teaching, critical inquiry is not the only practice that matters. Walsh emphasises that just as it is important to be and act against dominant orders of Western individualism, the mono-culture of binary thinking, and extractivist power structures, we should also build for “other ways of being and thinking in and with the world” (Walsh 2014).

Similarly, Walter Mignolo, building on Gloria Alzaldúa, states that healing the colonial wounds that effect our epistemic and aesthetic practices requires both unlearning and acquiring new capacities. These capacities of sensing, believing and emoting with the world in new ways are described by Alzaldúa as La facultad. The term comes form a play on the idea of different faculties at a university and aims to embrace the capacity of knowing that exists in every living organism (Mignolo 2021, pp. 73–74). She explains:

La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant “sensing,” a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world.

(Alzaldúa 1987, p. 38)

Reflecting on the insights shared by Aava and Aarre, I was unsettled by the possibility that, even though I am trained in both dance and other body-centred movement practices, I had lost my capacity to be excruciatingly alive to the world. Sarah Coakley brings up the importance of purging our desires and using academic training for teaching practices of suspicion, and I am quite willing to bring in such vocabulary and frameworks to my university lectures and even class exercises. Such practices include slow reading that pays attention to power structures in the materials, and raising awareness around my own biases. Another important practice of suspicion is suspending the unknown by creating spaces where actual dialogue is happening. This is done with open-ended inquiries, not making assumptions, and following a path of curiosity. Coakley further recognises that wholesomeness in academic work stems from having practices in place that promote both an hermeneutics of suspicion and an hermeneutics of charity.17 However, she leaves the actual content of the latter vaguely open and undefined (Coakley 2013).

Willie James Jennings, on the other hand, in his Payton lecture series entitled Creating Home: Forming Christians Who Believe in Creation and Creatures (2021a/b), brings in his own pair of practices. He speaks about an hermeneutics of love and one of idolatry. Where the first is characterised by what he calls “a trinitarian attentiveness to the world” (Jennings 2021b). He describes a process where a disciple of Jesus learns how to pay attention: When a person attends to the word, the Holy Spirit will speak to them and open their senses to the good in creation (Jennings 2021b). Through such examples, I am reminded of Barbara A. Holmes work, Joy unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (2017), in which she describes how a community would sit in silence together and wait upon the Spirit, or just find release in raising the gaze towards blue skies during intensive labour circumstances. She also speaks about ecstatic singing, lamentation practices like bell ringing, ring shouts and being possessed by the Spirit giving words or acts of encouragement and wisdom to the community (Holmes 2017). In all of these examples, what comes to the surface is the importance of a community. These are not solitary practices even though some of them also require being at a distance from the community in order to find what emerges from the silence. Jennings describes that even attending to the hermeneutics of idolatry is a question of cultivating discernment that comes through developing attunement to the world. Furthermore, attunement is a communal sensing, not just attending to one’s own experiences and perceptions. Cultivating discernment is a question of attending to the ways peoples are attuned to the world (Jennings 2021b). He adds “We have inherited a legacy of turning discernment against attunement. A legacy of turning discernment against attunement, borne of the failure to weave together a hermeneutics of love with a hermeneutics of idolatry” (Jennings 2021b). In light of Jennings’s teachings, I realise that the formation I have been part of is both inherently distrusting of a more ecstatic group activities and carries the assumption that holding a critical and rational stance towards a topic is somehow more valuable than sensing into and feeling with the fellow beings around me. So, in this sense maybe I have lost some of my capacities of being excruciatingly alive to the world? Or maybe I was never really trained at all in these forms of attentiveness? More importantly, these descriptions raise the question of whether I can still learn these practices, and of how our community can become better at cultivating an hermeneutics of love or charity.18

After the lecture, I pressed Jennings on particular practices that would be helpful for teaching attunement and how to re-calibrate our abilities to discern what God loves and what God wishes us to resist. He answered that he had not yet considered the topic in such concrete terms. He stated that the first step is to realise we need a change in trajectory (Jennings 2021b). The second step is then to move towards that change. Jennings added

That re-calibration ties directly to a re-engagement with other peoples ways of sensing and discerning. So, this is what is so important, as I said in the lecture, it is not a matter of me as a Christian or we as Christians trying to sense the creation, by ourselves. It’s a sensing with the sensing of others. And seeing that this sensing together with the sensing of others is fundamental to our own reality of discerning. This, this is what we walked away from. And I noted in the lecture, it was moving in two directions. It was not simply, the gentiles, sensing now in and through Israel, with Israel, the ways of their God. But it is Israel as well, the wideness and the Wildness of this God, through the sensing of others.

(ibid.)

What I find most important in Jennings’s answer to my question is the fact that he returns to the practice of sensing and of sensing in and with a community of others. He also connects specific kinds of sensing with the cultivation of a new kind of discernment. As I understand him, sensing happens in relationship to two different communities. One is sensing among people from cultures, religious traditions, and places different from ourselves. In After Whiteness, he specifies that being erotic souls is to share life as creaturely beings. Ultimately, he contrasts the world of white supremacy with the indigenous practices of sharing food together, touching flesh to flesh, crying over pain and breaking bread in joyous celebration (Jennings 2020, p. 11). So, even though he does refer to attentiveness as a practice of Christian disciples, here, I understand him to be conceptualising attunement as a capacity inherent in all human beings, independent of their personal relationship to a professed Christian God. Furthermore, what I also glean from these descriptions is the capacity of re-learning these practices if they have been lost to us.

In relationship to the communities we take part in, Jennings also brings in Black feminist scholars who state that erotic power is what drives all forms of education and community being. Theologically speaking, this is because God yearns for us and we get to respond to that deep yearning by sensing an erotic power in all our creative endeavours (Jennings 2020, pp. 149, 151). In Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (2007), she names the erotic as a powerful force born out of chaos and the nursemaid of deep knowing that carries both political and personal potential for change (Lorde 2007). Lorde explains that she is speaking about a life force found deep within every woman that yields creative powers in every aspect of our lives, in dancing, loving, language, history, and work (Lorde 2007, p. 107). Similarly to Holmes’s descriptions of ancestral African practices of dance, possession, and ecstatic performances, and Alzaldúa’s La facultad, Lorde identifies the capacity of being part of a force beyond language, of being attuned with creation itself. Contrary to Coakley’s language of purging of one’s desires, Lorde describes a move towards saying YES to our deepest cravings and embracing a vital life force within, that combines physical, sense experiences with emotions and feelings. It is a deep dive into the unknown, which untaps creative forces that our society has taught us to be fearful of. Lorde does not suggest that everything that comes up through erotic desire is “good”, rather she states that

…fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

(Lorde 2007, pp. 110–11)

In the descriptions of this life force and the capacity we have to grow beyond the current distortions that we may be carrying within us, I hear echoes of Kameron J. Carter’s latest book The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystical Song (2023). Building on Catherine Keller’s previous works and inspired by Lorde, Carter describes the vibrational nature of matter itself pulsing with a dark and mysterious life-force throughout the universe (Carter 2023; Keller 2003). Paying attention to, and experimenting with, sensing vibrational matter could be another path towards attunement and re-learning practices of intimacy. And it is here that I connect Jennings’s second statement about sensing. I understand that the second statement he makes on sensing is a phenomenon that happens in and with the Wildness of God. We are not only faced with the capacity of attunement to living in the world with others; we also have the capacity to recognize a deeply seated power to create, connect, and be part of a life-force, which goes beyond humanity. Jennings names an attunement to and with the world. It is in the wilderness and in the wildness of the utterly unknown where we can commune with God. The vibrational and vital matter described by Carter, is a power that pulsates throughout the universe and gives us the capacity to respond to the sensations we are entangled into (Carter 2023, pp. 100–1).

In a recent work, indigenous theologian Shiluinla Jamir describes how Western ideas of space and place often conjure images of vast and open emptiness, instead of a creation filled with presence. Furthermore, she brings in how communal gardening practices can re-calibrate our attunement of living in the world with others. One indigenous community member told her that for the plants to grow, “The soil needs to know my soul that flows through my hands and fingers that touch the soil” (Jamir forthcoming). These are some of the ways I imagine the possibility of sensing with the world and attunement to creation.

As already stated, the wildness is real, and the erotic can be deeply disruptive. What makes things even more challenging is that this power has been so deformed by those who fear, resist, and exploit it that few of us know how to relate to the erotic without trying to control, restrict, or over-emphasise it for specific needs.19 It is at this juncture that I imagine that practices of communal dancing may play a role, not only in spiritual formation processes, but also in the teaching of capacities of “sensing with the sensing of others” (Jennings 2021b).20 However, before we can go there, there is some level of more concrete historic unlearning that I think needs to happen. And it is for this purpose that we turn to Marco Polo and the practices of seeing and relating to the world found in The Travels.

4. Marco Polo’s Gaze

In the prelude of this article, I give a short introduction to how Kathryn Dickason and Geraldine Heng have analysed and criticised the accounts and accompanying artwork of Marco Polo’s journeys to the East. Now, I engage in a dialogue with those sources and give a theoretical description of how the gaze of Marco Polo was formed and what Heng means when she uses the term mercantile gaze. Understanding what is meant with Marco Polo’s gaze is central to delivering a critical reading of how and why Polo sees and describes dancing in particular ways. My argument is that, in the sections to come, if one wants to understand the liberating potential of dance, the kind of gaze promoted by Marco Polo needs to be undone.

Marco Polo, born in 1254, was the son of Niccolò Polo, a Venetian merchant. Marco’s father and uncle had already made one visit to China in 1260. When his father returned home and found out he had a teenage son, he took Marco with him on the next journey in 1271. After some years, the three men found themselves in the courts of Kubilai Khan (1215–1294) and proceeded to work in his service, travelling extensively throughout the Mongol empire. Although the exact course of Marco Polo’s travels is open to debate, it is fairly certain that he visited India and made at least one journey from Peking southwest as far as Burma. Once the Polos returned home to Venice in 1292, their homeland had gone to war against Genoa. Marco Polo joined the fighting and ended up in prison some time after 1293. It was probably in prison that he met Rustichello of Pisa, a romance-writer. Together, they composed The Travels. Originally the text was composed in Franco-Italian but was soon translated into many languages and became a best-seller in the genre of travel literature.21 Marco Polo was released from prison in 1299, became a wealthy merchant, married, and had children, before he died in 1324. The Travels has been called a hybrid narrative that combines third-person descriptions of Marco Polo’s travels with first-person “eyewitness” accounts of the diverse races, religions, and resources at the disposal of the extraordinary Mongol rulers. The legacy of the text lies in how it influenced explorers like Christopher Columbus in their travels22 and in the fact that the descriptions given in this account formed the image of the East for many generations of Europeans to come (Heng 2018; Dickason 2023). Geraldine Heng describes the latter phenomena as follows:

…this seminal text surveys the magnificence of Mongol China’s cities, ports, and hinterlands and details a vision of modernity, security, efficiency, welfare, success, and unimaginable prosperity and power the like of which is found nowhere else in the world. From the gigantic tax receipts of its ports to the glories of imperial gardens and architecture; from exorbitant feasts to massive granaries; from the exquisite abstraction of paper money as symbolic currency to the high-speed postal relay gridding the empire; from welfare and disaster relief to a panoptic surveillance system; from military might to statesmanlike innovations in governance—Mongol China’s incarnation of an economic, aesthetic, technological, and ethical sublime for Polo/Rustichello transmutes the Mongol race and empire into an object of fascination and desire under the Western gaze.

(Heng 2018, pp. 9–10)

If we take Heng’s summary as a valid description of what came to form the image of the East, Polo/Rustichello’s The Travels was less proto-orientalist in its outlook than Dickason suggests. An orientalist gaze looks at the land, the cultures, the peoples, and material wealth that exists in a place and does not view this as good, fascinating, and desirable. Instead, it sees whatever it gazes upon as “objects” or “raw materials” to be gathered, extracted, organised, and structured—drawn in by the West—in order to transform the East to fulfilling its “real” potential and purpose. Whatever is found of goodness or fascination needs to be purified, elevated, and/or guarded, in order to reach “full maturity” (Said 2002, pp. 117–19). Orientalism builds on a cultural, social, biological, political, religious, and racial idea of the need and wish to dominate the rowdy and unknown “Other” (ibid., p. 113). Such domination can happen through the means of political, moral, religious, military, or educational formats. With Polo/Rustichello’s texts, Heng envisions more of an admiration of what Mongol China has to offer.23 Heng explains that the impressive architectural, topographical, and landscape opulence are clearly Mongol accomplishments and that the likeness of these cannot be found anywhere else (Heng 2018, pp. 326–28). The West is not in a position of domination here, it can merely learn from and, at its best, copy, what it sees. Furthermore, it is at this point that Polo’s training as a trader plays such a pivotal role for the accounts. Heng speaks of his mercantile gaze, writing

Everything appears designed to delight the eye and the senses with color, brilliance, and variety. These extravagant constructions of landscape and architecture—and the exorbitant artificial prominence, in particular—bespeak fabulous wealth and aesthetic deliberation, and gesture at the ability to marshal unimaginable resources for their accomplishment.

(Heng 2018, p. 326)

Following along the journey that Polo makes, it becomes clear that the Great Khan dominates, not just the original Mongol lands, but also vast areas of Persia, India, and China. This is done either through direct subjugation, the use of paper money issued by the Khanate, or products that bring revenue to the empire. Each description of artistic, economic, and political brilliance seems designed to raise sensual pleasures and covetous lust for hitherto unimagined prosperity (Heng 2018, pp. 326–27). The practices that formed the mercantile gaze, which saturated Polo’s choices of where and how he placed his attention, came with three specific features.

The first one was associated with his task of counting—identifying, tagging, and tallying—the resources of the empire for the Khan. Everything he sees is not just quantified in value, Heng states that it is also taxonomically organised so that it does not overwhelm travellers. For the purpose of global trade, anything can be reduced to units that are sorted, categorised in an orderly, routinised way, and rendered manageable to traders and future customers. Not only is the material world made into raw materials that flow into systems of manufacturers and producers, markets with supply and demand, and consumers and importers; people and services are also filtered into these kinds of lists (Heng 2018, pp. 31–32).

In addition to this, Jack Weatherford explains in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004), how impactful the introduction of paper money became for the kind of trade that was developed. Not only was a standardised system put in place across the empire, from China to Persia (Weatherford 2004); there was a shift in the social imaginary, when people got used to the fact that gift-giving and exchange of goods could be substituted for an agreement written on a paper bill. This enabled the accumulation of wealth in completely new ways, it also changed the position and tasks of tax collectors and state systems of getting a share in commerce (Heng 2018, pp. 59–65; Weatherford 2004). Most importantly, the monetisation of every aspect of life, which slowly followed the path of centralised monetary systems, trained people to be dislocated from relational patterns of interaction to more clearly commodify and abstract their systems of exchange.24 Heng writes “This is how a mercantile imaginary sees the world. All human relations are economic relations of a sort, where participants seek to profit from trading, including intimate kinds of trading” (Heng 2018, p. 334). She argues that Marco Polo’s gaze becomes exceptionally clear when looking at how the world is described as a supply chain in which women in particular serve as goods to be exchanged. The fact that Polo/Rustichello’s text returns several times to descriptions of how the supply of sexual services were provided by women to men is a case in point (ibid.). In these examples we see how an erotic and mercantile gaze are intermingled with each other.

This brings us to Heng’s third and last point, which is of importance for the analysis of dance, that I shortly turn towards. The mercantile imagination does not stop with describing the Mongol empire as a place where the commodification of women, and the trading of sexual services is normalised; it turns any kind of otherness “into units of capital, to be entered into calculated exchange for advantage” (Heng 2018, p. 334). This means that things such as the religion of the inhabitants, the peculiar habits and customs of people, and cultural traditions all become part of the exotic luxury of the Mongol courts, descriptions that are brought forth in order to create awe and admiration of the Khan and his family. This is why, when Polo/Rustichello describe the moral superiority of the exceptional Mongol woman, like Khutulun, through her ability to control her sexuality and her refusal to marry, I would not depict this primarily as an instance of promoting a Christian moral hegemony (Heng 2018, p. 338). Rather, I agree with Heng that here Polo/Rustichello uses images, ideas, and values known to their European readership—like chastity, strength, and justice—to promote the moral superiority of the Mongols. In the majority of the moral examples provided by Polo/Rustichello’s account, the assessment of human greatness is grounded instead in the combination of displaying wealth, status, and the control of material abundance, as signs of God’s favour. One could even argue that Polo/Rustichello promotes polemic views about the Church and Christians.25 In this way, Heng explains that it is the values of the Mongol worldview, not classical Christian values, that are promoted.

In mercantile as in Mongol thinking, material success and moral righteousness are intermeshed in a calculus of equivalence and correlation. Kublai’s personal virtues—his valor, prowess, knowledge, and wisdom—can be extrapolated from the fact that he has dominion over more peoples, lands, and treasure than anyone in the world who ever lived.

(Heng 2018, p. 329)

The third aspect of how the story provided by Polo/Rustichello left marks on the readers of the text is that it suggests an alternative route for justifying a new kind of world order. The lure of excess in luxury and sensual pleasures, the influx of consumable goods, and the services provided by ethnic and gendered others, are not described as gluttony, greed, lust, or pride, but retold as signs of divine providence. Marco Polo’s gaze—combining mercantile attention and erotic sensory focus on tradable intimate services—is what frames and provides a storyline for the depictions of dance that can be found in The Travels. With these mechanisms in mind, it is now time to turn to the references I have gathered on dancing found in Polo/Rustichello’s text.

5. Dances in the Travels

Probing for references on dance and dancing, in The Travels, a simple google search brings up the following: dance is mentioned six times (in five different sections), danced is mentioned once, and dancing is mentioned three times (in two different sections). For comparison, music only appears six times, and some of these are the same as the sections on dancing. Singing, songs, and chanting appear more times; however, surprisingly many of these are the same sections where dancing occurs, often combing song, dance, music and festivities or celebrations of some kind. Altogether, dancing is mostly found in descriptions of non-Mongol communities. The only time it comes up in relation to Mongol customs is in its absence. With this, I mean that when Polo/Rustichello describe the modesty and decorum of the young ladies of the province of Cathay, they receive praise over how they respect elders and do not entertain themselves in wanton activities like frolicking and dancing (Polo 2016, pp. 395–96). What is described here is not actual dancing but activities like, partying, gossiping, and dressing extravagantly, that Polo/Rustichello identify with certain types of women, who also happen to be dancing.26 As Dickason points out, this section displays a similar kind of attitude that has been found across Europe when it comes to describing a morally righteous Christian woman (Dickason 2023).27

Even more interesting is that we know from other European sources—both in Mandeville’s travels and from Guillaume de Rubrouck’s (or William of Rubruck) (1248–1255)’s Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum—that dance was part of extravagant spectacles that created entertainment in the courts of the Khan.28 In Rubruck’s account, the greeting that is described from his first meeting with Khan Sartak (d. 1257) is not so much a scene of entertainment but more a celebration, where people are playing music and dancing in front of the Khan (Rubruck 2009, p. 115). In another section of his travels, Rubruck gives a more detailed account of what seems like a combination of a greeting ritual, and a dance and drinking game (Rubruck 2009, pp. 77–78, 115). We learn from Rubruck’s account that this was an important custom. For some reason Polo/Rustichello does not find it of interest to give attention to this dance in his writings.

Dancing is instead described in five different instances relating to other cultures and their customs. These are found, from Polo’s road to Cathay, in the kingdom of Kumul, his descriptions of the visions of Paradise portrayed in Muslim traditions, and an anecdote from India, as well as in a description of a region between Beijing and Bengal, in the province of Qarajang, where he goes to the cities of Yongchang and Yachi, and finally, in portraying the sacred customs of India. For the purpose of this article, the latter is the most important. Before we move there, let us touch briefly upon four of the other accounts as well, as they add context for how the gaze of Polo/Rustichello functioned in relationship to dance.

In two of the descriptions, in the vision of a paradisiacal place and in the anecdote from India, an abundance of dancing women are portrayed as part of explicit or implicit male sexual fantasies. In the story from Mulehet, Polo retells what he had heard to be the fate of those who choose to follow Mohammad and are awarded a place in Paradise (Polo 2016, p. 57). However, an interesting twist of this story, which can also be found in other travel accounts from the East, is that the paradisiacal scenery is not just an otherworldly place, but an actual garden hidden within the mountains (Heng 2018, pp. 127–38). As the story goes, Sheikh Alaodin had established the biggest and most beautiful garden according to the depictions given by Mohammed of what awaited men in Paradise. In addition to this, an old man was now in charge of alluring young men to come there and get caught in a sexual fantasy, by the help of which he made them into “warriors for God”. Polo/Rustichello explains that, by combining drugs and sensual pleasures, men are persuaded to become Assassins29 (Polo 2016, pp. 152–58). The role dancing plays in this dream world is as follows:

It was filled with all the choicest fruits in the world. And in this garden he had ordered the construction of the most exquisite houses and palaces that were ever seen, for they were gilded and decorated with scenes depicting all the loveliest things in the world. He had also had conduits installed there, some of which flowed with wine, some with milk, some with honey, and some with water. The most bewitching women and girls in the world were brought to live there, and they were more accomplished at playing every kind of instrument and at singing and dancing than any other women. (…) And the women and girls stayed with them all day long, playing music and singing and giving them great delight, and these youths had their way with them as they pleased, so that they had everything they could wish for and would never have left this place of their own accord

(Polo 2016, pp. 153–54).

We find a place full of pleasures, where dancing is combined with imagining seduction and a life where a man gets everything he ever could have wished for. Still, the dancing itself is not the central part of this story. Instead, this is a description of how men can be made into mighty warriors, and it plays with the tropes of other-worldly or present delights. Because of what we already know about Polo/Rustichello, it is important to note that what is offered here is not a condemnation of a problematic or heretic worldview. Rather, Polo/Rustichello offers the reader an alternative vision of Paradise, where the Muslim expectation of dancing female servants seems more alluring than the “heaven” that Jesus has to offer. Christian teachings state that in “Paradise” no man is even married to a woman, let alone does he get thousands of virgins to delight in.30 Many scholars have pointed out that, even though there is no historical precedence for the worldly paradise gardens of indulgences in delights, the fantasy and allure of these kinds of stories took over the European social imaginary in the early medieval period and even lives on in some current day stories about what engages terrorist actions (Heng 2018, pp. 127–29, 357–58).31

In Polo/Rustichello’s version of the legend, the spectacular story about the old man in the mountain and his “devilish” ways of capturing and using young men in his militant organisation ends with the arrival of the Mongols. Whatever combination of terror and delight that this story had to offer is all “liberated” by the arrival of a power that knew how to handle even extraordinary military forces. In that way, this story of dance plays into the depictions of other cultures that the Mongols were able to dominate with their superior forces of military power. The story also shows that Polo/Rustichello had no other way of imagining the possibilities of understanding the work of skilled dancing and singing women than them serving “the needs of delight” of men. In Polo/Rustichello’s gaze, dancing was entertainment or a prequel to free sexual encounters. There is much to be said about the connection between dance and the erotic in theological terms. However, as I understand this section to be about male sexual fantasies that objectify women, I will not venture into those kinds of discourses at this point.

In another section in which Polo/Rustichello plays with the image of a multitude of dancing women, captivating girls try to awaken the sexual appetites of the son of a king in India. This story actually comes from the island of Ceylon, and Dickason states that the “dancers exude the powers of seduction that a good Christian, like the chaste son, should overcome. The carnalisation of these dances indicates Europeans’ urge to proselytize and colonize the Other” (Dickason 2023, p. 332). However, she seems to have missed that the story shared by Polo/Rustichello in this section is a classical Buddha story. The journey of the king’s son who refuses worldly power and all the delights of the flesh—even the sexual invitations of alluring women—contain all the elements of the prince meeting death, sickness, and old age, which creates in him the resolution of committing his life to “enlightenment” instead (Polo 2016, pp. 561–67). So, even though a European reader surely can recognise the theme of a saintly figure that is able to hold steadfast against the temptations of “worldly pleasures”, this story depicts a Buddhist social imaginary. Polo/Rustichello is not trying to convert the Other into a Christian format of idealised behaviour. In contrast, they seem to be describing the path of a bodhisattva and creating a tension between what and how holiness is portrayed in different religious traditions. On the one hand, there are similarities: the holy men of India carry traits that are recognisable to all Christians (i.e., saying no to worldly pleasures and being steadfast when confronted with temptations). On the other hand, there are dissimilar traits: the people of Ceylon create statues of gold and worship their “saint” as a god. This makes them idolaters in the proper meaning of this word, which is worshippers of images.32 In Polo/Rustichello’s writings, being an idolator is not a morally condemnable practice, but rather a conceptual framework, with the help of which they create helpful categories of sorting.33

More importantly, Polo/Rustichello seems especially fascinated by the island of Ceylon being claimed as a holy place for both Muslims and the followers of this bodhisattva. While the Muslims state that the island is the resting place of the first human, Adam, the followers of the local religion state that in addition to a temple and statue on the mountain of their “saint”34 there are also physical relics. Followers of both traditions conduct similar pilgrimages and recognise the importance of holy places and a godly presence in the material realm of the world. Marco Polo’s gaze is not focused on how the mountain can be colonialised by Christians. Instead, his mercantile gaze takes note of the material assets at stake. He recognises that a pilgrimage route, independent of which religious tradition it is part of, is a source of commerce.

Simultaneously, there is also a conflict between the Muslims and the people of Ceylon around the teeth, hair, and food bowl that can be found in this place. Do these relics belong to Adam or Sakyamuni Burqan? The “Christian” resolution to such a problem is that nobody is correct, as “we” have scriptures that tell us otherwise (Polo 2016, 565–6). However, Polo/Rustichello, seemingly discontent with this answer, promotes the Mongol approach to the dilemma.

The Mongol way of addressing the tension created between different religious systems is to recognise that if several groups use a specific site as a place of pilgrimage and worship, there is benefit in letting them continue to do so. The Khan also saw it to be of utmost importance that all the spiritual favours that would come from a specific religious practice or holy place would come to benefit the Khan, his family, and the Mongol Empire (Weatherford 2004; Rubruck 2009; Heng 2018). So, the Khan “resolved” this particular situation by going to the island of Ceylon and persuading the communities living there to give the relics to him. Polo/Rustichello goes on to describe, how the Mongols—as a cultivated and superior culture—knew exactly how one should treat the arrival of the relics to a new place. Mirroring the descriptions of European practices of the translatio of relics (Brown 1981; Le Goff 2014), and using Christian social imaginary, Polo/Rustichello makes it clear to the reader that, through the rightful conduct of the Khan, the Mongols were able to benefit from the blessings that the relics provided (Polo 2016, pp. 566–67).

Contrary to Dickason’s reading, the story portrayed here, I suggest, only uses Christian concepts and practices known to the European readership to exemplify the actual dominance in this situation, which lies with the Mongols. Erotically alluring dances are only a minor detail in the description that shows how the Khan was able to join together the people—the monks and the representatives of different faith communities—in a celebratory ceremony he conducted with such reverence that the relics started to produce bread miracles to the Khan’s glory. The mercantile gaze pays attention to and describes the procedure of how material success and moral righteousness are combined in the conduct of The Khan. The Khan resolves conflict, brings peace, and creates a system in which different religions are not waging war against each other. It is true that the accounts of Polo/Rustichello utilise conceptual frames from Christian social imaginary, like the terminology of idols, relics, and pilgrimage. However, I do not see them promoting Christianity. Even though the terminology derives from a Christian understanding of religion, the Mongols are the racial and religious sublime. It is their culture and their practices that are promoted as supreme.

This account should not be confused with later work of cultural anthropologists or religious scholars, like James Frazer, who operate with a hierarchy of religious systems in which Christianity is valued as the most advanced form of worship (Josephson-Storm 2017, pp. 125–35; Hellsten 2021b, pp. 60–66, 88–96). There is a similar tendency in this account of creating universalising structures that utilise comparative terms derived from the European framework of religious understanding, but contrary to the authors from the 19th century, Polo/Rustichello’s description wants to show how the Mongol way of dealing with religious conflicts and differences is to make them into a market of curiosities. The terms themselves become “empty signifiers”. The description of what happened on Ceylon is not really intended to deepen the understanding of the local practices or promote specific religious customs. Rather, the account subjugates the particularities of each culture and elevates the capitalist mercantile elements prioritising profit that can be made from the exchange of goods. The discussions around religious practices are interesting to Polo/Rustichello only when they create commerce and secure a flow of goods from one region to another, which is what pilgrimage routes, the exchange of relics, and visits to holy places bring with them.

Most prominently, in this story, the end result brings together the pleasures of the flesh—the need of food—with the spiritual needs—of feast and ceremony—under the excellence of Mongol rule. In this mixture, Polo/Rustichello does not explicitly notice the potential of dance to bring people together and create harmonious relations. Instead, the value of dance lies in the margins as part of female sexual services. These can function as distractions, as in the case of the bodhisattva, or as entertainment, as in the case of the young men who were lured to give their life fighting in the service of a religious system. If Polo/Rustichello’s gaze would have been liturgically trained, like that of William of Rubruck, he might have noticed the importance of skilled musicians and dancers for completely other reasons.35

From here, it is now time to turn to another section of Polo/Rustichello’s journey, where dancing is seemingly in the sidelines, but where the communal reading session opened my awareness to the fact that more might be found in our understanding of the potentials of dance.

6. Festive Dancing in Community

In this section I turn to the first of two remaining examples of dance in Polo/Rustichello’s text. The third story of dancing used in healing practices amongst the tribal people in Kara-jang, Vochan, and Yachi, relevant as it is to the discussion of religious dance practices, needs its own article and is not dwelled upon in this work. Instead, let us turn to a small remark that appears early in the journey written by Polo/Rustichello. Marco Polo is travelling through the province of Kamul and encounters what could be called “simple” folk. Polo/Rustichello states the following:

The province lies between two deserts, for on one side is the Great Desert and on the other is a little desert three days’ journey in extent. The people are all idolaters and have their own language. They live on the fruits of the earth, for they have plenty of things to eat and drink and sell them to travellers who pass that way. They are given over to good living, for they desire nothing else but to play instruments and sing and dance and indulge in carnal pleasures. And I can tell you that if a stranger approaches a house seeking a place to stay, the man of the house is perfectly delighted. He orders his wife to grant the guest’s every wish, then leaves his house and goes about his business, staying away for two or three days. While he is away he sends over everything the guest needs—for which, however, he is paid—and he never goes home while the stranger is still there. Meanwhile the stranger stays in his house with his wife and does as he pleases, lying in bed with her just as if she were his own wife; and so they carry on in a state of bliss. All the men of this city and province are cuckolded by their wives in this way, but I assure you they are not in the least ashamed of it. As for the women, they are beautiful, vivacious and loose.

(Polo 2016, pp. 185–86).

Heng gives this excerpt as the prime example of how Polo/Rustichello’s mercantile gaze turns even intimate relations into tradable goods and services, where “everyone” profits. The story from Kamul is only one of several passages in which Marco Polo shares his excitement over how convenient it is for a (male) traveller on the trade route to the Mongol empire, as there are ample supplies of anything a man could need (Heng 2018, pp. 333–34). Yet again, this example shows, how Polo/Rustichello easily combines the image of “good living” with song, dance, and indulgence in carnal pleasure. In this story, the locals are described as people that seem to have easy lives, living off the fruits of the earth, leading to a situation where the women are beautiful, full of life, and promiscuous. Interestingly enough, Polo/Rustichello lets us know that these people are not ashamed of what they do, but rather seem to enjoy it.

Dickason applies the hermeneutics of suspicion and reads this section as a covert way of promoting Christian ideals of chastity (Dickason 2023, p. 331). Such a case can be made as Polo/Rustichello tells us that, once Mengu Khan, who was the lord of the Tartars, heard about this custom, he tried to stop it. The immoral behaviour of how “the men of Kumul made their wives commit adultery with strangers” (Polo 2016, p. 186), was not seen as appropriate within the domains of the Mongol empire. The domination of the Khan and his ethical standpoints are also shown in the fact that the men of the region complied to these demands for three consecutive years. However, the story gets a further twist.

From my point of view, a more likely reading of Polo/Rustichello’s intension can be seen in the transactions that follow. The men of Kumul make a complaint to Mengu: they send him an expensive gift and explain that their ancestral tradition is being dislodged with these new regulations. They argue “that the idols looked very favourably on them for affording strangers such pleasure with their wives and possessions, and that the yield of their crops and their labour on the land had multiplied greatly as a result” (Polo 2016, p. 187). The practice of gifting women—like other possessions—to strangers, is portrayed, not as a question of pleasure only, but as a necessary offering to the idols. Within the framework that Polo/Rustichello has to offer, the strangeness of sexual affordability is displayed as an exotic difference between people. Cultural and religious differences become tradable experiences for those who decide to embark on the “adventure” of travelling to the East. Polo/Rustichello’s mercantile gaze gives the European market a journey filled with “unique events”, where sexual tourism and entertainment with song and dance are packaged into the same conceptual frame (Heng 2018, p. 333).

One of the challenges with this social imaginary, according to Heng, is that the women in the gaze of Polo/Rustichello “are not portrayed as assertive and purposeful agents who control their own self-insertion into exchange relations” (Heng 2018, p. 334). The mercantile imagination does not just treat the women as merchandise, it also places all the power of the exchange in the hands of the heads of the household, be they husbands, brothers, fathers, or mothers. Moving away from such a narrative requires more than simply reversing it on its angle. Heng importantly asks about the agency of the women in the story. However, it is not as easy as just giving the voice of the women the power to have pleasure in the sexual interactions depicted by the male gaze. As Minna Salami describes so clearly in her book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (2020), claiming a hidden feminist voice is not an “alternative” or “new” story, it involves finding the voice that was there all along (Salami 2020). So, as we move into a slightly different format of inquiry, I ask what would the women have told us about what was happening in their ancestral traditions, if people would have paid attention all along? For this purpose, it is also time to return to our communal learning experience.

We had just finished reading out loud a section of the text in which a celebration of sorts is described. The story starts out describing the home-brewed drinks that were served at the feast. However, soon we learn that a guitar player always plays before the drinking. Once the celebration starts in this way—with a man playing a tune—all the women and men gather in rows before the mister and mistress of the community. There they dance in a very organised, almost ritualised fashion. People clap their hands and cheer on both the drinking and the dancing. While the setup seems to be a call and response with a clear format, the author concludes that all of this is done in a distasteful and greedy fashion.

I asked the community in the room to sit a while and imagine how this scene looked in their own fantasy of the situation. Some spoke of a rowdy party. Others thought about games that were used as excuses to get drunk. One person shared about their home, where dancing happens in a circle and in long rows, both around a fire site and in church on Sunday. Then Aava raised her voice. She spoke about the village festivities back in her homeland. She shared about the communal dancing of the women. How, even back home, the cities are seen as the places of “advancement” and “culture”. Still, looking again at the practices of the feast in the home village, this is where a sense of community is formed. The dances and music is what actually joins people together. The fun, the play, the relaxation, they are sacred activities, not something to be stopped or changed in order to come closer to a sense of the divine. Even the fact that the young men drink some alcohol in order to find the strength to approach the girls, creates a positive tension in the air. There is a communication beyond words in these situations and sometimes a practice is needed in order for us to “slip into” that frame of mind.

Upon hearing the stories that Aava shared, the community had an interesting conversation about how differently we had all imagined the same text. For some, it seemed self-evident that these kinds of parties were mostly a form of superficial entertainment. For others, it was just as self-evident that something deeper happens in a situation of dance, festivities, and playful inter-mingling of people’s bodies with each other. For me, these reactions, once more, made it clear that not only can stories be interpreted in many different ways, but also our understanding is deeply formed by the practices we have taken part in as embodied and sensuous beings. Probing into the “cracks” of a patriarchal, capitalist, or colonial system necessarily calls us to abandon binary thinking. The accounts in the text do not describe dance as sexual promiscuity, nor do they restrict or warn against all forms of pleasure—these are imaginaries we bring to the text. When we have a clear idea of what leads to heaven, and what does not, it is very likely that we are caught in the colonial pattern of discernment mentioned by Jennings. We are not built for “other ways of being and thinking in and with the world” (Walsh 2014).

Instead, I need to train myself and the community I lead in these inquiries into the past to learn from Jennings’s hermeneutics of love. What kind of attunement is needed if we want to look at the historical records while simultaneously, in the present, starting to imagine together with others. Seeta Chaganti writes that it is imperative that medieval dance scholars train themselves to imagine dance as a practice that moves beyond visible and recordable harmonious actions. I suggest, through the following reading, how we can challenge the social status quo of dance as a religious practice. This is done by following Chaganti’s lead when she says that we need to go beyond the written records and play with the cognitive creation of the “unseen, the unimagined, or the presently unimaginable” (Chaganti 2023). If we choose to sense with the sensing of others and attune to creation, how could the descriptions of dance from the province of Kamul have played themselves out?

Polo/Rustichello’s story states that, after three years of not seeking the joys of a state of bliss, the community council had to gather. After not dancing, playing music, and lavishly pouring out the gifts of the earth to the people that entered the community in need of hospitality, the land stopped yielding fruits. After not finding pleasure in the interactions with the guests, the households were struck with misfortune (Polo 2016, pp. 186–87). Once they were allowed to go back to these previous practices “The whole population received this news with the greatest joy” (Polo 2016, p. 187). These are the details out of which I want to re-imagine the story.

Could it be so, that what was practiced in this community was some sort of fertility rite? In some of the accounts from Mongol China, there are traces of a social imaginary that sees the male and female principals, and the regular sexual unity of these, as a driving force for life to flourish—not just in the household and the tribe, but in the interactions with the land (Weatherford 2010; Weatherford 2004). Some sources speak of temple prostitutes, but one can also imagine a less hierarchically ritualised structure, where mutual pleasure in intercourse is seen as a sacred act leading to wellbeing and prosperity. Eva Man writes in Bodies in China: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics (2016), that in “the Daoist theory of sex, women are also supposed to enjoy sexual pleasure. The important step of “harmonizing the will” to sexual pleasure requires that the feelings and intent of both man and woman combine as one” (Man 2016, p. 83). For this kind of interaction, dancing may have been an important form of foreplay. With foreplay, I do not only mean activities that stimulate and activate the sexual pleasures of the partners involved. I refer to what is more along the lines of what Man calls Matriarchal Aesthetics, where practices function according to “magical” principals, and where humans communicate with nature through symbols, rhythm, and vibrations that are not expressible on the level of language and words (Man 2016, pp. 20–22). Could it be so that communing together in music, dance, and games created a kind of sacred play, where the collective participation of the whole community set up the “field” within which the “process” of giving and receiving pleasures and delight was something that spread out beyond the individual partners involved?

In a collection of translated poems from China entitled The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (1996), Arthur Waley explains that many of the earliest poems were written by women for the purposes of celebrating festivities and expressing gratitude for a good life. In the collection’s postface, Joseph R. Allen further explains the structure of Chinese poetry with this quote from Haun Saussy:

When emotion stirs within, they take form in words. But if words are inadequate, then one expresses them in sighs. If sighs are inadequate, then one expresses them in singing. If singing is inadequate, then one quite unconsciously moves the hands in dance and stamps the feet in rhythm.

(Waley et al. 1996, p. 365)

As the explanation shows, dancing, singing, and poetic expression are tightly woven together, and one may follow upon the other when we move from emotions to breath and from sound to movements. Sometimes the movement happens in the opposite direction. Furthermore, what is fascinating with the function of Chinese poetry of this kind is that it is not only an internal sensation, or expression of the heart, that takes form in external manifestations. Music can also be a barometer of social-political conditions, where poetry can depict the state of the world and aims to transform it with its expressivity (Waley et al. 1996, pp. 365–66). In a similar way, I imagine that the movements of song and dance that were part of the practices of the community in Kamul did not only express the gaiety found in the hearts of the local community. The fact that they chose to welcome guests and visitors with a rich assortment of gifts, bringing the guests into community life through the sharing of food, shelter, life, and sensual delights functioned as a way of weaving together the stranger with the village. In a similar way, one could imagine that communal feasts to celebrate crops and grain braided together the people with their lands. Dancing was both an expression of intimate relations and an invitation to join in the community, while also creating an arena where mutual interaction was made possible.

In contrast to the sexually focused and mercantile gaze, a theologically trained eye could be trained in the liturgical gaze, defined by William T. Cavanaugh as the ability to see the world beyond the surface level, imagining it as it really is. With that, he does not mean one ultimately defines “Truth” but rather has the capacity to see things more as God has intended creation to be. He suggests that “The Christian liturgy unfolds a different imagination of space and time” (Cavanaugh 2011, pp. 120–21), a notion that I understand as the ability to combine the seen with the unseen. Reading about the dance and exchange of gifts with a liturgical gaze renders the celebratory participation as a rhythm of gratefulness for life, rather than a mandatory sacrificial offering to an idol. The community action is a way of attuning to creation, and in that pattern, dancing carries the capacity to tap into the erotic powers of creativity, as suggested by Lorde. This of course, does not take away the complexity of human and gendered power-relations, but it moves us away from a binary or dualist thinking and restates some agency to the dancing women.

7. Religious and Festive Dancing in Community

Finally, we have now come to the last of the stories of dancing in the journey through Asia described by Polo/Rustichello. This longer account takes place around temple worship in India and differs from the previous examples in two significant ways. Firstly, we are now in a territory of the world where the Khan is not in charge, where there are completely different kings who rule the land. The region is important for trading, but it is not part of the Mongol empire. Secondly, this section actually goes into some detail about customs concerning dancing that are explicitly described as part of religious ceremonies and traditions. Polo/Rustichello describes what is happening at the temple, which is called a monastery, as well as what the theological reasons for these events are.

Dickason emphasises the fact that Polo/Rustichello refers to the dancing as worship of idols (Dickason 2023, pp. 332–33). My understanding of Polo/Rustichello’s use of the word idol is not as much a question of value judgements as it is a descriptive category. In this particular situation, the term is used to classify different kinds of religious traditions. In previous sections, Polo/Rustichello mentions idol worship in other regions. Now, he gives the details of the practices in this region.

We learn that the community has both male and female “deities” or idols and that young girls are offered as servants to the monasteries where the idols are housed. The girls function in the office of servants to the idols only until they are married. By the end of the story, we also learn that, as long as the girls remain virgins, their flesh has a certain character—their bodies are firm and pertly—which may or may not be part of what they can “offer” in their service of “officiating” at the monastery. The main duties at these services are to sing, dance, and keep a high-spirited celebration. They also bring food offerings to the idol on a weekly and monthly basis. Polo/Rustichello seems to find it amusing that the community says that the idols eat the food offerings, when in practice, the girls offer their delicately prepared gift to the idol while putting on the finest entertainment in the world, and then proceed to eat the food that was prepared (Polo 2016, pp. 539–42). The most important part, for this inquiry, is when Polo/Rustichello presents the reasons for these celebrations and offering, through the explanation of the local priest. He writes

The god is angry with the goddess; they refuse to come together or speak to one another. So long as they are bad-tempered and angry and until they are reconciled and make their peace, all our affairs will be undone and will go from bad to worse because they will not bestow their blessing and favour.’ And so the aforementioned girls go to the monastery in the way we have said, completely naked apart from covering their private parts, and sing before the god and goddess. The god stands by himself on an altar under a canopy, the goddess by herself on another altar under another canopy; the people say that he often takes his pleasure with her and they have intercourse together, but when they are angry they refrain from intercourse. This is when these girls come to placate them; and when they arrive they set about singing, dancing, leaping, tumbling and performing all sorts of diversions liable to cheer up the god and goddess and reconcile them. While they are performing they say: ‘O Lord, why are you angry with the goddess and hard-hearted towards her? Is she not beautiful? Is she not delightful? May it please you therefore to be reconciled with her and take your pleasure with her, for she is unquestionably most delightful.’ Then the girl who has spoken these words will lift her leg above her neck and perform a pirouette for the pleasure of the god and goddess. And when they have done enough coaxing they go home. In the morning the priest of the idols will announce as a great blessing that he has seen the god and goddess together and that harmony is restored between them. And then everyone rejoices and gives thanks.

(Polo 2016, pp. 541–42).

With the sexualised gaze of Polo/Rustichello, which we by now are familiarised with, the attention in this description lies in the naked bodies of the young girls, the intercourse between the god and goddess, and how the entertainment of the troops of female dancers restores the harmony between the gods and the realm of human affairs. There is no moral judgement passed on these practices, nor is there an explicit value stamped on this event, that would give it a specific place in the treasure troves of the Khan. If anything, this is a kind of exotic entertainment sequence.

Interestingly, Dickason focuses on the imagery that accompanies this passage. (Figure 1) In the Livre des merveilles du monde (BnF Fr2810), which is an illustrated manuscript made in France around 1410–1412, containing not only The Travels, but a long list of other texts, there is an image depicting the dance of the young maidens. This book contains 297 folios and 265 miniatures produced by several Parisian workshops 100 years after the original text was written. In this manner, we can hardly claim that the illumination of female dancers from India found in BNF Fr2810, f44r. (Figure 1) is representative of what Marco Polo experienced.

However, the image (Figure 1) does reveal how the European audience that received Polo/Rustichello’s text interpreted the story. The image does not portray half-naked young women with plump breasts, but nuns dressed in the specific robes of the Cistercian order. These sisters are particularly known for how they cultivate silence and solitude, which makes an interesting contrast to the gaiety described by Polo/Rustichello to be part of the girls’ entertainment. Another detail that Dickason notes is that the circular format of the movements shown in the image resembles the French carole, which is known to be a practice found in both “secular” and “sacred” spaces in the European context of dancing (Dickason 2023, pp. 332–33; Dickason 2021).

Interestingly, what Polo/Rustichello’s gaze clearly missed, the French manuscript illustrator was able to capture: the dancing that took place in front of the idol, was not mere entertainment; it also included some elements of worship and ritual. The French art historian Michel Camille states that what can be seen in this illustration (Figure 1) is the enormous gap that exists between the social imaginary of the artist and the text. He points out that, not only are the women dressed as nuns, but the statue, in front of whom they perform their courtly dance, is depicted as an “idol whose only distinguishing mark of evil is her blackness” (Camille 1991, p. 160). On this point I can only beg to differ.

First of all, depicting a black madonna or a black saint, as Heng notes, is not an uncommon feature in the social imaginary of medieval Christians. In the examples of St. Maurice, we find that blackness can symbolise anything from the devil and sinfulness to exemplary beauty and consolation.36 Particularly, the black female figure was also a symbol of pleasurable sexual encounters (Heng 2018, pp. 42–45). Secondly, far from always depicting Black as sinful, Polo/Rustichello’s travels account explicitly states that the local custom in one area of India was to depict God and all the saints as black (while the devil is white) (Polo 2016, p. 263). This makes me question if the artist is not just merely combining two different descriptions, found not so far apart from each other in The Travels in this one illumination.

Furthermore, we also know that, during this same period, another French illuminated manuscript (Figure 2) depicted a very similar round dance with nuns in front of Christ. This image shows that imagining dancing as a worshipful act was not an uncommon feature in the social imaginary of the Europeans, even when the attention of Polo/Rustichello did not make associations in this direction.

The Holy Virgins Greeted by Christ as They Enter the Gates of Paradise, Simon Marmion ca. 1467–70.

“This miniature, depicting the Holy Virgins being greeted by Christ at the gates of paradise, was originally part of a breviary, which is a book containing the Divine Office for recitation on each day of the Roman Catholic calendar. The image would have faced the opening lines of the text for the Common of Virgins. The location and orientation of the image within the book is confirmed by the text on the back of this miniature, which is the end of the Common of Confessors—a section that traditionally precedes the Common of Virgins. Marmion has divided the leaf into three scenes, each of which illustrates part of the text of the Common of the Virgins. Among the figures in all three scenes is the abbess of a religious order, identifiable by her black habit, whose identity and meaning have yet to be unravelled. This book must have been lavishly illustrated, since full-page miniatures in the Common of Saints section, like this one, were rare. The generous use of gold leaf further underscores the expense of the original manuscript, which was begun for Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, in 1467, and finished in 1470 for Charles the Bold, Philip’s son and successor. A surviving document indicates that the manuscript had 624 folios, 95 miniatures, and was illustrated for the ducal court by Simon Marmion and his workshop. This breviary was one of a number of works undertaken by Marmion, one of the most esteemed illuminators and painters of his generation.”

Combining the facts that idol worship is not applied in Polo/Rustichello’s story as a derogative term, blackness is not automatically associated with evil, and that dancing itself—particularly in front of a deity—should not be taken as a sign of devil worship, I argue that probing at this “crack” with attunement combined with discernment opens up the possibility that the illustration used here (Figure 1), reveals more affinity to what was happening in this ritual than previous scholarship has been willing to acknowledge. While Polo/Rustichello’s attention goes to female dancers and a foreign goddess who needs to be encouraged to return to the sexual encounters with her partner, I think that the associations of the artists follow more along the lines of how worship has been portrayed in the traditions they come from. In Coakley’s explorations of the intermingling of erotic and Christian prayer, she points out that sitting in contemplative practices and participating in the willingness of giving oneself to the divine, the power of the erotic is known to arise. This is why chastity and even celibacy have become such strong themes in the Christian monastic traditions (Coakley 2013).37 The dressing of the nuns in fully covered attire, while they worshipfully dance in the illumination is well contrasted with Polo/Rustichello’s depictions of half-naked girls whirling around and lifting their legs while pleasing the gods in the text. This play with contrasts between the monasteries of the East, and the monks of India, who are allowed to marry and even have a multitude of wives (Polo 2016, pp. 84–85), seems to fascinate Polo/Rustichello, precisely because it is such a break with the traditions of sanctity and religious dedication that they were used to in Europe. My reading comes thus in stark contrast not only to previous interpretations of the imagery used here (Figure 1), but also to Dickason portrayal of image and text. I suggest that the illustrators of the Livre des merveilles du monde (BnF Fr2810), are combining a variety of themes from across the tales into one image. In addition, from the point of view of an hermeneutics of charity, the artistry of this illumination (Figure 1) may be read as an attempt to imagine with the other and portray a respectful version of what they sensed was a meaningful act of worship or important ritual.

Now returning once more to the possibility of imagining the unseen of the dancing in the Indian monastery, a question remains: What can we still notice that neither Polo/Rustichello nor the artists of the illumination portray? If I return to the story asking what I can sense through sensing with others, leaning into the kind of attunement that both Aarre and Aava showed me in the communal reading practices, what do I notice?

First of all, there is a specific rhythm to how the service of the girls took place. The food offering they brought to the monastery happened, not only on a monthly, but weekly basis. In practice, I could imagine this being a rare occasion when girls got to enjoy delicate meals in the company of each other as well as eating in a setting where the social obligations of the normal community structures were not in place. Being chosen as a girl that was “offered” to the monastery actually meant that one was guaranteed a proper regular meal, which might have been a luxury for the “ordinary” village girls. Secondly, the performances described in this text would have involved the practitioners exercising extensively and would have left them exhausted. Thus, the idea of the dance being the spiritual food of the deity and the performers getting their share in sustenance is not an unequal bargain. Thirdly, even though Polo/Rustichello primarily describes a dancing that has sexual undertones, the description of the priest says that the singing, dancing, leaping, tumbling, and performing all sorts of diversions were meant to cheer up the god and goddess. Presumably, these kinds of actions were also delightful to the practitioners, bringing life force to their limbs and bodies, activating their voice and self expression.

Speaking against the idea that the dancing was mere entertainment, I do not mean that delightful play and the activities of a performance that are joyful would in some way be less spiritual. Instead, I mean that, in a Western conceptual framework of religious activities, the fact that play and joy can also be practices of a mischievous nature is often missed. The delights brought to the goddess by the dancers, may have been entertaining, in the sense that they divert attention from one thing into another. However, they may have been more profoundly transformative, as when laughter or the bubbling up of a deeper Joy releases our bodies through the act of comic or unpredictable turns of events. The tension that is built up, suspended, and then let go of through a profound belly laugh is not far removed from the state of arousal in an orgasm. Where Polo/Rustichello saw displays of sexuality, the more erotically attentive eye may have seen a holy state of metamorphosis. In the ecstatic Christian traditions of, for example, Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching on prayer, Coakley speaks about an intermingling of human and God in a “yielding to the unknown in God in a desire without end” (Coakley 2013, p. 278). Such loss of control brings with it both internal and external transformation, which is also called liturgical ecstasis with even social and political potential (Lloyd 2011). However, I am quite unwilling to pose any Christian overtones or comparative framework to this Indian tradition.

Instead, I turn to Eva Mann for her envisionment of how matriarchal arts could help us imagine this. She describes art as something that “welds together feeling, thinking, and doing in the form of the concrete mythological image and, in this totality, releases true ecstasy in the participants. The true ecstasy unites the intellect, emotions, and bodily action in a climax where no one power is limited by another” (Man 2016, p. 21). Could we imagine the dancing of the young girls in the monastery as an enactment that delighted not only the god and goddess, but also the monks and other people present in the room? Can we imagine a dancing that delights the eyes of the observer, while also giving pleasure to the girls without making them into mere objects?

Where the linear patriarchal structures see communication that moves between author-text-reader, and previous scholars have interpreted these sections of Polo/Rustichello as showing specific underlying patterns of dominance, coloniality, or hegemonic structures in the depictions, could we imagine this differently? Eva Man envisions a matriarchal mythological understanding of performances where “people participate collectively to create the external expression, so all are simultaneously authors, text, and spectators” (Man 2016, p. 21). Along those lines of thinking, could we imagine the erotic in the movements and gestures of the dancers as a continuous cycle of life force energy that bursts out in the world. Instead of playing with familiar themes in Western theology—spirit/matter, body/soul, feminine/masculine, ascetic formation/community worship—as terms that open up our understanding to what is happening in this performance, could we instead play with a non-dual framework? We as co-creators of the action are activated and respond to what we see and sense. Envisioning and sensing the dance as a process of rebirths that moves, not only in the sphere of human interactions, rectifying gains and losses, activating anger or sadness and joy, but also as moving heavens and earth, affecting ghosts and spirits, all of which re-creates the world we are part of. Could this kind of mythological and poetical process be what made the gods find favour in the performance of the dancers, and thus became the key that bestowed blessings and favours back onto the community? In this, we would be at least practicing what it might be to sense with creation and sense with the senses of the other, while also riding the wave of erotic life force pulsing in the world.

8. Conclusions

This article starts with acknowledging that, even when the intention of the researcher is to perform a critical scrutiny of historical materials that touch upon topics of racism, sexism, and coloniality, such good intentions can still miss the mark. The depth to which Western theological and university education has been formed by the desire to master certain concepts and practice a self-sufficient control of master narratives hinders the scholar from imagining the world anew. Therefore, I envisioned a communal reading practice where in a mutual space of curiosity and exploration, we would listen carefully to the readings and stories of each other. In our community, we have further experimented with not only listening and reading texts together, but also practicing different embodied ways of approaching the texts. In being open to feelings and sensations that arose, either when listening to the text, like the auto-ethnographic dialogue with Aamu and Aarre brought forth, or while deepening the connection to the story through enacting parts of what is portrayed in the text, the methodology has aimed at developing tools for an hermeneutics of charity. An hermeneutics of charity does not seek to do away with critical readings of suspicion. Instead, the aim is to create a polysemous reading where our critical analysis has an added layer of describing how communities of scholars can expand their capacities of sensing, believing, and emoting with the world and the textual materials they are approaching.

In addition to this, I bring forth the deeply held distorted desire of academia to fear the erotic dimensions of learning and communal practices of ecstasy that are an integral part of theological formation. With the help of the theoretical frames described by Coakley, Jennings, and Lorde, I present how many theological inquiries into historical accounts should more seriously consider how an attunement to and with the world can be envisioned and described in the sources. Based on this, I embark on a journey of re-reading the stories told by Marco Polo describing dance.

First, I present the concept of a mercantile gaze found in the way The Travels, written by Polo/Rustichello, tends to describe everything encountered as desirable goods that can be traded and tallied for the benefit of the empire of the Great Khan. Not only material goods, but also the cultural customs of people and religious practices of communities can be either traded as services or sold as exotic encounters that are available for those that set out on the adventure of exploring the world. In the gaze of Polo/Rustichello, dance seems to land in the margins of the texts and portrayed as sometimes so irrelevant in a ceremony or feast that it is not even worth writing about. Looking at local customs of dance and musical performance with a mercantile gaze places their importance mainly as a source of entertainment or as a gesture towards abundance in spectacles where the Mongols were the centre piece of attention. Where the mercantile gaze is able to see mainly the material importance of pilgrimage routes and exchanges of relics at religious ceremonies, I contrast this with a liturgical gaze, that sees the rhythms of movement and interaction, where both spiritual and emotional patterns of exchange are woven together. In a liturgical gaze, dance can be a way of bringing people together and creating belonging and community.

A second aspect of Polo/Rustichello’s gaze is his fascination with sexual encounters and allure with female availability to satisfy the erotic fantasies of men. Dance is often portrayed by Polo/Rustichello as a part of the delights of the East. When women become part of the services and goods that are not only freely available, but that can be exchanged as goods on the trade route, in addition to a form of entertainment, dance also functions as a distraction and/or foreplay to what is the male “right” to satisfy all his needs as he pleases. In contrast to some of the previous scholarly readings of Polo/Rustichello’s text, I do not identify them as primarily proselytising, moralising or colonialising the encountered “Others” in relation to superior Christian and European ways of life. Instead, I see the text either as an implicit critical comment to some of the Christian narratives of holiness, or a very explicit rendering of the Mongol excellence in leadership and morality as exceptionally desirable. It is in relationship to The Khan’s moral superiority or in describing how the Mongol empire was able to conquer lands and religiously important regions for trade that local customs are condemned or altered into new forms in the text. I also argue that this mercantile gaze gives away to a prosperity gospel where association to exotic details—like the people in Zanzibar and dancers in India—are valued only as sexual curiosities that diversify the gains of Mongol exceptionalism, while the erotic power of bodies is diminished. I suggest that stripping the body and dancing of its erotic power, severs the wildness of being a relational creature in connection to the divine. Such wounding of our intimacies carries both political and social consequences.

In the last example of dance found in Polo/Rustichello’s text, I aim to move completely away from distorted gazes towards a reading where neither mercantile nor sexualising narratives define the dances. I also play with a possibility of describing the dance of the young girls in front of their deities in a way where euro-patriarchal forms of dualist thinking between spiritual and material or body and soul are not even negated. In the envisioned communal and religious encounter, dance is restored as a mythological enactment that creates intimacy and gives the pleasures and eruptive power of the erotic its rightful place in the narrative. In this way, dance becomes a practice with theological relevance as it attunes us with the world and helps us engage in sensing with the sensing of others, both seen and unseen aspects of living in the life-force of creation.