Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Each dance and its music belong to a time and place. It can be borrowed
elsewhere, or later in time, but it will never be in its moment again.
When these little cultural blooms are past, they become ethnic or nostalgic,
but never quite fully present—manifesting the web of their original connections
and meanings—again
— Gary Snyder
There are many people who have helped me in one way or another over the years. I
cannot mention them all here, but I would like to thank a few people who made
particularly lasting impressions on me at each stage of the journey.
At UC Davis, where I did my undergraduate degree, two of my teachers were
particularly influential: my undergraduate advisor, Naomi Janowitz, introduced me to the
History of Religions, instilled in me the critical eye that is so often missing from work in
the humanities, sent me to Cairo for a year to cure me of my parochialism and tried to get
me to think twice about going to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago; Aram
Yengoyan let me into the graduate courses that he taught when I was eighteen years old
and had no right to be there, and my decision to go to graduate school was largely a
product of the impression that those classes left on me. Kendall House, a graduate student
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