In a famous lecture delivered 60 years ago, the English scientist and writer C.P. Snow claimed that intellectual specialization has created “two cultures” – the scientific and the artistic. Snow found that scientists and artists could no longer communicate with one another because those in one discipline lacked the knowledge possessed by those in the other. He worried that this mutual incomprehension prevented solutions to social problems.
His observations continue to stimulate heated debate, perhaps for a good reason.
According to John O. McGinnis, the divide that Snow described is much worse today due to the increased specialization of knowledge, the pace of technical change, and the disintegration of the humanistic tradition.
This cultural divide has implications for those of us engaged in the study of human movement, for there is a difference between the knowledge possessed by movement scientists and the body knowledge possessed by movement artists. And this makes it difficult to discuss human movement across disciplinary boundaries.
In the following series of blogs, I will use Rudolf Laban as an exemplar of someone whose career bridged the arts and sciences. Further, I will flag a few aspects of Laban theory that have potential connections to scientific ideas and provide possible channels for disciplinary exchange across the cultural divide.