Reference: Ríos Oyola, Sandra, and Thania Acarón Ríos. ‘Peacebuilding and Dance in Afro- Colombian Funerary Ritual’. In The Arts of Peacebuilding, edited by Jolyon Mitchell, Gisselle Vincett, Theodora Hawksley, and Hal Culbertson, 395–413. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030178741#aboutBook. Peacebuilding and Dance in Afro-Colombian Funerary Ritual Sandra M. Rios Oyola and Thania Acarón Ríos Introduction Dance as an art form has an unwavering focus on and with the body. Dance draws upon social meaning; constituting its own movement vocabulary, which each sociocultural context decodes in a multiplicity of ways. Dance represents a conglomeration of movements functionalised to express the interrelation between body, space, place, culture and history. 1 Dance may include the presence and influence of sounds, songs, silence, words or images, yet it is this primary focus on the body’s expression that distinguishes the processes of dance from those of other art genres and provides a useful vector for the understanding of nonverbal relational aspects in peacebuilding. Scholars within the fields of anthropology, dance ethnography and sociology of dance emphasise the ways in which the various activities and practices of dance, including choreography, performance, improvisation and tradition, serve to both reflect societies, and to produce them. 2 Dance is therefore both constructive and constructing, a feature Taylor notes in drawing attention to the tension between conceptualisations of arts performances as artifice, and as providing a version of truth to a society. 3 This tension can allow the performing arts to function as subversive communication enabling artists, as community members, to convey messages of transformation or advocacy,