Theory for Ethnomusicology

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, Second Edition, is a foundational

work for courses in ethnomusicological theory. This book examines key intellectual movements
and topic areas in social and cultural theory, and explores the way they have been taken up in
­ethnomusicological research. New co-editor Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone investigate
the discipline’s past, present, and future, reflecting on contemporary concerns while cataloging
significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2008.
A dozen contributors approach a broad range of theoretical topics alive in ethnomusicology. Each
chapter examines ethnographic and historical works from within ethnomusicology, ­showcasing
the unique contributions scholars in the field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs, while
illuminating the field’s relevance and pointing the way toward new horizons of research.

New to This Edition:

• Every chapter in the book is completely new, with richer and more comprehensive discussions.
• New chapters have been added on gender and sexuality, sound and voice studies, perfor-
mance and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation.
• New text boxes and notes make connections among the chapters, emphasizing points of
contact and conflict among intellectual movements.

Contributors:
Jayson Beaster-Jones
Harris M. Berger
Esther Clinton
J. Martin Daughtry
Maureen Mahon
Peter Manuel
Katherine Meizel
Matthew Rahaim
Ruth M. Stone
Jane C. Sugarman
Jeremy Wallach
Ellen Waterman

Harris M. Berger is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, Director of the R

­ esearch
Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place, and Professor of Music and Folklore at
­Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Ruth M. Stone is the Laura Boulton Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology in the ­Department of
Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.
Theory for Ethnomusicology
Histories, Conversations, Insights

Edited by
Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

Second Edition
Second edition published 2019
by Routledge
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First edition published by Pearson Education, Inc. 2008
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Contents

List of Text Boxes and Tables vii

Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1
H arris M . B erg er and Ruth M . S t o ne

1 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Ethnomusicology:

From Abstract Structure to Situated Practice 26
J ays o n B easter- J o nes

2 Marxist Approaches to Music, Political Economy, and the Culture

Industries: Ethnomusicological Perspectives 51
P eter M anuel

3 Theories of Gender and Sexuality: From the Village to the

Anthropocene 71
J ane C . S u g arman

4 Constructing Race and Engaging Power through Music:

Ethnomusicology and Critical Approaches to Race 99
M aureen M ah o n

5 Theories of the Post-colonial and Globalization: Ethnomusicologists

Grapple with Power, History, Media, and Mobility 114
J eremy Wallach and E sther C lint o n

6 Performance Studies and Critical Improvisation Studies in

Ethnomusicology: Understanding Music and Culture through
Situated Practice 141
E llen Waterman

7 Decentering Music: Sound Studies and Voice Studies in

Ethnomusicology 176
K atherine M ei z el and J . M artin Dau g htry
vi Contents
8 Phenomenology and Phenomenological Ethnomusicology:
Approaches to the Lived Experience of Music 204
H arris M . B erg er

9 Theories of Participation 219

M atthew R ahaim

Notes on Contributors 233

Index 237
Text Boxes and Tables

Text Boxes
1.1 Embodiment and Practice across the Disciplines 30
1.2 Linguistics and Semiotics in the Context of Analytic Philosophy 32
2.1 Practice Theory 54
2.2 Relationships among Differing Traditions of Critical Research 62
6.1 Performance Studies in Folklore 146

Tables
1.1 Jakobson’s Model of Language Functions 31
1.2 Peirce’s Three Main Sign Types 34
Preface

Writing with what was likely a mix of sincere wonder and dry irony, Gertrude Stein
famously stated, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than
diagramming sentences” ([1935] 2004: 124). The same can be said of social and cultural
theory. Readers come to a work of ethnomusicology for a range of reasons—to learn
more about a music they love, to discover a new social world, to satisfy the demands of a
manuscript reviewer, or to earn a grade in a class. But among the items on that list, the
search for broadly applicable insights into social and cultural phenomena must surely be
ranked high. That quest can be a powerful thing. Seductive and alluring, works of theory
can help us to understand the complexities of social life and inspire profound commit-
ments and actions.
We love social and cultural theory, and we evoke Stein’s mix of wonder and irony at the
outset of this book because we are aware that not all readers come to this topic with keen
anticipation and unbridled delight. Many are drawn to our field because of a fascination
with particular musical and social phenomena. They want to learn more about the stirring
melodies of Umm Kulthūm or Billie Holiday, the powerful textures of the gamelan in Java
or California, the social relationships that emerge in the hollow square of a Sacred Harp
singing event or the mosh pit of a heavy metal show, or the flow of beats around the world
in electronic dance music or jazz. For a person whose primary goal is to know this music
or these people, social and cultural theory can sometimes feel like an obstacle that stands
between oneself and the musical and social experiences one cares about. At their worst,
discussions of theory—in a book or article, the question-and-answer portion of a confer-
ence panel, or a conversation in a seminar or coffee shop—can devolve into exercises in
empty erudition and self-aggrandizement. But it is rarely wise to treat worst case scenarios
as exemplars. As one facet of research in the humanities and social sciences, theory offers a
powerful gift—the capacity to understand our fieldsites more deeply, to gain broad insights
into social life, and to see and act in the world in new ways.
Before the development of the social sciences in the Western academy, what today is called
“theory” was simply referred to as social philosophy, political philosophy, or aesthetics. With
the birth of sociology and anthropology as academic disciplines in the nineteenth century,
a range of thinkers began to lay down what were understood as the theoretical foundations
upon which empirical social research was to be based. Today, sociology has a sub-field that
is known simply as “social theory,” anthropology has long-standing theoretical traditions,
and works of social and cultural theory in many disciplines are clearly rooted in philosophy
and the first social sciences. While these fields have retained their relevance in contemporary
intellectual life, the scope of theory today is far broader than this. The twentieth century
saw the emergence of a wide range of new academic disciplines—ethnomusicology among
them—that drew on or critiqued older theoretical traditions and developed new insights
of their own. And the academy is not the only source of theory. Activists, revolutionaries,
 Preface  ix
artists, journalists, culture brokers, lawyers, and public intellectuals both within and beyond
the academy have developed key theoretical insights. It is this topic—beguiling and complex,
difficult but endlessly rewarding—that we explore in these pages.

How to Use This Book

In many ways, this is exactly the book that we wished we had as graduate students. For both
beginning and advanced students, theory is a topic that can produce great amounts of anx-
iety. The sheer number of writings in contemporary social thought can be overwhelming,
and the twisted, intersecting paths of intellectual history can be bewildering. In language
that is as accessible as it is sophisticated, the contributors to this book discuss a broad range of
the theoretical work alive in contemporary ethnomusicology and provide the reader with an
overview of key segments of today’s discipline. Each chapter identifies an important theoret-
ical movement (e.g. Marxism or phenomenology) or a topic area that has developed its own
body of theory (e.g. gender and sexuality), tells the story of its intellectual and social history,
synthesizes its key insights, and shows how ideas from that literature have been used in eth-
nomusicology. Many chapters provide extended examples from the author’s own research.
Working their way through a given chapter, students will be able to move from the shifting
landscape of theory anxiety to firm ground, confident that they have gotten the lay of the
land, know how to approach the literature on this subject, and understand how this body of
ideas can be made useful in their research. But this book is not just for students. Each chap-
ter examines theoretical and empirical works from within ethnomusicology and shows the
unique contributions that scholars in our field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs.
Synthesizing ethnomusicological contributions, the chapters highlight the broad relevance
of our field and point the way toward new horizons of research. In so doing, the book will,
we hope, be of interest to scholars moving into new research areas and to anyone seeking a
synthetic vision of key segments of our discipline and where its conversations are heading.
The book is organized as a coherent whole and can be read profitably from cover to
cover. In broad strokes, the first chapters cover theoretical orientations with the longest
histories, a set of middle chapters are concerned with the scholarship of social critique, and
the later chapters focus on intellectual movements that have emerged more recently. How-
ever, each chapter can also be treated as a stand-alone essay, and readers may work their way
through the book in a nonlinear fashion, using the textboxes and the forward and backward
references to follow themes that speak to their interests. Setting the book’s chapters into
perspective, the Introduction discusses the nature of social and culture theory, explores
the relationship between theoretical work and other kinds of projects that ethnomusicolo-
gists pursue, and offers ideas about the most effective ways to approach intellectual history.
Whatever order one reads the chapters, the Introduction is the natural starting point.
At the outset, we want to make clear what this book does not do. This book’s topic is a
portion of the traditions of social and cultural theory that are important to the discipline
of ethnomusicology in English-speaking North America today. Given the interdisciplinary
nature of our field and the transdisciplinary nature of theory, we have had to be selective
in choosing our subjects, and we make no claim that this book presents a comprehensive
discussion of contemporary theory or a complete review of theory within ethnomusicology
itself. Balancing depth and breadth always involves judgment calls, and we have chosen to
explore works and ideas that resonate most strongly across the chapters and across our dis-
cipline. Further, we would emphasize that the subject of research methods is not a focus of
this book. While theory and method are closely related, methodology is a large and com-
plex topic in its own right. Discussing both in a single volume, we felt, would have made
this book unwieldy. In the Introduction, we examine the relationship between theory and
x Preface
method, and brief discussions of the implications of theory for methodological issues appear
in some chapters. However, the book does not pretend to offer a comprehensive discussion
of this subject. Likewise, while a good part of the book concerns itself with the intellectual
history of particular bodies of theory or topic areas, it does not pretend to be a history of
the discipline of ethnomusicology.

New to This Edition

While this book examines many of the subjects discussed in the first edition, it is an entirely
new work. Where the first edition was a single-authored monograph, this second edition
contains chapters by twelve scholars, each a specialist with a deep knowledge in their area.
Further, the book has been reorganized to better reflect the concerns of the contemporary
discipline. We have deleted chapters on subjects that were only of historical interest or
could not be covered adequately in the space allotted, created new chapters on subjects that
were not discussed in the first edition, and devoted full chapters to subjects that were treated
only with a section or subsection of the original edition.

• Every chapter in the book has been greatly expanded, providing richer and more com-
prehensive discussions. All of the contributors have worked to ensure that the chapters
place their subjects in wider social and political contexts, emphasize the role that eth-
nomusicologists have played in interdisciplinary conversations, and highlight emerging
questions and concerns.
• New to this edition are full chapters on gender and sexuality, sound studies and
voice studies, performance studies and critical improvisation studies, and theories of
participation.
• Structuralism, which was given an entire chapter in the first edition, is now discussed
in a section of the chapter on linguistic and semiotic approaches. This allows readers to
more effectively place this subject in its intellectual context. The chapters on cultural
evolutionism in comparative musicology and structural-functionalism in anthropology
have been eliminated, as these are only of historical interest and neither is tenable in
the contemporary discipline. In their stead, discussions of ethnomusicology’s colonial
legacy—and the project of decolonizing the discipline—are threaded throughout the
book.
• The book’s first edition had a short chapter on historical approaches and treated this
subject as a specialized topic. Since the first edition was published, historical work has
become common in every part of our discipline. Rather than devote a single chapter to
this topic, the theme of history and references to works of historical ethnomusicology
are woven throughout the entire book.
• New text boxes and endnotes make connections between the chapters, emphasizing
wider intellectual trends, as well as points of contact and conflict among theoretical
movements. New backward and forward references likewise draw attention to inter-
disciplinary dialog and debate.

***

Looking back across the development of this project, we have come to believe that the most
provocative theoretical perspectives emerge in the conversations that occur at ­meeting places:
between ethnomusicologists and their research participants, between our ­preconceived ­notions
and the phenomena we uncover in the field or archive, between our research and our every-
day lives, between our research and our teaching, and between our research and our public
 Preface  xi
programs, our activism, and other forms of participation in the ­public sphere. Our project in
this book has been to try to keep all of this in view. ­Interpreting Charles Seeger’s ideas about
musicology and music research ([1970] 1977), Anthony Seeger described ethnomusicology as
a kind of meeting place, with paths to new research and new insights radiating in and out in
every direction (1987: 493–494). This book seeks to map these paths and suggest, at least in
part, where they might be leading.
Harris M. Berger
St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
Ruth M. Stone
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
August 2018

Works Cited
Seeger, Anthony. 1987. “Do We Need to Remodel Ethnomusicology?” Ethnomusicology 31 (3): 491–495.
Seeger, Charles. (1970) 1977. “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology.” In Studies in Musicology,
1935–1975, 102–138. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stein, Gertrude. (1935) 2004. “Poetry and Grammar.” In Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and
Lectures, 1911–1945, edited by Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen.
Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the contributors to this book, who convened in the
­summer of 2017 at the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP)
at Memorial University of Newfoundland for a meeting that substantially enhanced the
depth and coherence of the project. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada
­Research Chairs Program, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Memorial’s School
of Music for their support of that meeting. Special thanks go to Dr. Meghan Forsyth, pro-
ject coordinator and researcher at MMaP, and Spencer Crewe, MMaP’s digital audio studio
coordinator, for their work on the meeting. We would like to express our appreciation to
Lynne Stillings for her recommendations for references to the literature on the ethnomu-
sicology of childhood. Thanks also go to Jane C. Sugarman for introducing us to Stillings
and for suggesting the felicitous phrase “Looking Ahead,” which was adopted by several
contributors as the title for the concluding section of their chapters. We also acknowledge
the assistance of Alison Martin of Indiana University and Monique McGrath of Memorial
University of Newfoundland, who aided us in our work.
I (Berger) would like to thank Beverley Diamond, Meghan Forsyth, Giovanna P. Del
Negro, Judith Hamera, and Kati Szego for their insights into social and cultural theory,
and their generous conversations about this project throughout its development. I also ex-
press my appreciation to Robert Carley for suggesting sources and offering insights on
the ­relationship between Marxism other traditions of critical research, and to Christopher
Menzel for sharing perspectives and sources in analytic philosophy. Most of all, I would like
to thank Ruth Stone, who initiated this project, for her wisdom and kindness, both in the
time that we developed this book and in our many years of working together.
I (Stone) would like to thank all of my students and colleagues over the years, who have
stimulated conversations about theory and its importance to the field of ethnomusicology.
I am particularly indebted to Harris M. Berger for his willingness to host the meeting for
contributors to this volume and for his deep and sustained dedication to the project.
Introduction
Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

The Work of Theory

The earliest roots of ethnomusicology can be found in the late nineteenth century, when a
group of scholars in Germany from a range of disciplines and known as the Berlin School
collaborated to study the music of the world. Throughout the first half of the twentieth
century, an increasing number of anthropologists and musicologists in Europe and North
American brought the methodologies of their discipline to bear on this topic. In 1955, their
diverse efforts coalesced into the contemporary field of ethnomusicology with the establish-
ment of the Society for Ethnomusicology. At that time, the division between musicologists,
who sought to understand the music structures that they found in non-Western cultures,
and anthropologists, who wanted to understand the place of music in the social life of their
fieldsites, formed the central dynamic of the field. While a minority of scholars in today’s
discipline may still feel uncomfortable with ethnomusicological studies that do not present
musical transcriptions or engage in traditional music analysis, the division between musi-
cological and anthropological ethnomusicology has receded from prominence in our field.
In its place is a rich and varied intellectual landscape where scholars pursue an enormously
wide range of projects, and it is this diversity that makes the role of theory in contemporary
ethnomusicology both so difficult and so tantalizing.
No single organizing scheme seems perfect in making sense of the work done in ethno-
musicology in English-speaking North America today. For example, one way of coming
to grips with the research done in the field would be through the familiar rubric of text
and context. Thinking in this way, one might imagine a spectrum that ranges from work
on ­music sound in auditory cognition (e.g. Fales 2002) and contemporary studies of music
analysis in an ethnomusicological context (Tenzer and Roeder 2011), through studies of
face-to-face interaction in the performance event that explore phenomena like music and
gesture (Rahaim 2012) or music and trance (Friedson 2009), to research that explores macro-
social phenomena like the music industries (Beaster-Jones 2016) or other institutional
contexts for music making (Wade 2014). Alternatively, one might organize the field by
­contrasting ethnographic studies of particular locales in the present with, on the one hand,
multi-sited ethnographies (Rapport 2014) and, on the other, works of historical ethnomu-
sicology that explore the ways music and culture change over time (Carr 2014). Activist
scholars may contrast work that doesn’t explicitly address politics with critical studies of
race/ethnicity (e.g. Mahon 2004), gender and sexuality (Spiller 2010), class (Berger 1999;
Murphy 2014), the predicaments of the colonial or post-colonial world (Ochoa Gautier
2014), or any of their complex intersections. Or one may contrast the ethnomusicology of
music and culture with that work that seeks to move beyond the notion of music altogether
and take as its object of study a more encompassing topic, such as sound (Wong 2004;
Daughtry 2015; see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).
2  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
While there can be no single rubric for definitively organizing the research in ethno-
musicology, one feature common to every study is a theoretical orientation—a set of fun-
damental ideas about the phenomena that one finds in the world, the questions one should
be asking about them, and the means and ends of that inquiry. Although some ethnomu-
sicologists may not emphasize the theoretical foundations of their research or frame their
contributions in explicitly theoretical terms, all work in the ethnomusicology (or any of the
social sciences and humanities) rely on theory. All writing and research in ethnomusicol-
ogy entail assumptions about the nature of music and social life. Poorly grounded research
fails to examine those assumptions, and in taking those assumptions for granted confuses
the researcher’s personal experience with universal truth. Well-grounded research rests on
assumptions as well, but the researcher examines her assumptions richly, seeking to trans-
form them from an incoherent and idiosyncratic mass of contradictions and truisms into a
relatively coherent whole that is open to revision by new information and can lead to new
insights and new topics for inquiry.
The work of theory is not isolated and personal contemplation, though it certainly in-
volves careful thinking and even the stray long, dark night of the soul. Rather, theoretical
work is a fundamentally social endeavor. In it, we bring our life experiences into con-
versation with the ideas from theoretical and empirical literatures, academic colleagues,
research participants, and others to contribute to all manner of social projects. Those
­conversations—their ideas and insights, their pitfalls and opportunities, their arguments
and evidence—are the subject of this book. Each chapter presents an overview of a theo-
retical tradition or topic area that is important for contemporary ethnomusicology. While
the linkages among these various traditions and topic areas are many, we could no more
offer a single narrative of the history of social and cultural theory in ethnomusicology than
we could present a master ­organizing scheme for the kinds of work that go on in the field
today. Our starting place must therefore be this common ground, the work of theory itself,
in ethnomusicology today.

Description, Interpretation and Analysis, and Theory

To get a clearer sense of what theory is, we need to put it into the context of other types of
work that ethnomusicologists do. Broadly speaking, three kinds of activities go on in eth-
nomusicological studies—description, interpretation and analysis, and theory. Description
provides an account of particular states of affairs. Interpretive and analytic work takes those
descriptions and tries to make sense of the social worlds from which they come. Theory
seeks broadly applicable insights into social phenomena. Understanding the interplay be-
tween these kinds of work is the first step toward putting theory into perspective.
In any given book or article, a scholar may move back and forth among these three lev-
els. For example, several chapters of my (Berger’s) first book discuss music making in the
heavy metal, jazz, and commercial hard rock scenes of Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. In
those chapters, I present descriptions of the clothing people wore on particular nights, the
layout and design of the venues, and the conduct of the audience and performers. Inter-
spersed with these descriptions are interpretations of meaning. At heavy metal shows, for
example, audience members in the mosh pit (an informally demarcated area in front of the
stage) would alternate between bumping into each while grinning sheepishly and aggres-
sively body-checking each other without actually trying to cause serious physical harm.
While the previous sentence is primarily descriptive—providing an account of the practices
that occurred in the mosh pit—it has interpretive overtones: saying that their grins were
sheepish implies something about the meaning of their facial expression, and saying that
the people in the pit weren’t trying to cause serious physical harm offers an interpretation
 Introduction  3
of the participant’s intent. Moving from description with interpretive overtones to more
explicitly interpretive passages, I wrote about the significance that stylized performances
of aggression have in the world of metal and why metalheads would want to participate in
performances that take rage and aggression as their theme.
Contemporary ethnomusicologists engage a wide variety of scholarly tasks, but the inter-
pretation of music and cultures is the most common kind of work that scholars in our field
today pursue. This kind of work has a long history in both ethnomusicology and anthro-
pology, but one of its most sophisticated advocates was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.1
Geertz famously described the work of ethnography as “thick description” (1973)—the
interpretation of the dense, multi-layered, culturally specific meanings that play out in both
everyday life and in heightened spheres performance, like ritual or festival.2 Pursuing in-
terpretive work, the ethnomusicologist places musical practices and musical works in larger
cultural contexts, “reads” the meaning of those practices, and seeks to understand local
experiences of music. It is important to emphasize that not all of the scholarship that focuses
on particular social groups or situations seeks to interpret local perspectives. Rather, studies
of specific social situations or groups may analyze musical forms, cultural dynamics, pat-
terns of practice, discursive tropes, or other social phenomena with little or no reference to
the viewpoint of the people who participate in them. And, of course, these two approaches
to specific social situations (the interpretive and the analytic) may be married together in a
wide variety of ways.
Descriptive work was most common in ethnomusicology’s pre-history and early years.
At that time, many scholars published compendia of songs or wrote ethnographies that
did little more than describe the practices of particular rituals or performances. Work that
is largely descriptive can be valuable in certain contexts, for example, in documenting or
drawing wider cultural attention to a tradition that had previously been ignored, and in-
terpretive work usual entails a descriptive component. Most contemporary ethnomusicol-
ogists, however, consider purely descriptive work to be of limited use—a legacy of a time
when social scientists took an impoverished vision of the natural sciences as their model,
saw musical works or songtexts as isolable units of analysis, and published them with the
hope that a theorist would come along later and deduce theories from these data. A majority
of books and articles in contemporary ethnomusicology have at least some interpretive or
analytic components, and most studies make interpretive or analytic work their focal point,
seeking evocative and even novelistic accounts of music and culture that capture the texture
of social life in a community or analyzing the forms of cultural and musical phenomena that
take place in a particular social world.
So far, we have discussed scholarly work that focuses on particular groups or locales,
but it is important to see that all research (descriptive, as well as interpretive and analytic)
entails theoretical assumptions. On a basic level, the evidentiary foundation of any descrip-
tive claim can always be questioned and the assumptions built into such claims are always
open to scrutiny. Consider the seemingly unproblematic descriptive claim that a certain
tunebook was initially published in 1975 or that a particular person sang a given song at a
specific performance. Regarding the first example, one may discover a copy of a tunebook
listing 1972 as the year of publication or learn that a Xeroxed manuscript of the tunes was
circulated so widely a few years before that we should question what “publication” means
in this community. Considering the second example, some might view the text that the
singer voiced as a prayer, which in the culture in question is not considered a kind of music
at all and therefore not something that was “sung.” Likewise, all manner of theoretical and
cultural perspectives might question the ideas of personhood, agency, and causality implicit
in the seemingly simple claim that this singer sang this song. If the song was sung during a
play, a recital, or a trance ritual, was it Sarah who sang the song or her character, her stage
4  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
persona, or the spirit who possessed her? Saying that Sarah sang the song implies that she is
the cause of it being sounded at this place and time, but was the cause of the performance
her personal will, neurochemical processes in her brain, the dictates of tradition, the un-
folding of discourse, or the playing out of larger social or political forces? In both purely
descriptive works and the descriptive passages of interpretive and analytic ethnographies,
the question of significance is always at issue, and this makes a-interpretive or a-theoretical
description impossible. The world presents us with an endless array of cultural facts, and
the decision to choose to describe this state of affairs rather than some other one, to give
more attention to these performers or those, to draw the boundaries of this community
here rather than there, to characterize a performance or genre as art or ritual, traditional or
innovative (or even as music at all)—to do any of these things entails interpretive, analytic,
and ultimately theoretical dimensions.
If description is always at least implicitly interpretive, it is equally true that interpretive
and analytic work is linked to the project of description, in the sense that, in interpreting
or analyzing culture, most ethnomusicologists seek to understand the set of meanings that
are alive for their research participants or describe the social phenomena that play out in
their world. That this song has a kind of quiet rage (and why these people participate in a
practice that prizes that affect), that this genre is a proud badge of our ethnic identity, that
these songs give women a new voice in our culture—these are the forms of meaning and
significance that interpretive and analytic ethnography most frequently seeks. If even the
blandest descriptive statement entails theoretical assumptions, the theoretical implications
of interpretation and analytic work are even more significant, and interpretation and analy-
sis can operate at many levels. Scholars may interpret the meaning or significance of a par-
ticular musical performance, work, genre, or tradition, and they may explore the meaning
that their study object has for a particular person, for a small community, or for differing
groups within a larger culture. Because cultural meanings are thick, in Geertz’s sense of
the term, the meanings that we find in culture cannot simply be equated with intention.
The most important issues in our lives are rarely one-dimensional, and the lives of music
makers and music listeners are more often about exploring and discovering the meanings
to be found in key musical works and performances, rather than simply bestowing signif-
icance upon them.3 An equally broad range of inquiry happens in analytic work. Scholars
may analyze the dynamics of face-to-face interaction in a performance event, the patterns
of social conduct in a city or region, or the widest currents of globalization or social change
on the scale of historical time.
With these points, we begin to move toward the domain of theory—the search for
broadly applicable insights into social and cultural phenomena. The range of possible topics
here is as expansive as social life itself. It includes, for example, both broadly synoptic ques-
tions about the nature of music and its role in the social world, as well as sharper questions
that include the dynamics of musical meaning making or music perception, the role of mu-
sic in the construction of racial or gender identities, and the place of music or sound under
conditions of colonialism or neo-liberal capitalism. Theoretical writing can be measured,
systematic, and intended as a complete and definitive statement, or it can be polemical, pro-
vocative, or provisional. What defines it is a search for powerful and broad ranging insights.
Above, we argued that all historical or ethnographic case studies are informed by theory.
Here, we wish to emphasize that many of the richest case studies use the data from the
archive or the field to develop new theoretical understandings. In this context, the descrip-
tion of practices by musicians and listeners provides the raw material for interpretation and
analysis, and the interpretations and analyses themselves become the raw material out of
which larger theoretical claims are made. Other works present information from two or
more social groups and explore their relationships to make theoretical claims. For example,
 Introduction  5
one of the main topics of my (Berger’s) first book is the social organization of attention
(1999). In that study, I worked with musicians from four different music scenes to under-
stand how each one focused attention on the various elements of their experience (their
bodies, music sound, thoughts, and the words or actions of other people). I then compared
those readings to show how the musician’s typical practices of organizing attention were
unique to each scene and shaped by larger social forces. Of course, not all works in the
discipline are case studies. Others, like Alan Merriam’s field defining Anthropology of Music
(1964) or classic writings by Charles Seeger (1977), John Blacking (1973), or Bruno Nettl
([1983] 2015), operate mostly in the domain of theory. Such works may draw material from
focused case studies, but they spend the bulk of their effort defining concepts, making ar-
guments, identifying social dynamics, and making general claims.
To go deeper into the topic of theory, we need to introduce a second set of distinctions
that are often drawn in the contemporary academy—theoretical works that stand aloof from
social criticism, theoretical works of critique, and theoretical works of activist scholarship,
which seek to contribute directly to social change.4 The first kind of theoretical work is de-
scriptive in a relatively straightforward way. Such scholarship seeks generally applicable in-
sights about music and social life. In this sense, theory tries to describe the social world, not
its particulars but its patterns, its structures, and its dynamics. Theoretical works of critique
also try to describe the dynamics of social life, but they have a second project as well—to
identify, highlight, and criticize power relations.5 Such work is not merely descriptive, it’s
normative and evaluative. For much of the twentieth century, ethnomusicology was dom-
inated by the first kind of theory; most scholars during this period sought to be objective
social scientists or humanists who dispassionately described music and culture, and they
shunned politicized work as inherently biased.6 In contrast, a group of ethnomusicologists
who came of age in the 1990s were informed by the field of cultural studies and the grow-
ing critical tradition in anthropology.7 For these scholars, power is an inescapable feature of
social life, and this idea carries with it far ranging significance for ethnomusicological re-
search. On a basic level, holding this view requires scholars to account for the role that hier-
archy, domination, and exploitation play in every sphere of experience and area of research.
Working out the implications of this idea, critical scholars argue that power relations shape
ethnomusicological research itself and that acknowledging this fact allows critical research to
offer a more faithful understanding of the social world. In pretending to be aloof from power
relations, the older type of theorists blind themselves to their own position in arrays of power
relations, critical scholars argue, making apolitical work more, not less, biased.
The political situatedness of ethnomusicological inquiry shapes every facet of research,
but it is most readily apparent when we consider the goals that scholars have for their
projects. For example, structural-functionalism was the dominant theoretical framework
in anthropology in the middle of the twentieth century, and it had an important place in
ethnomusicology throughout the 1960s. With its interest in identifying the mechanisms
that lead to social stability and limit social change, structural-functionalism was deeply
implicated in European colonialism, and many anthropologists in this tradition represented
their field as a “science of man” that could serve the management of empire. When critical
scholars say that all research is political, they do not mean that one should stack the em-
pirical deck, manipulating ethnographic or historical data to serve a pre-existing political
agenda. Rather, they mean that scholars must recognize the profound role of power in
social life, acknowledge that the act of doing research itself is situated in an existing field of
power relations, and be attentive to the political goals implicit in their scholarship.
Pushing this last point to what is seen as its logical conclusion, activist scholars do not merely
wish to criticize power relations, but rather to do work that will help in remaking them. This
view is most famously articulated in the final thesis from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach ([1888] 1969):
6  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Scholars engaged in this kind of project posit theories of social change, develop intellectual or
cultural tools for activists, and mobilize their research to try to achieve such ends. Of course, all
but the most detached forms of scholarship seek to have a positive impact, if only to encourage
critical thinking on a particular topic, provide resources for the teaching of music, inform the
public about a culture and its practices, celebrate the musical achievements of a neglected or
disparaged group, or foster cross-cultural understanding. Works of activist scholarship seek a
more fundamental impact by participating in movements that try to change the very relations of
power that organize a society. Such work doesn’t merely critique social relations; it attempts to
understand the mechanisms by which they are perpetuated, chart a route to their amelioration,
and help steer society in that direction. Perhaps the most pointed statement of such a perspective
comes from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who has argued that the true test of the validity of
a Marxist theory of capitalism lies in its ability to help navigate a path to a post-capitalist social
order (Wright and Beggs 2015). Of course, this kind of theory is a complex domain. There can
be many strategies of promoting fundamental social change, and social criticism can be under-
stood as one technique for achieving such ends. Set in the broadest context, theoretical works of
this kind open out onto other endeavors, including more conventional forms of political activ-
ism, performance ethnography, and applied ethnomusicology.8
The projects of interpretive ethnography and analytic work can have critical and activist
goals as well, and these kinds of research have their own politics. Many ethnomusicologists
see their job as amplifying the voices of marginalized groups within a society, and these
scholars are often critical of forms of research that see ethnographic or historical subjects as
mere grist for the theorist’s mill. From this perspective, theory is at its worst when a scholar
treats her research participants as nothing more than examples of a larger social dynamic.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this view was elaborated as part of a sophisticated and highly in-
fluential body of writings in cultural anthropology, and scholars refer the problems that
this work addressed as the crisis of representation. (See note 1 for a discussion of this topic.)
Though some may dismiss any kind of academic theory as irredeemably colonial or merely
elitist—the work of a detached and pompous scholar, delivering pronouncements from
on high—most in our field embrace theory building as a valid enterprise. One common
strategy for addressing these concerns is to place the ideas from social and cultural theorists
into conversation with those of one’s research participants. In so doing, such work attends
to the politics of ethnographic writing itself.9 In my own work, I (Berger) have argued
for a dialectic of critical and relativistic approaches in ethnographic research (1999), and
today’s ethnomusicologists approach these issues in a variety of ways. As several chapters
in this book make clear, for many bodies of theory, research participants aren’t merely
consultants in a project driven by a scholar; rather, they are sophisticated thinkers in their
own right, non-academic artists and intellectuals who began developing ideas about music
and social life long before they were approached by an ethnomusicologist for an interview
and will continue to do so long after the ethnomusicologist’s ethnography is published (see
also Shelemay 1998: 2). We will return to this point below when we discuss the topic of
reflexive ethnography.
Ethnomusicologists today engage in all of the forms of research that we have discussed.
While interpretive ethnomusicological case studies remain the most common form of re-
search, some of the richest work uses the data from a field site or archival sources to develop
broader insights, and primarily theoretical works continue to be published in ethnomusi-
cology as well (e.g. Turino 2008; Berger 2010; Koskoff 2014; Rice 2017). To prepare the
ground for the discussion of individual theoretical traditions and topic areas, we need to
go deeper into the nature of theory and theoretical practice, understanding their various
elements and the work that they do in ethnomusicology.
 Introduction  7
The Nature of Theory
Theoretical work may be densely textured with highly technical arguments, specialized
terminology, and the painstaking analysis of data, but the origin of all theory, we maintain,
is everyday experience. A topic like race in music or the problem of temporality in per-
formance only becomes a compelling focus of research because writers and their audiences
find something in their experience that is alluring, confusing, painful, or problematic. In
the past, students were typically drawn to ethnomusicology because they were intrigued
by an unfamiliar musical style, but today it is just as common that the power of a familiar
music or the impact of music on some other domain of social life—politics or psychology,
economics or sports—piques an individual’s interest. And everyday life doesn’t merely spark
our initial curiosity; it establishes the first ground rules of our thinking and sets the terms of
debate for our initial encounters. Reading for the first time a theorist like Alfred Schütz or
Judith Butler, the student may be partially unaware of the intellectual history from which
these authors are emerging, the rivals or interlocutors to whom they are responding, and the
larger projects they are pursuing. Though lacking in these key contexts and susceptible to
misunderstanding, the reader new to a text can only gain her initial purchase on words like
time, gender, or performance because they have some prior meaning for her in everyday
social interaction. While theoretical writings often come out of a highly refined discourse
that has developed over generations and seek to transform everyday thinking, technical
definitions often carry with them at least a hint of quotidian usage, and, ultimately, mun-
dane language and practice is the implicit ground upon which concepts are developed.
To carry the geological metaphor further, we would emphasize that this terrain is far
from uniform and constantly changing. The everyday experiences of class or gender, ritual
or play, vary from culture to culture and time period to time period, giving differing read-
erships differing starting points for understanding theoretical issues. And even if everyday
practices around the world and across historical periods were always the same, each reader
would come to understand those practices through the historically and culturally particular
constellation of discourses alive in the world around her, many of which come from social
theory itself. In contemporary North America, the discourse of coffee shop conversations
and op-ed pages on economics and politics is threaded through with ideas from roman-
tic nationalism, structural-functionalism, neoliberalism, and social democracy in a messy
hodgepodge, even when the conversationalists or editorialists have never heard of Johann
Herder, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Friedrich Hayek, or Karl Polanyi. The film maker George
Lucas actively drew on Joseph Campbell’s work in crafting Star Wars.10 Likewise, while
the screenwriters of the 1990s Star Trek television series may not have read the work of an-
thropologists Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict, their cultural-and-personality school ideas
about ritual and culture run through every Klingon episode of those shows. Even if every-
day life was the same everywhere and one single discourse prevailed among our species, the
ground of everyday life would always be shifting because there is always a slippage between
language and practice. Theory tries to make sense of this messy reality.
Interposed between the motley, contradictory mass of discourses in everyday life and
the highly refined conceptual systems of social and cultural theory is the paradigm—the
shared understandings that a group of scholars possess. Here, we use the idea of paradigm
in a broad and encompassing way to mean something like a worldview or cultural perspec-
tive, including both explicit theoretical statements as well as implicit understandings and
practices that inform research. Our scholarship emerges from a paradigm because research
is a kind of social activity, and paradigms are the implicit worldview of the social practice of
research. The concept of paradigm attained wide currency with the publication of Thomas
Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that seminal works
8  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
establish a program of research by defining basic terms and concepts, setting out research
methods, and articulating key research questions. The work that follows is what he called
“normal science” (10)—research that incrementally contributes to the paradigm that sem-
inal works articulate. Eventually, the incremental advance of normal science reveals the
limits or contradictions of the paradigm, Kuhn argued, which leads to a scientific revolu-
tion, new paradigms, and new procedures for research. Crucially, paradigms include sets
of assumptions that researchers possess about the world, which are only implicit in their
thinking and are largely outside of awareness.
It would be hard to contradict the view that researchers operate within paradigmatic
visions, and the Kuhnian dynamic of paradigm, normal science, and revolution was highly
effective in describing the history of at least some of the natural sciences, with physics being
the ideal case. Tim Rice ([1987] 2017) has argued that, throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
Alan ­Merriam’s Anthropology of Music served as ethnomusicology’s dominant ­paradigm.
­Emphasizing the use of field methods to understand “conceptualization about music, behav-
ior in relation to music, and music sound itself ” (Merriam 1964: 32, quoted in Rice [1987]
2017: 43), Merriam’s explicit theoretical framework and his broad, ­paradigmatic vision shaped
the mainstream of work done in the discipline. Though ethnomusicology has changed in
many ways since the mid-1960s, scholars in the field continue to ­produce a large number
of ­interpretive ethnographies of musical meaning—studies that use ­participant-observation
fieldwork to understand local experiences of music. In practice, this kind of research in-
volves a range of activities, including interviews and the careful observation and recording
of day-to-day musical events and the social life that surrounds them. ­Ethnomusicologists
doing interpretive ethnography engage intensively with artists and their audiences, and
some play music with their research participants in order to better grasp the intricacies
of their performing tradition. As we discuss further below, the methods used in interpre-
tive ethnomusicological ethnography have expanded greatly in the twenty-first century to
­include ethnographic work over the Internet, historical ethnomusicology, and a range of
other approaches. While interpretive ethnography is no longer the sine qua non of ethno-
musicology and competing visions abound in the discipline today, we would argue that an
ethnographic vision, if not ethnographic methods, is the lingua franca of our discipline.
Emerging from a foundation in everyday life and the broad vision of paradigm, theory
sets the stage for empirical inquiry and shapes every part of a scholar’s research project.
Below, we will sketch out the elements of research methods, but what interests us here
is the way that paradigms, theories, and programs of research implicate one another. To
articulate a research project, one must define a set of concepts and at least provisionally
imagine how the phenomena that those concepts identify play out in the world. Claims
about the nature of social life are built up from underlying concepts and have their utility
in pointing to new research, while the value of any concept is how it leads to new insights
and new approaches. In elaborating a theoretical orientation, a scholar may start with any
one of these elements and work her way out to the others. For example, Blacking’s best
known theoretical study centers on the eponymous question How Musical is Man? (1973),
and across the lectures that comprise that often cited book, he articulates a series of concepts
(“humanly organized sound,” “soundly organized humanity”) and a program of research
that charges scholars with understanding the role of music in producing a humane society.
Central to Charles Keil’s thought is the concept of “participatory discrepancies,” small
differences in timing, pitch, or timbre among the parts performed by an ensemble. His the-
oretical writings elaborate the idea that the presence of participatory discrepancies in music
encourage the listener’s active involvement, and he urges researchers to identify the unique
ways that such features operate in each music culture. (See Keil’s chapters in Keil and Feld
[1994] and Keil [1995]; on Keil and the wider theoretical literature on participation, see
 Introduction  9
Rahaim, this volume). In a widely cited essay, Deborah Wong (2014) analyzes discourses
about aesthetics and music in the Western academy in order to argue that we can have more
culturally relevant and theoretically resonant research if we take sound, rather than music,
as our object of study. And what is true of individual theoretical writings is equally true of
scholarly discourses as a whole. The many responses to Keil’s theory (Cowdery et al. 1995)
begin variously by questioning his basic terms, problematizing his claims about the effect of
participatory discrepancies, or pointing to alternative lines of research, and they move from
there to trace trajectories toward any of the other elements.
Theories can vary considerably in the scope of the data for which they account. Some
identify patterns unique to particular kinds of social groups (e.g. popular music scenes or
diasporic communities), while others are meant to apply universally. Further, theories
vary in the level of social scale that they address, with some focusing on micro-social
phenomena like face-to-face interaction and others exploring social phenomena on the
level of small-scale communities, large-scale societies, or global processes. Many theories
seek to understand the relationships between the micro and macro—for example, the
ways in which situated acts of music making may impact the political life of a country or
community, or the way that power relations at play in an entire society may shape fine-
grained elements of individual experience. An influential theoretical work on the notion
of social scale in ethnomusicology is Mark Slobin’s Subcultural Sounds, which extended the
older idea of music subcultures to explore the complex relationships among subcultures,
“supercultures,” and “intercultures” ([1993] 2000). Historical time depth is an equally
important issue for theoretical generalization. Some studies may operate in what is often
referred to as the “ethnographic present,” treating the period of the scholar’s fieldwork as a
more or less uniform historical moment and developing theoretical generalizations that do
not account for historical change. Other researchers seek to explore the way that particular
musical and cultural forms change over time. For example, Peter Manuel’s chapter in this
book, which examines Marxism and Marxist approaches in ethnomusicology, illustrates
a range of ways that scholars have theorized the place of music in the epochal transi-
tions from feudalism to capitalism and from industrial capitalism to neo-liberal capitalism.
Other scholars focus on patterns of cultural change that operate on a much smaller time
frame, such as the research on the dynamics of musical revivals (Livingston 1999). In all
of these cases, having a clear vision of social scale and historical time depth is central for
developing a well-conceived project.
The relationship between theory and data is dialectical. We go to the fieldsite or archive
with paradigms, theoretical orientations, and all manner of ideas, both explicit and implicit.
These factors shape how we see the world, the kinds of questions we ask, and the insights
we pursue. Sometimes, new data may confirm our existing theories, but each new field ex-
perience, interview, or archival source has the potential to impinge back on our thinking,
leading to new perspectives, new insights, and new questions. Those just starting out in
research often operate at the ends of this continuum: in some periods of their work, they
collect information that does little more than support well-established claims; these periods
can be punctuated by stretches of time in which the researcher is overwhelmed by powerful
new experiences that call into question her most basic assumptions. More seasoned schol-
ars are able to find interesting implications in the most seemingly confirmatory data and
manage the flow of new information without feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes, the most
powerful implications of new data only become apparent in hindsight, while seemingly
revolutionary findings may later turn out to be explained by conventional ideas. Whatever
the pace and intensity that one finds in the interplay between theory and data, yesterday’s
data bring new insights today, which changes the way one gathers new information tomor-
row, creating back-and-forth exchanges that continue throughout one’s career.11
10  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
Setting these dynamics in a broader context, we see that every element of our thinking
and writing is dialectical. Experiences from our everyday lives have the potential to change
our theoretical assumptions and our understanding of the data we find in the field or in the
ethnographies that we read. Fieldwork and theory change our understanding of everyday
lives, within and beyond the academy. Our thinking alters as we work through new ideas
with colleagues and friends, and as we engage in dialog across disciplinary boundaries. And
most importantly, many of our deepest insights come from our ongoing interactions with
our research participants.

Theory and Method

The term method refers to the process by which research is conducted, and the word meth-
odology denotes the study of method and its broader implications.12 Like the relationship
between theory and data or the one between theory and everyday life, the relationship
between theory and method is highly dialectical: method, one might quip, is theory op-
erationalized. While the two are tightly enmeshed in any particular research project, they
are analytically distinct. Method and methodology are complex and important topics. It is
beyond the scope of this book to discuss theory and method together, as doing so would
require us to either treat each individual topic with unfortunate brevity or produce a study
that would be unwieldy in its length. Our goal in this section is to sketch out some of the
broad contours of the topic of research methods in order to suggest the complex interplay
between the two in ethnomusicological research.

The Elements of Research Methods

Paradigms and theoretical orientations set the stage for research, and, in the context of particu-
lar empirical projects, they cash out in the articulation of research assumptions, the framing of
study objects, and the use of particular methods and techniques. In ethnomusicological meth-
odology, assumptions refer to the knowledge that ethnomusicologists hold to be true at any
particular moment in a research situation. While assumptions are asserted at a particular time,
new data may make these assumptions subject to modification and change. In my (Stone’s) own
work about music event among the Kpelle of Liberia ([1982] 2010: 7–10), I outlined eleven as-
sumptions I was making in conducting the study, beginning with “Music is communication,”
including “Meaning in music is created by participants in the course of social interaction” and
“The social relationship among event participants is based upon the simultaneous experiencing
of the performance in multiple dimensions of time,” and ending with, “The ethnomusicol-
ogist makes inferences about music event interaction by engaging in interactional behavior.”
Statements of assumptions such as these cordon off those things that scholars take to be true,
things that are not questioned at the moment they embarked on their research. It is important
to identify assumptions, so that it is clear from the start what areas are not open to question—at
least, to use Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann’s oft repeated phrase, “until further notice”
(1973: 4). As we have seen, there are many cases where evidence may, at a later point in time,
bring our unquestioned assumptions to light or make us question our implicit beliefs. But we
can never make all of our assumptions explicit, even in the most richly theorized research.13
Flowing directly from the articulation of research assumptions is the definition of study
object. The study object identifies the basic unit of analysis in a research project, and the
range of study objects that ethnomusicologists explore is wide. In my (Stone’s) Kpelle field-
work, I took the music event as my study object. Organizing my research in this way, I took
as my primary unit of analysis a phenomenon that was salient for the people with whom
I worked, which allowed my research to be more sensitive to local experiences and ideas.
 Introduction  11
For Kpelle performers, the event is set apart from everyday life and is the site where sound
and behavior were united in musical interaction. The Kpelle understood the area circum-
scribed by the boundaries of the event as the “inside” of the performance, and this was
expressed in their everyday speech. In talking about music making, they would often say
“Kwa loi belei su” (We are entering the inside of the performance) ([1982] 2010: 2). Taking
the event as my study object, I was able to attend to the practices that establish performance
as a sphere of experience—a process that would have been invisible if I had taken music
sound or even music making as my study object.
Once an ethnomusicologist has articulated her assumptions and established her study
object, she is in a position to pose research questions. Questions frame one’s research, shap-
ing the kinds of methods and techniques one employs, the way one engages with one’s
interlocutors and makes sense of texts, and one’s practices in the field or the archive. As part
of a research grant application that I (Stone) prepared, which focused on the role of spatial
components (local ideas about how space is organized) in music performance, I posed the
following research questions:

First, how do Kpelle musicians and audience express spatial components in musical
performance and what is the significance of these spatial components? … Second, how
do these spatial elements interact with Kpelle ideas of time? Third, how does this spatial
description serve to define Kpelle music theory?

Here, I wanted to understand why people commented on singers “raising” a song or a chorus
responding “underneath” a soloist. This further led to studying the predominance of terms
and phrases that were oriented to issues of space and the metaphors that served to explain how
music performance worked. These overarching questions then served to guide the direction
of my subsequent research and led to more specific questions and decisions about the project.
With research assumptions, study objects, and research questions articulated, the eth-
nomusicologist uses research methods to try to answer the questions she has posed. Eth-
nographic research for ethnomusicologists customarily involves participant-observation
methods, which encompass a broad continuum of activities. At one end of the continuum,
the ethnomusicologist will observe social conduct, and the scholar’s definition of study ob-
ject will shape her observational practices. For example, a fieldworker whose primary study
object is gender identity and performance will pay attention to the full range of conduct in
a music event and will do so in a particular way; focusing on the means by which musicians
and audience members perform being a women, a man, or some other gender identity, she
will literally see and hear gender, with markers of those identities taking a prominent place
in her experience. A fieldworker whose primary study object is the intersensory dimensions
of music may certainly commit some of her attention to gender. However, she will focus
her primary attention on the interaction of stage lighting and music sound, as well as the
way that the moving bodies on the dance floor react to the music, and her experience of
these phenomena will be far more intense than the fieldworker whose main interest is in
gender performance. On the participant end of the spectrum, the fieldworker may perform
as an instrumentalist, singer, or dancer in an effort to learn about details and nuances of
the music as it is being created. Of course, a scholar emphasizing the participant side of
the ­participant-observer continuum is an observer as well, watching and listening to the
practices that transpire in the event and observing her own music making practices. Her
attention will likewise be shaped by her ideas about study object and research questions,
and her active participation in music making will bring new facets of the culture to light.
In Liberia in 1976, I (Stone) became an apprentice to a koning (triangular frame zither)
player. In the early phases of my research, I had asked my teacher, Bena-golo-kuu, many
12  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
questions about the instrument but received few answers. As I became more adept on the
instrument, he described a tutelary spirit who could make my playing excellent, but he also
noted that there were dangers in engaging with such a spirit and warned me that I needed
to be cautious. In the abstract discussions about performance that occurred before I started
my apprenticeship, he had never mentioned these aspects of the musical spirits. It was only
when he thought I needed to know these ideas that he revealed this specialized knowledge
(Stone [1982] 2010: 54–55). If participation leads to new opportunities for observation, that
observation always involves at least a measure of participation, in the sense that all observers
are at the very least present within fieldwork events, and the interplay between the two
forms of research practice is a central feature of participant-observation methods.
Some ethnomusicologists supplement their participant-observation fieldwork with ar-
chival research. Archival methods involve searching in online or physical repositories to
understand what other scholars, musicians, critics, government officials, or ordinary people
have found in the past. Newspaper accounts, diaries, letters, and photographs all constitute
documents for the ethnomusicologist to draw upon. In the 1980s, Rice encouraged scholars
to expand their focus beyond the ethnographic present ([1987] 2017), and his program was
engaged actively. Many ethnographers supplement ethnographic fieldwork with archival
research, while strictly historical studies have become common in contemporary ethnomu-
sicology (e.g. Bohlman 2013; McCollum and Herbert 2014; and Ziegler at al. 2017).
Each research method entails a wide range of techniques—particular kinds of research
practices that yield particular kinds of information and insights (Kaplan 1964: 19). These
include conducting interviews, making sound recordings, video recordings, or still photo-
graphs, transcribing music or speech, and the creation of fieldnotes. Each of these techniques
can be carried out with a range of variations. Interview techniques include surveys (in which
a fixed schedule of questions with multiple choice answers is administered to a larger number
of people), semi-structured interviews (in which a set of questions has been established in
advance, though the interviewer has the freedom to deviate from her script and pursue new
topics as they emerge), and open-ended interviews (in which only a topic is set in advance,
and the interview develops in a conversational style). Life-history interviews are used to
uncover personal experience narratives and may lead to something like an ethnographic
biography. In feedback interviews, the researcher plays field, archival, or commercial re-
cordings for her research participants in order to stimulate discussion and understand their
perspectives on the music (Stone and Stone 1981; Stone-MacDonald and Stone 2013).
The choices that an ethnomusicologist makes about specific techniques and their var-
iations depend on her theoretical orientation and research questions. For the present dis-
cussion, what interests us is the interplay of theory and method. If individual songs are a
researcher’s study object, then music analysis will likely be her primary research method.
If, on the other hand, a community is the object of study, then the research will embrace
a whole range of other performances and inevitably treat the details of individual songs
differently. Of course, a single study may have multiple study objects and may draw on
ideas from more than one body of theory, and across the span of a single project, a scholar’s
objects of study and theoretical orientations may shift. What we wish to highlight here is
the interplay between theory and method, and the complex ways in which they may shape
one another in individual research situations.

Expanding Research Methods, New Perspectives

The range of research methods and techniques that are used in the humanities and so-
cial sciences today is extremely broad. While qualitative methods continue to dominate
ethnomusicology, quantitative work—such as experimental research in sound perception
 Introduction  13
(e.g. McGraw and Kohnen 2016; Johansson 2017) and computational studies of large data
sets of music and text on the Internet (Cornelis et al. 2013)—is also actively pursued in the
contemporary scene. Perhaps the most significant developments that have come to the fore
since the early 1980s are in the area of new ethnographic methods. Performance ethnog-
raphy, for example, may involve experimental writing (Denzin 2003) or the development
of stage productions or other artistic performances from field materials (Conquergood
2002). (The topic of performance ethnography in ethnomusicology is examined further in
­Waterman, this volume.) In reflexive ethnography, the scholar discusses her interpretations
and analyses with her research participants as they emerge in the field and returns to the
fieldsite to share her conclusions with her collaborators or to document changes in the con-
text over time (Burawoy 2003). Such work allows for a sharing of authority between the
fieldworker and research participants, a dialogic back-and-forth between all of the parties
involved. In these kinds of approaches, the ethnographer actively acknowledges the role
of local people in the study that is published (e.g. Berger 1999) and may list key research
participants as co-authors, as Jocelyne Guilbault did in her book Zouk: World Music in the
West Indies (Guilbault, with Averill, Benoit, and Rabess 1993) and her ethnomusicological
biography of the soca musician Roy Cape (Guilbault and Cape 2014). Closely related are
decolonized approaches like indigenous ethnography (Smith 1999) and border ethnogra-
phy (Vila 2000), where ideas about social categories, space, and identity are treated as fluid
concepts for exploration.
While people have always traveled throughout the world, most early ethnographers fo-
cused on communities that were situated in a single locale. Increasingly, ethnomusicologists
conduct multi-site research for a single study, particularly in cases of urban-rural move-
ment, transnational migration, travel, or the involuntary circulation of peoples due to war
or other conflicts (e.g. Shelemay 1998; Solomon 2009; Helbig 2014; Rapport 2014). Con-
temporary ethnomusicologists recognize that people move consistently from place to place
and that to understand this requires a kind of ethnography “in motion” (see Hahn 2010).
Internet mediation has transformed both music making and the ethnography of ­music.
Technology has enabled scholars to conduct research via the Internet, where they do not
engage people face-to-face in a shared physical space, but rather carry out research ­remotely,
in what is known as virtual ethnography. This new terrain both expands possibilities and
entails a range of new challenges. For example, Kiri Miller’s 2012 study Playing Along
examines a wide variety of ways in which music has been transformed by technological
mediation—from the place of music soundtracks in video games to those video games, like
Guitar Hero, that take virtual music performance as their focus, and from gaming cultures
that cross the virtual/real-world divide to the purely virtual communities that emerge
around online music lessons (see also Cheng 2014). Internet mediation has also transformed
the product of ethnographic research. Contemporary scholars often enhance their eth-
nographies by annotating their video data and including it in online repositories, like the
Ethnographic Video for Analysis and Instruction (EVIA) digital archive, where the material
is much more widely accessible than would otherwise be possible.
While many of the early writings in ethnomusicology focused on the analysis of m ­ usic
sound and, later, on musical performance in communities, scholars have increasingly
turned their attention to ethnographic work on social individuals. Building on earlier
studies such as Navajo Blessingway Singer: The Autobiography of Frank Mitchell, 1881–1967
­(Frisbie and ­McAllester 1978) and Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women
(Vander 1988), such work often begins with the musical practices of a single person and
moves outward to show how her experiences shed light on the social life of a commu-
nity or larger historical processes (e.g. Rice 1994; Danielson 1997; Lohman 2010; Ruskin
and Rice 2012; Guilbault and Cape 2014). And in the methodology of autoethnography
14  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
(Reed-Danahay 1997), the ethnographer’s memories of her own personal experiences may
serve as the raw data for interpretation and analysis (Bartleet and Ellis 2009; Castro 2016).
As Jayson Beaster-Jones, who was interpreting the ideas about fieldwork in anthropology
developed by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997), remarked to us recently, “the field”
isn’t only a place, and fieldwork means far more than research in a distant locale; rather,
fieldwork is a way of seeing the world and making sense of social phenomena.

Approaching Intellectual History

Like other professions, academic disciplines are sometimes characterized as what George
Bernard Shaw called “conspiracies against the laity” ([1906] 2011: 39). In this view, dis-
ciplines are intellectual silos that do little more than stifle thinking and limit creativity.
Disciplinary boundaries can serve a limiting function, but we believe that this is not their
only effect. To modify slightly a common bit of phraseology from practice theory, we
would suggest that disciplines both constrain and enable thinking, and we argue that the
rejection of disciplines smacks of a naïve individualism, one that neglects the social and
dialogic nature of research and confuses intellectual community with intellectual con-
formity. Ethnomusicology is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field, and the conversations
that emerged at its founding were highly creative, even daring for their time. While we
would never want to live in world where we only read the work of ethnomusicologists,
we would be equally impoverished without the depth of thinking that has come from
situating ourselves within a conversation that has developed over the span of decades and
within a contemporary community of interlocutors and colleagues. Like most disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences, ours certainly bears a colonial legacy. The weight of
this legacy cannot be dismissed lightly, and the attempts to decolonize the field, which are
discussed in several chapters in this book, are of vital importance to our discipline. But to
see ethnomusicology as irredeemably colonial is to neglect both the real contributions that
scholars in our field have made and to deny our potential for development and growth. At
its best, the discipline of ethnomusicology has provided its practitioners with intellectual
tools, research ­methods, and a community of interlocutors. No project can cover an infinite
number of topics, thinkers, or discourses, and, by necessity, we have had to set bounda-
ries to frame our discussion. But throughout the text, we have seen these boundaries as
­permeable—­h istorically emergent, constantly open to new engagements, and through their
very permeability p­ roductive of new insights and perspectives.
If academic disciplines offer the researcher both pitfalls and potentials, how are we best
to understand their dynamics? At first blush, disciplines seem to be defined by their study
objects. Astronomers, it appears, study stars and zoologists study animals, but nowhere,
not even in the natural sciences, do study objects neatly separate the disciplines from one
another. The boundary between chemistry and physics has been contested for hundreds of
years, and in the humanities and social sciences the lines between disciplines are even harder
to draw. What would it mean to say that anthropologists study anthropos (“man”) while
sociologists study society? A more productive way of understanding disciplines is to see
them first and foremost as social groups, ones that are bound together less by their unique
claim on an object of study and more by discourses, institutions, histories, and patterns of
practice—debates and conflicts as much as shared assumptions or topics. Anthropology and
sociology are distinct from one another because one group of people self-identify as an-
thropologists and another as sociologists, each with their own histories, canons of scholarly
literature, departments or programs, sets of research methods, conferences, journals, and
book series—not because “man” and society are distinct objects in the world.14 And the
interdisciplinary linkages between those disciplines, as found in combined departments of
 Introduction  15
sociology and anthropology, are linkages precisely because people read, write, teach, and
interact through and across those boundaries.
If we understand disciplines best by focusing on social practices of thinking and writing,
rather than reified study objects, a similar approach applies to theoretical traditions, as well.
At a first order of approximation, theoretical traditions and their intellectual histories can be
organized into linear narratives that start with a founder or small group of founders and are
developed through branching groups of descendants. To come to a deeper understanding,
one needs a different perspective, and in many ways theoretical traditions are like musical
genres. Certainly, some musicians fit unambiguously within particular genre categories.
Few would deny that Chuck Berry was a rock and roll performer, not only because his mu-
sic has all of the features that are associated with this genre, but also because he explicitly
references the genre in his music, worked to forward rock and roll as a musical movement,
and was categorized that way by both supporters and critics. While figures like Berry are
easy to identify with specific genres, many do not fit easily into a single category. Much of
the creative work of music making comes in drawing together a diverse set of stylistic tra-
ditions from multiple histories and cultures—Berry himself, of course, was deeply rooted
in the blues and was well familiar with country music—and many musicians’ styles change
over time. Most importantly, listeners use genre labels as frameworks for making sense of
music, and they do so in ways that fit the immediate situation and larger-scale contexts. For
all of these reasons, it is less productive to fixate on music genres as discrete categories into
which music must be fit and more useful to understand them as interpretive frameworks
that people use to produce and make sense of music in situated interaction.
The same is true of theoretical work. Some scholars fit unambiguously into one intellec-
tual tradition or another—Husserl was a phenomenologist; Lévi-Strauss was a ­structuralist—
and many are self-conscious in their efforts to found or forward a particular school of
thought. Others, however, draw creatively on multiple sources, take varying approaches
across the span of their careers, and can be interpreted in a range of ways. Even when a
single scholar seeks nothing more than to contribute incrementally to an established move-
ment or tradition, the development of any set of ideas by a group of researchers inevitable
leads toward contradiction and change, if not transformation or rupture. To evoke a trope
from contemporary computer interface design, tags are a better metaphor for disciplines
than folder hierarchies. At a first order of approximation, one can hardly avoid thinking in
terms of theoretical movements and intellectual lineages. We gain deeper understandings,
however, if we examine the particularity and situatedness of social and cultural theory and
the dialogic relations that scholars have with their interlocutors, rather than rigidly trying
to develop tree diagrams with fixed schools of thought, founders, and followers.
This book has been developed with those ideas in mind. Each chapter takes one or two
theoretical traditions or topic areas as its focus. Exploring theoretical work from within
and beyond ethnomusicology, as well as a range of ethnographic and historical case studies
that have theoretical implications, each chapter sketches some of the intellectual history of
the tradition or area in question, places it in its social and intellectual context, discusses its
most resonant ideas, explores how ethnomusicologists have contributed to, taken up, or
transformed those ideas, and suggests emerging areas of research. To reach toward fuller,
more dialogic understandings, each chapter discusses the interactions among traditions,
with forward and backward references to relevant passages in other chapters. Text boxes
point the way toward further connections. The scholarship discussed in this book spans a
period of about one hundred years and traces a variety of intellectual trajectories within the
history of ethnomusicology; however, the book is not in any way intended as a history of
the discipline.15 While Chapter 1 discusses some of the oldest theoretical traditions in the
book, no linear or progressive development of ideas is implied in the order of the book’s
16  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
chapters. Organized as a coherent whole, the book may be profitably read straight through
from beginning to end, but its chapters may also be read without difficulty as stand-alone
essays or in an alternative sequence.
Jayson Beaster-Jones begins the book with a history of linguistic and semiotic approaches
in ethnomusicology. A complex and wide-ranging piece, it starts by examining the ideas
of the Swiss scholar of language and sign systems, Ferdinand de Saussure, and explores the
varied ways that theories of language and meaning have been engaged in the ethnomu-
sicology. Discussing the work of Noam Chomsky, the broad ranging theoretical tradition
of structuralism, the writings of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and a
variety of “language-in-use perspectives,” Beaster-Jones shows how contemporary ethno-
musicologists understand music and language as systems of communication and meaning
making, pointing the way to powerful new ideas about social life and culture.
The next four chapters focus on theoretical traditions or topic areas that center in critical
research. Peter Manuel’s chapter looks at the Marxist tradition in social and cultural theory,
with particular attention to music’s place in political economy and the cultural industries.
Jane ­Sugarman discusses theories of gender and sexuality and the ways that they have been
addressed in ethnomusicology. Marxism is a diverse but relatively well-bounded intellectual
movement, but scholars from a wide array of intellectual traditions have examined the topic
of gender and sexuality. Sugarman’s chapter is particularly important, as it introduces a wide
range of crucial intellectual movements and ideas, including the critique of the subject in
post-structuralism and the notions of performativity and intersectionality. In so doing, it sets
the stage for much of the work that is done in the chapters that follow. Critical research on gen-
der and sexually is diverse. Equally varied is the critical research on race and ethnicity, which
is the topic Maureen Mahon’s chapter, and the work on globalization and post-­colonialism,
which is examined in the chapter by Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton. Critical research on
these topics became a pivotal part of the ethnomusicology of the 1990s and continues actively
in the field today. The initial examination of cultural studies appears in Manuel’s Marxism
chapter, and further discussion of cultural studies thinkers are threaded throughout the other
chapters in this group.
The next four chapters discuss a mix of theoretical movements, topic areas, and new
interdisciplinary partners that have more recently come into prominence in ethnomusi-
cology. Highly influential in the humanities and humanistic social sciences is performance
studies, an academic discipline with four distinct but inter-related intellectual traditions.
Ellen Waterman’s chapter makes sense of this complex history and explores the way that
theories of performance have been carried forward in contemporary ethnomusicology.
Her chapter also examines the closely related field of critical studies in improvisation.
­A nother interdisciplinary area that has seen enormous growth in recent years is sound
studies. ­Ethnomusicologists have taken the lead in theorizing sound, many of whom now
see the sonic, rather than the musical, as their primary study object. Katherine Meizel
and J. ­Martin Daughtry’s chapter examines these developments, as well as the related area
of voice studies. Phenomenology is an intellectual movement that began in Continental
­European philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century and has had an impact on almost
every humanities discipline and many of the social sciences as well. Ethnomusicologists
began to engage phenomenology in the 1980s, and my (Berger’s) chapter explores this
tradition. Finally, thinkers since the time of Plato have been fascinated by the notion of
participation. In the twentieth century, a diverse group of scholars, artists, and activists have
examined this topic, either celebrating its liberatory potentials or issuing warning about its
perils. Ethnomusicologists have been at the forefront here, and Matthew Rahaim’s chapter
discusses classical Greek ideas about participation, the wide range of scholars who have ex-
plored this topic in the twentieth century, and its place in contemporary ethnomusicology.
 Introduction  17
While each of the book’s chapters explores a different topic, one can find related tenden-
cies and trajectories in the histories that they trace, and it will be worthwhile to note these
commonalities here at the outset. One of these trajectories is a movement from scholarship
that explains social practices or cultural products by reference to universal cognitive pro-
cesses, to scholarship that explains such phenomena by reference to cultural context (often
in a relativistic, value neutral sense of that word), and finally to scholarship that shows how
social practices or cultural forms are shaped by relations of power. The first transition could
be characterized as a shift from essentialism to social construction, while the later transition
is a shift toward critical research, in the sense of that term that we developed above. A sec-
ond trajectory involves the transition from scholarship that posits abstract, decontextualized
mental systems or texts to scholarship that attends to situated, embodied practice.16 A third
trajectory—more like a peripatetic movement—involves changing levels of focus. The late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by theories of sweeping global
or historical scope, while the mid-twentieth century saw the rise of theoretical attention
to small-scale social phenomena and arguments about the cultural or political significance
of the micro-level. With the advent of globalization, theories at the macro-scale returned
to prominence in the 1990s. Finally, the book’s chapters observe a trajectory from what
Waterman has, in personal communication, dubbed “a faith in analytic omniscience” (the
confidence that the theorist can provide unique access to fundamental social processes) to
“critical reflection” (an awareness that all theoretical work is situated in and profoundly
shaped by its practitioner’s social and cultural contexts).
These trajectories describe some of the directions that social and cultural theory has
taken in the Western academy since ethnomusicology was founded, but there is another
set of trajectories that needs to be mentioned here as well—our contributors’ trajectories
through these literatures. Social and cultural theory is vast, and none of the individual bod-
ies of work that the contributors discuss could be summarized in a single chapter. Working
through this book, it is best for the reader to think of each chapter as one path that an indi-
vidual author has made through this body of work—not a comprehensive overview, but one
way of identifying the landmarks in this terrain and mapping its contours. Understood in
this way, the chapters will, we hope, serve as a model that the reader can use for approach-
ing other bodies of social and cultural theory that she cares about. And what is true of each
individual chapter is true of the book as a whole.
We have regretted passing over many tantalizing writers and important theoretical
­approaches in order to give more detailed accounts of a smaller number of intellectual move-
ments and themes. For example, we have devoted little attention to the scholarship that
has emerged at the meeting place of ethnomusicology and cognitive science (e.g. Clayton,
Dueck, and Leante 2013) or ethnomusicology and affect theory (Hofman 2015; Garcia 2015;
Gill 2017), and we have not explored the growing subdisciplines of medical e­ thnomusicology
(Koen et al. 2008) or the ethnomusicology of childhood (Marsh 2008; Campbell and ­Wiggins
2012). Finally, we have devoted only limited attention to applied ethnomusicology, an im-
portant domain of scholarly practice which can engage almost any of the theoretical currents
alive in our field today and which has a body of theoretical work of its own (e.g. Pettan and
Titon 2015). Ultimately, though, these regrets set into relief the pleasure we have found in
exploring new ideas, and we have approached the work of this book with delight.

***
A common and erroneous idea in our field is that ethnomusicologists do not generate the-
ory of our own. Rather, this line of thinking suggests, we only borrow theory from other
fields, applying whatever ideas are fashionable as a kind of intellectual window dressing to
18  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
the descriptive and interpretive projects that are our true métier. From that perspective, a
book on social and cultural theory in ethnomusicology would find that the movement of
ideas only flowed in one direction—from Theory (Philosophy? Sociology? Anthropology?)
to ethnomusicology. While there certainly are works in our field that use theory in this
manner, such a view fundamentally misunderstands both the work that ethnomusicologists
have done and the nature of the theoretical enterprise.
We observed in the Preface that the questions that social and cultural theory examines
were once the domain of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology but have, over time,
been taken up by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as a range
of related fields of endeavor. With this in mind, we would emphasize that while social
philosophy and social theory remain vibrant subdisciplines in philosophy, sociology, and
anthropology, in today’s academy they are only part of a much larger discourse that tran-
scends individual disciplines. The situation that ethnomusicologists face is, therefore, no
different than that of scholars in any other field—philosophy, sociology, and anthropology
no less than cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies, or any of the other newer
disciplines: all of us come from an intellectual history formed by a discipline or a cluster of
related disciplines. All of us work to make sense of the vast set of theoretical conversations
about the nature of social life and culture. And, if we seek to make the most powerful kinds
of contributions, all of us must think about how our individual projects add to that broadly
transdisciplinary conversation or its many interdisciplinary threads. Making this kind of
contribution is a daunting task, but it is no less daunting for a philosopher, sociologist, or
anthropologist than it is for an ethnomusicologist, and each of the contributors to this book
has emphasized the important contributions that scholars in our field have made.17
We use the older term “contribution,” rather than the more contemporary term “in-
tervention” very intentionally here. On a basic level, the word “intervention” smacks of
clinical psychology—a group of friends and family members, led by a therapist or counselor,
who tries to compel an addict to acknowledge her addiction. Clearly, ethnomusicology is
not some junkie waiting for a theorist to scream, “Enough!” More insidious and damaging
than this distasteful image are the neo-liberal resonances of the word “intervention” and
its much uglier partner, “disruption.” Neo-liberals from the Austrian and Chicago schools
of economics celebrated the “creative destruction” of the rebel capitalists who “disrupted”
established patterns of economic production—Randian figures who bravely threw buggy
whip manufacturers out of work so that the Model-T could be born. In place of this indi-
vidualistic and competitive vision, we would prefer to see theoretical work as a fundamen-
tally social practice, something we do with others, both within and beyond the academy. It’s
an activity in which ideas may need to be challenged or rejected, sometimes vigorously so,
but always in the spirit of solidarity with others in the intellectual enterprise—something
that is never a zero-sum game. Ethnomusicologists and ethnomusicology can make impor-
tant contributions to that enterprise. Working together, the authors of the book have shown
some of the ways that ethnomusicologists have done so in the past and suggest some of the
paths to new contributions in the future. Let’s do it together.

Notes
1 Theoretical work in ethnomusicology has long been influenced by social and cultural anthropol-
ogy, particularly in ethnomusicology’s early years, and it will be useful to briefly sketch out some of
the relevant intellectual history of anthropology here. The development of cultural anthropology in
the twentieth century is typically characterized as a progression through a series of dominant the-
oretical ­orientations—first cultural evolutionism, then functionalism, structural-functionalism (see
note 15), structuralism (discussed in Beaster-Jones, this volume), and interpretive anthropology. As the
story is usually told, this history culminates in the 1980s with a period of intense self-criticism about
 Introduction  19
anthropology’s complicity in colonialism, its research method of ethnographic fieldwork, and its modes
writing, which together are referred to as the “crisis of representation.” Here, classic texts like Writing
Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995), and Anthropology
as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1996) drew attention to the colonial viewpoints embedded in the
field and the inescapably political dimensions of representation in ethnography. The result of the crisis
was the emergence of diversity of approaches that have been variously labeled as “post-modernism” or
“post-structuralism.” Post-colonial theory, which is discussed by ­Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton’s
chapter in this volume, is also linked to this representational crisis.
  While a concern with local perspectives had long been of interest to anthropologists, it became the
primary preoccupation of interpretive anthropology, most famously developed by Clifford Geertz
(1973) and Victor Turner (1974). A focus on local perspectives on music making has for many years
served as the hallmark of ethnomusicology as well, and for this reason we have chosen to discuss it
here in the book’s introduction. We have decided not to devote a chapter to post-modernism and
post-structuralism, as the former term has been used with decreasing frequency after the 1990s and
the historical impact of the later is extraordinarily complex. There is no question that the major
post-structuralist thinkers have been of the first importance to contemporary social and cultural
theory. However, scholars today hold a range of opinions about whether or not the term “post-­
structuralism” refers to a unified intellectual movement or a diverse cluster of approaches and tenden-
cies. Further, post-structuralism itself was and continues to be highly interdisciplinary. Many of its
most important theorists were philosophers, historians, and literary scholars—thinkers whose ideas
had to be adapted or expanded to bear fruit in an ethnographic context. In this book, we have chosen
to present the initial discussion of post-structuralist theories in the chapter on gender and sexuality,
which is written by Jane Sugarman, not because the post-structuralists were uniquely concerned with
gender (though some of them were), but because post-structuralism has been used so productively in
music disciplines to address this topic. The chapters by Wallach and Clinton and by Waterman also
discuss this topic. On post-modernity, see Manuel (this volume).
2 On Geertz and the relationship between his work and the anthropology of gender, see Sugarman (this
volume). On the role of Geertz’s work in performance studies, see Waterman (this volume).
3 This idea has its roots in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology and has been most richly de-
veloped in ethnomusicology by the classic ethnographies Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song
in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Titon 1988) and May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music
(Rice 1994). See the chapter on phenomenological ethnomusicology (Berger, this volume) for further
discussion.
4 It is worth dispelling a potential point of terminological confusion here. As James Bohman has ob-
served ([2005] 2016), scholars use the term critical theory in a narrow sense to refer to a highly influ-
ential body of Marxist writings developed by scholars working at the Institute for Social Research at
the University of Frankfurt, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno (e.g. Horkheimer and
Adorno [1944] 2007), Herbert Marcuse ([1964] 1991), and Eric Fromm ([1961] 2003), as well as their
intellectual descendants, such as Jürgen Habermas (1981). In a less technical sense, though, the term
critical theory is used to refer to any kind of theoretical work that seeks to critique power relations. (The
related terms critical scholarship and critical research are often used in this non-technical sense as well.)
This book will use critical theory to refer to the work of the Frankfurt School, which is discussed in
Manuel (this volume), and critical scholarship or critical research to refer to any kind of theory that engages
in social criticism.
5 It is worth noting that while many ethnomusicologists are committed to social criticism, far fewer
engage in aesthetic criticism ( judging the artistic merits of individual works or genres) as part of
their ethnomusicological practice. The situation is more complex than it may seem. At a first level of
approximation, almost all contemporary ethnomusicologists would agree that it is not the job of an
ethnomusicologist to rate any performance, genre, or music culture as superior to any other. Aesthetic
relativism is the foundation of almost every North American undergraduate survey course on the
musics of the world taught by trained ethnomusicologists, who almost universally seek to counter the
ethnocentric view that musics outside the Western conservatory tradition are primitive or unsophisti-
cated. No ethnomusicological ethnography of which we are aware contains anything like journalistic
record reviews—giving this album a 4 stars and that one 2.5—though many ethnomusicologists seek
to understand the aesthetic criticisms that their research participants make. But politics and aesthetics
can be hard to disentangle. In the work of ethnomusicologists who emphasize the ways in which
music can serve as a medium for social relations and who seek to engage social criticism, there can be
an implicit dimension of aesthetic critique, albeit one that is to varying degrees hidden. For example,
in differing ways both Charles Keil (Keil 1979; Keil, Keil, and Blau 1992) and John Blacking (1973)
argue that the music of their research participants represents a kind of ideal way for people to be
20  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone
together, implicitly or explicitly contrasting it with what they see as the stultifying and hierarchical
relations constituted in the Western concert hall. Unless otherwise noted, we will use the terms critical
scholarship and critical research to refer to social criticism, rather than aesthetic criticism. See note 4 on
the differing sense of the term critical theory.
6 The relative paucity of critical scholarship in early American ethnomusicology and its allied fields is a topic
ripe for investigation. In a highly provocative article, Susan Davis (2010) shows how the mid-twentieth
century America folklorist Benjamin Botkin was harassed by the FBI and other a­ nti-communist forces for
his critical scholarship and was marginalized within the field of folklore studies. Davis argues that the full
effect of US anti-communism on the discipline of folklore is not known. There is good reason to believe,
she argues, that critical folkloristics has much deeper roots than is often acknowledged, and she calls for
more research in the intellectual history of the discipline to recuperate this work. We would suggest that
a similar project would be beneficial in ethnomusicology as well.
7 The intellectual history of the turn toward critical scholarship in the ethnomusicology of the 1990s is
evocatively discussed in Deborah Wong’s important 2006 article, “Ethnomusicology and Difference.”
8 While we have discussed these three forms of theory (theory that stands aloof from social criticism,
theoretical work of critique, and theoretical work of activist scholarship) in series, we do not want to
imply a historical progression or hierarchy of values here. Scholars from all three camps have made
significant contributions to contemporary discourses, and the relationship among them is complex. A
scholar who pursues the first kind of theoretical work, for example, may have a principled opposition
to critical or activist theoretical work, or she may respect critical forms of theory but simply feel that
her strengths or interests lie in other areas. Scholars deeply committed to one approach may freely
borrow ideas from the other camps, and across the span of a single career, a scholar may shift from one
approach to another.
9 See Guilbault and Cape (2014: 1–22) for a rich discussion of this literature.
10 See Seastrom (2015). It is worth noting in passing that Campbell’s writings have been widely criti-
cized in folklore studies (e.g. Dundes 2005).
11 In the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, the back-and-forth interplay in meaning making
between past and present, or between parts and wholes, is sometimes referred to as the hermeneutic
circle, though this term has a wide range of other meanings as well. For further discussion of the
hermeneutic circle, see Berger (2015). Hermeneutic phenomenology is also discussed in Berger (this
volume). On the dialectics of theory and data, see Berger (2004).
12 The literature on methodologies of ethnographic fieldwork and writing is substantial. Classic and con-
temporary works include The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley 1979), Participant Observation (­Spradley
1980), People Studying People (Georges and Jones 1980), Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986),
Women’s Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995), Analyzing Social Settings (Lofland et al. 2005),
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), and Tales of the Field (Van Maanen
2010). (On the place of Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture in the history of anthropology, see
note 1 in this chapter.) Perhaps the most influential study of methodology from within the discipline
of ethnomusicology is Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley’s Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives
for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). On historical methods in ethnomusicology, see McCollum and
Herbert (2014) and Ziegler et al. (2017).
13 Reading research proposals over the years, I (Stone) have often observed that scholars sometimes
confuse assumptions and research questions. In such a situation, the scholar will begin by describing
certain assumptions about a body of music to be studied. As the research questions are presented,
however, it very quickly becomes evident that a concept stated as an assumption is also being posed as
a research question. While unexpected data may eventually force the scholar to question one of her
basic assumptions, the scholar must, from the start, be clear about how she is situating her investiga-
tion and must separate assumptions from research questions.
14 The anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997: 2) make a related point when they argue
that the study objects of anthropology and other social science disciplines are not sharply separated
from one another, and what defines their field is not its object of study but rather its methodology—a
commitment to fieldwork.
15 A variety of scholars have written on the disciplinary history of ethnomusicology, including Merriam
(1969), Nettl (1979, 2010), Nettl and Bohlman (1991), and Ziegler (2010). For a review of additional
sources on this topic, see Nettl (2010: xvi).
  Given the book’s focus on the contemporary discipline, we have chosen not to devote chapters
to theoretical traditions that are no longer actively pursued in the field today. It will, however, be
worthwhile to talk briefly about two clusters of theory that shaped thinking about music and culture
in the predecessor discipline to ethnomusicology (the comparative musicology of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries) and in ethnomusicology’s early years.
 Introduction  21
  Analyzing recordings and instruments brought back to Europe by Western explorers, the scholars
who established the discipline of comparative musicology in the late nineteenth century sought to
make sense of the diverse musical systems of the world’s peoples. The theoretical foundations of their
work came from the anthropology of the day: cultural evolutionism (which posited a linear develop-
ment from unsophisticated “primitives” to “civilized” Europeans) and diffusionism (which sought to
trace the history of the movement of culture traits among “primitive” societies). While early compar-
ative musicology was a complex and highly interdisciplinary endeavor, its practitioners were products
of their time. Like the anthropologists from whom they derived their theoretical paradigms, their
work was deeply colonial in its outlook. They imagined non-Western peoples as “living ancestors”—
unsophisticated primitives stuck an earlier phase of cultural development. Within both anthropology
and ethnomusicology, cultural evolutionism and the diffusionist approaches of the late nineteenth
century have been thoroughly discredited. On the history of comparative musicology, see especially
Nettl and Bohlman (1991), as well as some of the original source readings in Shelemay (1990a, 1990b).
It is worth noting that some contemporary scholars have sought to revive the discipline of compara-
tive musicology, albeit stripped of its colonial visions (e.g. Savage and Brown 2013, Giannattasio and
Giuriati 2017).
  In anthropology, cultural evolutionism and diffusionism gave way to functionalism (e.g. ­Malinowski
1925) and later structural-functionalism (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1933, Bascom 1954), which ­understood
culture as a complex system of interacting parts that allowed societies to maintain social cohesion
and reproduce themselves over time. The theoretical generalizations made by functionalists and
­structural-functionalism in anthropology and ethnomusicology were often based on data collected
in detailed fieldwork, and the ideas that they developed could be highly complex. But imagining
non-Western peoples as fundamentally static, treating social conflict as fundamentally dysfunctional,
and ­subordinating the agency of situated actors to the imperatives of social stability, functionalism and
structural-functionalism likewise betrayed a colonial perspective. Structural-functionalism was cen-
tral to social and cultural anthropology throughout the mid-twentieth century; while it was never a
­dominant theoretical orientation within ethnomusicology, its ideas influenced a number of writings in
the field. Elements of structural-functionalism can be found in Merriam’s Anthropology of Music (1964),
as well as articles like Waterman (1956).
  No contemporary scholar would explicitly support cultural evolutionism, the diffusionism of
­n ineteenth-century anthropology, or structural-functionalism, but many would argue that elements
of a colonial viewpoint are still at play in the field today. In that context, scholars of many kinds seek
to decolonize ethnomusicology, exposing and eradicating the elements of colonial thinking that
­remain in the field’s theory and practice.
16 On theories of embodiment, see Text Box 1.1. On practice theory, see Text Box 2.1.
17 Our field has a long history of important programmatic works and a living body of contemporary
theoretical writings, and none of this is to suggest that ethnomusicologists should stop themselves
from writing works that are primarily intended for an audience of other ethnomusicologists. (Indeed,
we imagine that one of the main audiences of this book will be other ethnomusicologists.) However,
as we have argued above, academic disciplines do not divide the world into distinct phenomena, with
each claiming sole rights to a unique object of study. Cast in their widest terms, many of the topics
that ethnomusicologists address and the theoretical questions we seek to answer are part and parcel of
a much wider domain. In writing this book, we have conceptualized our subject matter as both these
broader sets of theoretical dialogs and the theoretical work from within disciplinary ethnomusicol-
ogy, as well as the complex interrelations between them.

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1 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches
to Ethnomusicology
From Abstract Structure to Situated
Practice
Jayson Beaster-Jones

One of the first issues that I and other ethnomusicologists confront in the classroom is the
persistent fallacy that music is a “universal language,” the meanings of which transcend the
particularities of musical systems, cultural contexts, and processes of social and historical
change. This idea misunderstands language as much as it misunderstands music, and despite
its implied assertion of the social value of music as a way to unify humankind, misunder-
stands the meanings generated by both forms of expression. Part of the problem here is the
tendency to think about music as a thing, rather than as a process (see Attali 1985; Small
1998; Turino 2008; Rahaim, this volume), which is tied to larger questions about how ide-
ologies influence the way that listeners experience sound as music or noise.
Few ethnomusicologists today would agree that “music is universal language,” but despite
the misunderstandings that this idea entails, it raises a number of useful questions. What do
we mean when we say that music “means” or “communicates” an idea? How does music
mean or communicate? What kinds of relationships exist among music, language, and other
forms of communication?1 Exploring these topics, ethnomusicologists have pursued lin-
guistic analogies for music, as these analogies provide insights into the ways that musicians,
listeners, and scholars have thought about music as a mode or system of communication.
This chapter will begin by describing some of the key theoretical debates in the field of lin-
guistics, including the notion of the linguistic sign, the role of structure in language, the idea
of linguistic competence, and larger issues of language and meaning. I will not endeavor to
summarize the entire field of linguistics in this chapter; instead, I will focus upon linguistic
theories that have had particular relevance for ethnomusicology and allied disciplines. I sug-
gest that over the course of the twentieth century, many humanistically oriented linguists
have shifted away from thinking about language as an abstract, decontextualized cognitive
system to emphasize language-in-use as a form of situated, and situating, interaction. Ethno-
musicologists interested in music communication have, I argue, followed a similar trajectory
by moving away from decontextualized analyses of musical structure to approaches that
examine the situated meanings and values of music in performance contexts. Exploring this
history, the chapter discusses some of the adaptations of linguistic theory in ethnomusicol-
ogy and applies ideas from this work to the musical and social analysis of the Hindi language
song “Pal pal hai bhaari,” from the 2003 Bollywood film Swades.

The Field of Linguistic Theory

Published three years after his death, the Course on General Linguistics by the Swiss scholar
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is the most significant contribution to the field of struc-
tural linguistics in the twentieth century ([1916] 1998). Based on class notes taken by his
students, the Course made observations about the structure and operation of language that
were adopted and developed by generations of linguists and influenced the thinking of
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  27
scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Central to Saussure’s work is the distinc-
tion between language (langue) and speech (parole). He used the first term to refer to the
system of a language as a whole, while he used the second term to refer to the particular
utterances, manifestations, or performances that are outcomes of that system. For Saussure,
language is the product of a community (rather than an isolated individual), relatively stable
within a given historical moment, and governed by a system of rules that determine correct
performance in speech. The consequences of the language/speech distinction are profound:
because language is a system produced by a community and distinct from any given per-
formance, one cannot observe language directly. Instead, one must observe performances
of language in order to map the system that underlies it, a process akin to using individual
pings of sonar to map an ocean floor as a way to predict the trajectories of ocean currents.
More than just conceptualizing language as a system, Saussure created the field of ­semiology,
the study of sign systems in social life.2 He argued that languages and other systems of
communication are built on, around, and through signs. A combination of cognitive and
physiological phenomena, Saussurian signs emerge from mental representations that occur
in relationship to things (objects, ideas, and so forth) that exist in the world. Sign are com-
posed of two parts: the “signifier,” which is a group of sounds or images (e.g. the sound of
the word “tree” or the letters t-r-e-e) and the “signified,” which is an object in the world
(e.g. trees themselves). In language, Saussure argued, the relationship between signifier and
signified is arbitrary, by which he meant that there is no necessary or inherent connection
between, say, a tree in one’s field of view and the French word arbre as it is written or spoken.
Low-level signifiers have an arbitrary relationship to their signifieds, but at higher levels of
linguistic structure, signifiers become less arbitrary; for example, the individual components
of a compound word like landscape (“land” and “scape”) may be arbitrary, but the compound
word itself clearly is not. Additionally, Saussure notes that it is not just the signifiers that vary
from one language to the next but the signifieds as well. For example, the Sanskrit sign sa ṅgīt
and the English sign music have different signifiers (the word sa ṅgīt and the word music). In
addition, the signifieds of those two signs also differ, as the sign sa ṅgīt includes phenomena
that in English would be captured by the concepts of both music and dance.
Another central feature of Saussure’s semiology is the distinction between sign meanings
and sign values. A sign’s meaning is defined by the connection between a signified and an
idea existing independent of language as a self-contained conceptual unit. A sign’s value,
however, is defined strictly through its contrasts with the other signs in the system. For
example, the meaning of the sign “tree” might be positively defined by listing its attrib-
utes (a large plant with roots, a trunk, leaves, etc.); however, its value is defined negatively
and in opposition to other signs in the sign system (cf. “bush,” “shrub,” “vine,” etc.). This
notion of linguistic value is critical to Saussure’s larger view that linguistic analysis should
focus on structure rather than content, a perspective that he applied to other aspects of lan-
guage, like speech sounds and grammar. On the surface, this distinction between meaning
and value might not seem important, yet it and Saussure’s broader emphasis on systemic
contrasts in language gave his approach the power to explain large-scale linguistic transfor-
mations within language communities. By attending to the way that signs necessarily exist
in relationship to other signs and have their values determined through these relationships,
large shifts in a language’s phonemics (its system of speech sounds), morphology and syntax
(the structure of words and sentences in a language), or semantics (word meanings) can be
explained in elegant theoretical terms, with even minor changes creating effects that ripple
across the system as a whole. These large-scale shifts are difficult to explain if language and
its meanings are understood only through its positive attributes. Identifying the systemic
property of language was central to Saussure’s project of transforming linguistics into a
science, which was eminently desirable for scholars of his generation.
28  Jayson Beaster-Jones
Finally, Saussure notes that language involves both an abstract set of relationships and a
system of classification. That is, in addition to containing the rules that make speech co-
herent and meaningful, language serves as a means for classifying the world. For instance,
Saussure notes that English speakers see a relationship among the terms river, stream, and
creek, which are all categories of moving water based upon their relative size; in contrast,
the French language parcels the space of moving water into different terms, where flueve
and rivière are differentiated both on their relative size and whether they flow into an ocean.
This insight, combined with the notion that humans utilize many different kinds of signs
and sign systems (of which, Saussure argues, language is predominant), led scholars in a va-
riety of disciplines to explore the inter-relations among sign systems. Applying these ideas
about structure and classification to the study of literature, kinship, food, and a wide range
of other topics, scholars in an array of academic disciplines expanded structural linguistics
into the broad intellectual movement of structuralism, which I will examine in further
detail below. In addition, many analysts have attempted to apply Saussure’s ideas about the
arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified to music, with greater or lesser success.
Like language, music seems to operate through abstract, structural relationships among mu-
sical sounds. Accordingly, Saussure’s idea of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier
and the signified was particularly influential in ethnomusicology.
In the mid-twentieth century, the most important linguist to develop the Saussurian
conception of structural linguistics was Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). Like Saussure, Chomsky
is fundamentally interested in pursuing a scientific study of language, as well as explor-
ing the relationship between language and the mind. Starting with the observation that
every human cultural group uses language, Chomsky proposed the notion of a “universal
­g rammar”—an innate, biologically based capacity among humans for language, one that
emerges from their largely unconscious use of language structures to produce correct sen-
tences. Despite their apparent differences, Chomsky argued that all human languages are
based on a shared “deep structure,” an underlying pattern of organization that is built into
the human mind. The rules of each individual language are a product of this deep structure.
Particular utterances have a “surface structure,” which emerges from the underlying rules
of the language in question, which, in turn, depend upon the deep structure of language
in general (Chomsky 1965). While the universal human capacity for language acquisition
is not an especially controversial idea these days, the relationship between these structuring
principles and linguistic meaning is subject to extensive debate (e.g. Lakoff 1971, 1987), and
Chomsky has adapted his theory several times to account for new developments in linguis-
tics, psychology, and cognitive science (e.g. Chomsky and Lasnik 1977; Chomsky 1981,
1986, 1995). Another Chomskian idea that has been adopted by some ethnomusicologists is
the notion of “generative grammar,” which offers a very specific vision of the way a system
of language rules produces sentences. Observing that humans can create an infinite number
of sentences from a finite set of grammatical rules, Chomsky argued that language rules
must be recursive, with one set of rules nesting within other sets to produce the complex
sentences found in everyday speech. To take a very simplified example, one could imagine
an English grammatical rule that states that sentences may have a subject, a verb, and an ob-
ject (e.g. Chris likes music); in this context, a second-order rule might state that one could
recursively replace the sentence’s object with another subject, verb, and object (e.g. Chris
likes it when Jan makes music). These notions of generative grammar and recursive rules
became useful for the analysis of creativity and creative play within the operation of systems
like language and music (e.g. Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985), though they do not account for
the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of language described by linguists like Roman Jakobson,
who I discuss below. Finally, Chomsky refined Saussure’s ideas of langue and parole by
drawing a distinction between “linguistic competence” (a speaker-hearer’s knowledge of a
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  29
language) and “linguistic performance” (the use of language in a particular context)
(1965: 4). By accounting for the relative level of the speaker’s or listener’s ability to com-
prehend and perform language when its structure and meanings remain consistent, this
distinction helps to explain how miscommunication occurs in everyday language use.
The work of structural linguists like Saussure and Chomsky was one of the main inspirations
for structuralism, an intellectual movement that shaped a wide range of scholarly disciplines in
the twentieth century. Like earlier theorists who argued for an underlying rationality of human
cultural experience, the structuralists were concerned with understanding the cognitive systems
that they believed had language-like properties and produced the cultural forms (e.g. myth,
music, food, or kinship systems) of each individual society. Because systemic properties were
common to the cognitive systems that produced a society’s bodies of myth or music, the analyst,
it was believed, could compare seemingly disparate phenomena from within a society and un-
cover the properties and organizational principles that they shared. By this logic, situated social
contexts of use were unimportant because it was the underlying structural mechanisms that were
primarily responsible for generating performances. By aggregating together many performances
of key cultural texts, analysts sought to reveal the underlying structural-organizational principles
that produced them. These principles, they argued, could ultimately be reduced to sets of bi-
nary oppositions through which all forms of cultural expression might be coded and compared.
Mapping out these structures of binaries enabled direct comparisons between systems, which,
the structuralists supposed, would enable researchers to expose cultural universals in ways that
would be relevant to scientific enquiry. The foremost proponent of this approach was the French
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed structuralism into a broad-based theoretical
orientation that spoke to fundamental questions in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. [1949]
1969, 1955, [1962] 1963, [1962] 1966, [1964] 1969). Drawing on structuralism, among other ap-
proaches, ethnomusicologists like John Blacking (1974) and Steven Feld ([1982] 2012) compared
the structure of the music or myths that they found in their fieldsites with the social structures of
the societies that they studied; in so doing, they hoped to unveil the otherwise hidden logics of
culture, as well as gain insight into the operation of the human mind.3
The insights of structural linguistics and the subsequent growth of the structuralist
movement had a strong influence on ethnographic work from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Within anthropology, for example, the interest in language and social categories spawned
the areas of cognitive anthropology and ethnoscience. Building on Saussure’s ideas about
classification, anthropologists in these traditions studied cultural and linguistic taxonomies
(hierarchically organized systems of categories) to understand how language influences the
way the people from a particular cultural group understand and represent the world (e.g.
Berlin and Kay 1969; Conklin 1973; Tambiah 1976; and Lakoff 1987; see also Whorf 1964).4
Focusing on abstract ordering principles, these scholars argued that while individual cul-
tural groups differ greatly in the way that they classify phenomena like kinship, flora and
fauna, or color, the underlying principle of organization by taxonomy is universal. Taking
the notion of language categories in a somewhat different direction, other scholars deployed
the idea of “speech genres” developed by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975)
to understand how the categories of language use within a linguistic community (e.g. a
tweet, a note, a memorandum, a manifesto, a treatise) shape the structure and meaning of
discourse within that community (see Bakhtin [1979] 1987; Silverstein and Urban 1996;
and Lee 1997; on Bakhtinian approaches to voice, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).
In the 1970s, structural linguistics and the approaches to anthropological work that it in-
formed came under strong and sustained critique. For example, Saussure treated language as
a synchronic system (a set of rules operating uniformly at a single historical moment), because
he believed that if linguistics was to be a science, it needed to begin by revealing the structural
processes at the center of human communication and work outward from there. This is not to
30  Jayson Beaster-Jones
say that he deemed diachronic analysis (the study of language change over time) and s­ituated
activities of speaking as unimportant; rather, he expected that the study of those topics would
follow from the systematic study of synchronic language structure. Saussure’s 1970s critics
argued that the focus on synchronic systems elides much of what is important in language,
­including the way that linguistic performance unfolds over time, the production and recep-
tion of affect, and the varied ways that people from differing social roles may experience an
interaction, as well as broader issues of embodiment in language (Turner 1977; Silverstein
1979). A second group of scholars criticized the structural linguist’s assumption that languages
and linguistic communities could be treated as if they were internally homogeneous and
sharply separated from their neighbors. These scholars argued that taking such a view prevents
the linguist from accounting for the ways that languages inflect each other through, for exam-
ple, loan words, pidgins, or creoles (Irvine and Gal 2000). Sharpening the political critique,
scholars working in an area called the politics of representation accused structural linguistics
of privileging the views of Western analysts over local perspectives and producing colonialist
ethnographies filled with structures, rather than people (Marcus and Fischer 1986).5 Thus,
the ideological debates, conflicts, and contradictions within a linguistic community tended to
be excluded from the analyses of structural linguistics or were relegated to footnotes. In this
context, the elegant systems that these scholars used to describe languages were often incom-
prehensible to the interlocutors who provided the very data upon which those systems were
based. Finally, one might add that structural linguistics tended to overlook other important
components of verbal interaction, such as prosody (the rhythm and pitch of speaking) and
paralanguage (gestures and other embodied performances that accompany talk), features that
are similar to music but are not easily described in structural terms.

Text Box 1.1  Embodiment and Practice across the

Disciplines

The theme of embodiment is central to a wide range of currents in contemporary

social thought. To say that a phenomenon like mind, text, or social life is embodied
is to say that it necessarily depends on our existence as corporeal beings and the par-
ticularities of our physical bodies. In modern philosophy, the interest in embodiment
was a reaction against the dualistic ontology of René Descartes (1596–1650), which
understood mind and body as completely separate orders of reality ([1641] 1990).
From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962) to Michel
Foucault’s writings on the body and power ([1975] 1979), George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson’s work at the meeting place of cognitive science and philosophy (1999), and
beyond, a wide range of thinkers have emphasized the embodied nature of social
phenomena. (For a useful collection of readings on approaches to embodiment in
the tradition of Continental European philosophy, see Welton 1999.) In this volume,
Sugarman’s chapter on gender and sexuality, Waterman’s chapter on performance and
improvisation, Meizel and Daughtry’s chapter on sound and voice, my chapter on
phenomenology, and Rahaim’s chapter on participation discuss the varied approaches
to embodiment that contemporary scholars have taken. The theme of embodiment is
closely related to that of social practice, and the increasing interest in situated conduct
that Beaster-Jones discusses here is closely related to trends recounted in the chapters
by Sugarman, Waterman, Meizel and Daughtry, myself, and Rahaim. See also the
discussion of practice theory in Text Box 2.1. —Harris M. Berger
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  31
Situated Language-in-Use
In the context of these critiques, scholars in the 1960s from the fields of sociolinguistics
and linguistic anthropology began to pay much more attention to language use and lin-
guistic performance. Distinct from the syntactic and semantic approaches to language,
these pragmatic approaches to linguistic analysis move past language structure in order
to examine the ways in which language-in-use is necessarily situated within—and po-
tentially transformative of—its social and historical contexts.6 One of the most important
scholars to develop these approaches was Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), who inspired
researchers to examine speech events and the way language is used in social interaction.
Jakobson argued that there are six language factors present in any given speech event, each
of which has a corresponding language function. He described the factors in this way:

The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the

message requires a CONTEXT referred to [that is] graspable by the addressee, and [is]
either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, com-
mon to the addresser and addressee… and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel
and psychological connection between the addresser and addressee, enabling both of
them to enter and stay in communication.
([1976] 1990: 73, emphasis in original)

Several fundamental insights emerge from this perspective, not the least of which are that the
meanings of speech cannot be isolated from its performance contexts and that the analysis of
speech events must take into account the physical, material, and psychological connections be-
tween speaker and hearer. From these factors, Jakobson derives six communicative functions.
Acknowledging at the outset that speech acts almost always involve more than one function
at a time, he suggests that in any performance of language, a functional hierarchy is in oper-
ation, whereby one function predominates but the other five continue to play a part.7 Unlike
structural linguists, Jakobson took a keen interest in verbal art and argued for interdisciplinary
collaborations between linguists and literary scholars. Expanding the intellectual tools of lin-
guistics to account for language’s poetic function, Jakobson explored the aesthetics of everyday
speech and showed how or why certain word combinations might sound better than others
(e.g. why the rhythm produced by the word order of my last name, “Jayson Beaster-Jones,”
made it preferable to the alternative word order, “Jayson Jones-Beaster”). (See Table 1.1.)
Following Jakobson’s ideas about the functions of language-in-use, the pioneering linguist and
anthropologist Dell Hymes (1927–2009) reoriented Chomsky’s ideas of linguistic competence,

Table 1.1  Jakobson’s Model of Language Functions

Function Orientation Purpose

Referential Context Communicate information, express denotative (direct)

meanings
Emotive Addresser Express the affective relationship of the speaker to their
message
Conative Addressee Influence the thoughts or behavior of the addressee
Phatic Contact Establish, prolong, discontinue communication; check that the
channel is intact
Metalinguistic Code Communicate about the operation of language itself, clarify
language with language
Poetic Message Perform the aesthetic dimension of a speech event or verbal
art in ways that are sequential and unfold over time
32  Jayson Beaster-Jones
urging scholars to go beyond the study of syntax and semantics, and attend to “communicative
competence,” the cultural knowledge that speakers have about performance of appropriate lin-
guistic utterances in context (1972). This incorporation of the pragmatic function of language
into linguistic analysis has had a major impact on anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology.
Richard Bauman (1984), for example, expanded Hymes’s framework into an influential con-
ception of linguistic performance that includes not just the transmission of referential content,
but also the manner in which performances take place, the ethical responsibilities of the per-
former to the audience, and the aesthetic and evaluative dimensions of performance.8 Closely
linked with this work is the theory of “framing” developed by anthropologist Gregory Bateson
(1904–1980) and the related notion of “keying” found in the work of sociologist Erving ­Goffman
(1922–1983). These theories show how utterances can carry vastly different meanings depend-
ing upon how they are used within different contexts of social interaction (Bateson [1955] 1972;
Goffman 1979). For example, the utterance “I love you” might be understood by an interlocutor
in any number of ways, depending upon how the speaker places it in context (e.g. as an insult,
a joke, a bon mot, as reference to an earlier interaction, or the words of a fictional character in a
play). Like Hymes, the approaches of Bateson and Goffman have been highly influential, help-
ing linguistic anthropologists and other language scholars reveal how meaning is shaped by and
situated within larger social contexts.9
Taking this notion of language performance in a different direction, the British philosopher
J. L. Austin (1911–1960) proposed a theory of “speech acts,” which describes the ways that ut-
terances have meanings and consequences beyond the operation of language as a system (1962).
At the heart of Austin’s work is the distinction between “constative” and “performative” ut-
terances: constatives describe a state of affairs and have a truth value, accurately or inaccurately
representing a situation in the world. In contrast, performatives create or change a state of affairs
in the world. For example, the performative utterance “You are under arrest” does not merely
describe one’s status in the legal system; rather, the utterance establishes that status. If the person
stating “you are under arrest” is a police officer (and if other conditions are met), their utterance
of those words actually changes the addressee’s legal status. Austin goes on to define three kinds
of speech acts: “locutionary acts,” which generate meaning through the regular operation of
language to convey information; “illocutionary acts,” which carry along with them a certain
force (e.g. as a result of saying “I promise that I will… ,” I am bound to certain actions); and
“perlocutionary acts,” which have effects upon the emotions, thoughts, or actions of a receiver
(e.g. an appeal such as “I am begging you to come with me to the party”). By revealing the
power of language to establish and transform social relationships, Austin’s speech act theory has
had a tremendous impact on the humanities and social sciences.

Text Box 1.2  Linguistics and Semiotics in the Context

of Analytic Philosophy

The narrative of diverging intellectual movements that Beaster-Jones describes here

(i.e. structural linguistics versus language-in-use perspectives) was part of a broad, trans-
disciplinary trend in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, the desire
for scientific rigor that was so prominent in the work of structural linguistics also ani-
mated thinkers in philosophy. Following foundational work by Gottlob Frege (1848–
1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), scholars in philosophy’s analytic tradition
developed modern symbolic logic and specialized logical languages with the goals of es-
tablishing logic as the foundation for mathematics and answering longstanding questions
in philosophy (Frege [1879] 1967, [1884] 1974; Whitehead and Russell [1910–1913] 1962).
Ludwig ­Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was central to this tradition. His great early work,
the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ([1921] 1922), understood language solely as a means for
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  33

referring to facts in the world and of articulating logical and mathematical truths; elab-
orating this perspective through seven propositions, the Tractatus sought to resolve the
traditional problems of philosophy by purifying language of any element that muddied
the referential waters. Scholars in a movement called “logical positivism” sought to carry
forward the line of thinking that the Tractatus set out (e.g. Carnap [1928] 1967 and the
essays collected in Ayer 1959), but over time, a number of analytic philosophers began
to develop ideas that, at least partially, worked against these impulses. Spearheaded by
Wittgenstein’s later work ([1953] 2009) and the ideas of J. L. Austin ([1962] 1965), the
tradition of ordinary language philosophy shifted attention away from logical founda-
tions and linguistic reference, and sought to understand the way language is employed in
quotidian contexts and the place of language in social life. Austin is not the only point of
contact between this history and the one that Beaster-Jones traces, as Gregory Bateson’s
“Theory of Play and F ­ antasy” ­(Bateson [1955] 1972) is explicitly framed as a response to
Whitehead and Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists. This strain of
research ­contributed not only to the development of the language-in-use perspectives that
Beaster-Jones describes here, but to the field of performance studies, which is discussed in
Ellen ­Waterman’s chapter in this book.
It is worth emphasizing that ordinary language philosophy and the language-in-
use perspectives that Beaster-Jones discusses did not in any sense erase or supersede
the other traditions. While few scholars today would call what they do logical positiv-
ism, a great number of philosophers work in the tradition of Frege and Russell, where
they seek to solve philosophical problems by analyzing and clarifying language and
forward research in symbolic logic. Structural linguistics likewise continues to be an
actively going concern. —Harris M. Berger

One final language-in-use paradigm that has informed ethnographers of language

and music is derived from the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839–1914). Like Saussure, Peirce understood the sign as the medium of human cogni-
tion and communication, but in most other respects the two thinkers differ substantially.
While Saussure’s semiology offers broad insights into the operation of language systems,
Peirce’s semiotic draws attention to the interweaving of language and other modes of com-
munication, and provides an elegant way of theorizing the values of—and interactions
among—many kinds of phenomena. The Peircean semiotic gives scholars a sophisticated
understanding of human meaning-making practices and has long been used in classical
American philosophy, film, and literature studies. However, his work was not widely
adopted in linguistic and cultural anthropology until the 1980s, and in ethnomusicology in
the 1990s, when it attracted widespread attention as an alternative to Saussurian semiology.
While Pierce’s ideas are enormously powerful, parsing his writing is not easy, and to appre-
ciate his work, readers must reconfigure their understanding of many everyday words and con-
cepts. The Peircean semiotic rests upon the notion that humans perceive, experience, remember,
and think with and through signs. As a basic unit of analysis, the sign is, in Peirce’s terms,
“something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” ([1916] 1960:
vol. 2, 228). As a medium of thought and expression, signs can emerge from internal sources
(e.g. memories, beliefs) or external ones (e.g. sensory stimuli, actions), and because cognition op-
erates through the collaboration of internal and external signs, no sign exists in isolation. Rather,
signs necessarily co-occur with other signs. The Peircean sign emerges from the interactions
of three parts: an object, a sign vehicle (sometime shortened to “a sign”), and an interpretant.10
An object can be anything in the world, from the abstract color blue, to a corporeal object like a
pencil or a saxophone, the snap of a can opener opening a tuna can, the perception of the dialect
of someone’s spoken French as having an Algerian accent, the affect signaled by the timbre of
34  Jayson Beaster-Jones
Table 1.2  Peirce’s Three Main Sign Types

Sign Type Object-Sign Vehicle Relation Examples

Icon Resemblance Line drawing of a cat, which may be an icon of an

actual cat or cats in general
The sound of tympani, which may be intended or
interpreted as an (auditory) icon of thunder
Index Causation, co-occurrence Weather vane indexes wind direction
Dropping the /r/ sound in speech may index that
the speaker is from New York City
Symbol Human convention $ is a symbol for American currency
The Spanish word “el búho” means “owl” in English

a voice, or the corpus of American constitutional law. A sign vehicle is something that represents
the object or the qualities of the object in some way, yet is also constrained or determined by
the qualities or properties of the object; an interpretant is a consequence or representation of the
object-sign relationship, which might include, among other things, an action, behavior, inter-
pretation, or emotion. Peirce’s best-known work describes ten possible sign types, and his later
writings delineated sixty-six categories of signs (see Atkin 2010); however, most scholars today
work with a subset of three of his sign types (Table 1.2).
According to Peirce, these sign types are related to one another through nested hierar-
chies, such that lower order signs are built into higher order signs: a symbol is composed of
indexes, and indexes are composed of icons. This insight helps to explain how complicated
signs like a cross might operate at many levels simultaneously (e.g. as a conventional sym-
bol of the body of Christian philosophical thought, as an index of the location of a church
in a skyline, as an icon of the wooden device on which Jesus was crucified). ­Linguistic
structure might also be explained in Peircean terms as a system based upon the symbolic
(i.e. arbitrary and conventional) connection between sound concept and object. While
symbols certainly play a role in language, most real-world speech performance operates
at the iconic and indexical level, with spoken words and gestures frequently serving as
icons or indexes that reference or constitute the speech interaction as it is taking place
(Lee 1997). Thus, in verbal interactions, the word choices and tone of voice that a speaker
uses may index the nature of the relationship between speaker and hearer (e.g. contrast
the way one speaks to one’s child with the deferential approach one might use in speaking
to a king or other head of state). Grammatical structures in Romance languages, to use
another example, index the gender of the speaker or the perceived gender of the hearer,
while word choice or the pronunciation of particular vowels might index the regional or
class background of the speaker.
Studies of language-in-use draw our attention to the ways that language itself is much
more than its semantic meanings or the syntactic structures that are shared by an ideal
speaker and an ideal listener, as described by Saussure and Chomsky.11 As the critics of
structural linguistics have argued, we miss the point of language performance if we limit
our analysis to semantics and syntax: language performance is also the performance of
many varieties of sociability. Taken in slightly different terms, one might see semiotic
analysis as a framework for understanding the ways individuals perceive and derive mean-
ings in and through language performance as a mode of social life. Such an approach
enables an analyst to begin to address the ways in which signs that reside outside of the
semantic or syntactic domain (e.g. color, noise, style, timbre) might have manifold sig-
nificances and interconnections with other signs, without reducing these meanings to
structural or linguistic analogs.
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  35
Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Music
Like language, music has long been conceptualized as a mode of communication, and a
variety of scholars have used ideas from linguistics and semiotics to understand meaning
making in music. Drawing an analogy with the semantic function of language, the com-
poser and music theorist Wilson Coker (1972), for example, attempted to explain mean-
ing in music by developing a musical lexicon that had a stable set of meanings. Seeking
analogies with the syntactic function of language, others tried to identify the Chomskian
“deep structure” of particular musical styles (e.g. Perlman and Greenblatt 1981; Lerdahl and
Jackendoff 1985). Musicologists applied structuralist approaches to examine composition
in Western art music (Tarasti 1987; Nattiez 1990; Dougherty 1994; Hatten 1995), while a
broad range of scholars have borrowed ideas from Peirce to understand musical processes
(Boilés 1982; Tagg 1987, 1993; Monson 1996; Sawyer 1996; Dueck 2013a, 2013b). As in
linguistics, ethnomusicology has seen a slow transition across the span of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries from approaches that treat music as an abstract cognitive system to
approaches that examine music in/as situated practice.
While ideas from linguistics and semiotics can be highly valuable in the study of mu-
sic, they cannot be employed in a direct or uncritical fashion. To develop useful insights,
one needs a nuanced perspective that acknowledges both the similarities and differences
between music and language, treats them as interrelated but distinct sign systems, and
acknowledges the often ineffable qualities of musical experience. Such an approach neces-
sarily requires many levels of analysis. When asked, for example, “At what level can we say
that music is meaningful?” one might first point out that by defining any given sound as
“music,” one has already ascribed meaning to it, insofar as the categorization of any sonic
phenomenon (e.g. the sound produced by a violin, human voices in Qur’anic recitation, or
an automobile engine) always requires taking a particular ideological stance about what is
or is not music.12 One might also point out that, at any level of analysis, particular kinds
of aural phenomena might operate as signs and be imbued with musical meanings. These
meanings might emerge, for example, from the perception of harmonies, rhythms, timbres,
textures, styles, or ornaments. If one does not take a careful approach to these issues, treat-
ing music and language as interrelated systems of human communication can lead to serious
conceptual difficulties.13
Until the 1990s, structural linguistic approaches to music analysis were relatively com-
mon. In many cultural traditions, there are musical sounds that retain relatively stable
meanings and seem to operate in parallel to the semantic function of words; as such, some
musical systems appear to have something like the referential function of language and
operate as a “speech surrogate” (Stern 1957). George Herzog’s documentation of Liberian
drum languages (1934, 1945) is one example of ethnomusicological work that takes this
approach. Similarly, scholars in musicology and music theory have analyzed musical motifs
and harmonies, such as Wagnerian leitmotifs, as referring to particular kinds of extramusical
meanings (Meyer 1960; Hacohen and Wagner 1997). However, this apparent referential
function in music differs distinctly from that of language, because language can, through its
metalinguistic function, be used to discuss, frame, or refer to other linguistic phenomena
(e.g. in reported speech or word definitions) and does so in ways that do not have a direct
parallel in musical communication—at least without resorting to language as a mediating
communicative system. Another adaptation of the music/language analogy was through the
analysis of underlying musical structures as a kind of syntax. One notable example is Robin
Cooper’s application of Chomsky’s notions of deep structure and generative grammar to the
raga system found in Indian classical musics (1977). In those traditions, the system of ragas
allows the musician to generate melodies, in part, by drawing on a set of melodic modes.
36  Jayson Beaster-Jones
These modes systematically govern the relationships among tones and musical phrases, pro-
viding the listener with a way to determine which composition is being performed at any
given time (e.g. Rag Bhairavi or Rag Yaman) and whether it is being performed correctly,
accurately, and/or appropriately.14 Drawing from Chomsky’s paradigm, Cooper classified
particular ragas within the larger system in terms of their modal content. In much the same
way that sentences can be correctly generated from an underlying grammatical structure,
most raga performances, Cooper argued, can be correctly generated from an underlying
modal structure that would be coherent given the rules of that system. Unfortunately, like
other kinds of structural analysis, Cooper’s discussion reduced ragas to a species of mode
without accounting for the short melodic phrases and extramusical associations (e.g. times
of the day, seasons, gods) that ragas also carry along with them.
While semantic and syntactic calques of music gained prominence with the rise of struc-
turalism in the 1950s and began to wane with that movement’s decline in the 1980s, the
tendency to analyze music as a kind of “text” has a much longer history and continues to
play a prominent role in the disciplines of musicology and music theory. Many scholars in
these fields treat musical scores in Western staff notion as their primary study object and
treat score analysis as their primary methodology. The analysis of musical scores, they claim,
reveals the formal organization of individual works or larger bodies of music associated
with particular composers, historical periods, or genres. While this way of doing scholar-
ship, which we might loosely refer to as “textualism,” can be a fruitful means of conducting
music analysis in the context of certain periods of Western art music, it is subject to many
of the same critiques that have been made of structural linguistics and structuralism more
generally. A textualist analysis of the verse/chorus form of a song, for example, does not
provide many insights into other dimensions of musical meaning, like vocal or instrumental
timbre, individual performative interpretations of the text, or the unfolding of music over
time, inter alia. Most importantly, textualist work lends few insights into the way that mu-
sical sound is received by listeners, the way that music is reproduced within and framed by
situated or large-scale social contexts, or the production and reception of affect, which is an
important component of musical experiences in many cultures. Finally, the vast majority of
the music produced by humans is simply not notated, nor is it readily reduced to notation.15
One important entrée into the relationship between music and language that moves be-
yond the textualist approach is Steven Feld’s landmark work, Sound and Sentiment. This mon-
ograph is important in the history of ethnomusicology for combining the structural analysis
of cultural taxonomies with language-in-use approaches and richly evocative, humanistic
ethnography. Originally published in 1982 and currently in its third edition (2012), Sound
and Sentiment is a study of the music and culture of the Bosavi clan of the Kaluli peoples of
Papua New Guinea. Feld conducted much of his fieldwork in conjunction with Edward and
Bambi Schieffelin, linguistic anthropologists who worked on Kaluli language and cultural
practices over many decades. Tracing out the linkages between local ideas about poetics
and the genres of weeping, song, and sacred narrative, Feld draws on structuralist insights
to argue that the Kaluli myth “The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird” is the “metaphoric
base for Kaluli aesthetics” (2012: 14). The early chapters of the book explore the meanings
that birds have in Kaluli cultural practice and provide detailed discussions of Kaluli folk
taxonomies of birds and bird songs, the local significance of individual bird species, and
the ways that avian soundscapes are tied to indigenous understandings of space and the
temporality of daily and seasonal events. Feld shows how Kaluli understand the sounds of
particular birds as the voices of deceased ancestors, who in death carry on social lives that
are parallel to their former human lives. Drawing all of this together, Feld argues that birds
and bird songs are the means by which the Kaluli place themselves within—and make sense
of—the world around them. The analysis of music making later in the book centers on the
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  37
call of the muni bird (Beautiful Fruitdove, ptilinopus pulchellus). Feld shows how the sound
of the bird’s call is imitated in and provides the melodic structure for an important genre of
Kaluli lament. A musically stylized form of weeping, the laments focus on the names and
memories of the deceased and are composed with the intent of moving listeners to tears.
In Feld’s analysis, bird song is the structuring principle for women’s weeping, weeping is
further stylized into song, and the women’s song is, in turn, used to move men to tears.
Beyond its structural analysis of myth, Sound and Sentiment has been foundational in il-
lustrating the relationships among affect, sound, and linguistic and musical classification, as
well as in showing how those relationships are, as in language, unconsciously performed. It
has also been a model for the use of theory in ethnomusicology, as it draws liberally from
several different paradigms that are sometimes at odds with each other, including structur-
alism (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1966), interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1973), cognitive an-
thropology (Conklin 1973), and the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1972; Schieffelin
1976). In addition to being an important work in ethnomusicology, this book has become
one of the foundational texts in the fields of sound studies and ecomusicology, as it richly
examines human interactions with soundscapes and the representations of those sound-
scapes in expressive practice (see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).
Another fruitful way that linguistic insights have been applied to music is by analyzing
how musical categories organize the expectations and experiences of audiences and per-
formers. In other work, Feld (1984) addressed this topic as part of a larger consideration of
“speech about music,” a term he adapted from Charles Seeger (1977). Feld described speech
about music as a kind of metacommunication that frames the meanings experienced by mu-
sicians and listeners. Feld’s ideas on this topic have been usefully applied in a wide variety
of situations. For example, my own work on music industries in India (Beaster-Jones 2016)
shows how genre is a fundamental organizing principle for many kinds of musical practices.
From the earliest stages of production, music producers use the idea of genre to anticipate
the tastes of potential audiences and guide the work of musicians and engineers (Frith 1996;
Negus 1999)—even as the audiences themselves are constituted through their encounters
with these genres (Warner 2005). Like other cultural and linguistic categories, genres have
a certain contingency; the artists or recordings that are exemplars of a genre are always
shifting, and the boundaries among genres change as well. For example, the genre category
“jazz” has had many different sets of cultural associations across its history. It is unlikely that
the critics and listening publics of the 1920s could have anticipated the cultural transfor-
mation of this genre from a popular dance style in their era (one that was the subject of an
intense moral panic) to a highly intellectual art music in the bebop period of the 1940s and
1950s. Extending Saussure’s insights about the systematic nature of sign values, one might
observe that genres are defined both by their positive features and in opposition to other
genres. As a result, historical change in the meaning of one genre will inflect the meanings
of other genres, even if their musical content remains the same. Thus, the 1990s saw the
rising prominence in mainstream discourse of a narrative that treated jazz as “America’s
classical music,” and this occurred at a moment when hip-hop had become one of the most
influential forms of popular music. It is no accident that, at the same time, hip-hop was
the subject of the same kind of moral panic about the perceived negative influence of black
music on American society that had been directed at jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. In this
context, the condemnation of hip-hop can be seen, at least in part, as a systematic effect, the
result of the increase in jazz’s cultural status.
In addition to guiding the way that musical sound is associated with social groups, genre
also frames expectations about the behavior, dress, and styles of interaction among listeners
and performers within a music scene or culture. Operating as overt or covert social cat-
egories, genre conventions come into play as talk about music—and as music itself—are
38  Jayson Beaster-Jones
performed in ways deemed “appropriate” for their social contexts. (For example, compare
the audience practices of a Sufi qawwali with those of an Irish traditional music session.) As
a result, genre discourses connect music and identity, such that the perceived affective qual-
ities and social characteristics of participants in a music culture can be indexed through the
performance and consumption of certain types of music.16 Genre labels can indicate forms
of musical production or performance (Turino 2000), attitudes or behaviors (Hebdige
1979; Walser 1993), and modes of talk in and through music (Feld and Fox 1994; Berger
and ­Carroll 2003). In this way, music may express the values, aspirations, or identities of
­particular communities, and, at least on the surface, may serve as a guide for conceptions
of authenticity (Stokes 1997; Taylor 1997; Frith 2000; Toynbee 2000; Beaster-Jones 2009,
2011). Insofar as individual perspectives on genres vary, the relative meanings of genre may
vary across differing social, cultural, or geographic contexts. As the music associated with
a local soundscape, the meaning of a musical genre might be widely shared within a com-
munity and therefore taken for granted, or it may be historicized and treated as a cultural
tradition, especially as generations of musicians and listeners become enculturated into its
musical practice. Conversely, new or unfamiliar musics have to be put in their place—­
socially, culturally, geographically—to be made meaningful. For example, Charles Carson
(2004) describes how musical styles are territorialized as cultural icons in the background
music of Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center: mariachi music is a key part of the place-
making in the Mexican Pavilion, while Bavarian music is central to the German Pavilion.
These representations, Carson argues, provide one stable point of connecting the peoples of
the world to the musics that these peoples ostensibly produce. Similarly, one of the impor-
tant roles of film music is to subtly establish when and where particular scenes take place, as
well as provide additional information about particular characters (Kalinak 1992). In short,
musical practices both constitute and are constituted through language, and speech about
music becomes one important way that these practices are made meaningful, albeit in ways
that are not necessarily universal. (On the role of genre in the globalization of music, see
Wallach and Clinton, this volume.)

Semiotic Approaches to Music Analysis

Applying ideas from structural linguistics to music can help clarify the systemic dimensions
of musical cognition and performance, but they provide little insight into the interconnec-
tion of music and other sign systems. Such an approach cannot explain, for example, how
social or cultural groups use music as a way of establishing and reproducing various kinds
of identities (e.g. ethnic, gender, regional, religious), much less the affective and social rela-
tionships that people develop through musical practice. In order to address music as a mode
of social life, a number of scholars have turned to the Peircean semiotic as a model for music
analysis. Notable among them are Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1975, 1990), Charles Boilés (1982),
and Thomas Turino (1999, 2008). In differing ways, each of these theorists illustrate how
musical sound can generate extramusical meanings, interact with other kinds of signs, and
play into the full range of an individual’s experiences.
For many musicologists, the most influential approach to musical semiotics has been
Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Music and Discourse (1990). Drawing from the extensive body of semi-
otic theory developed by Peirce (1960), Jean Molino (1975, 1978), and Umberto Eco (1976,
1984), as well as his own earlier investigations (1975), Nattiez adapted Peirce’s notion of the
interpretant into an idiosyncratic theoretical apparatus that is highly suggestive, although
it can at times be confusing. For instance, his paradigm deviates from Peirce’s terminolog-
ical specificity, particularly in his inconsistent distinction between the terms “sign” and
“symbol.” Nattiez suggests that we might analyze music in various performative modes as
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  39
dense constellations of signs, which he calls the “symbolic form” (8). Nattiez then extends
Molino’s “tripartition” model to understand the process of meaning making in music. As
a model for examining musical symbols, tripartition involves the analysis of the “poietic”
(everything involved in the creation of music), the “esthetic” (all of the possible ways mu-
sical sound might be received or interpreted by anyone over time), and the “neutral” or
“trace” (the work or musical expression itself ). Following this approach, one might study
a song like George Gershwin’s “Summertime” by starting with a poietic analysis of the
various versions of the piece that have emerged over time and showing how they bear the
musical values of the eras in which they were performed. Focusing on the aesthetic level,
one would examine the reception of the various versions of the composition and how its
meanings are constituted and transformed by individuals or groups. Focusing on the level
of the trace, one would analyze the material embodiment of the song—how it is reproduced
in performance and in musical scores, and how these embodiments come to inflect the
poietic and aesthetic levels. Tripartition, Nattiez argues, thus provides a way to examine
the entirety of musical meaning from every potential perspective and explain the broader
semiotic properties of music.
Like other European musicologists, Nattiez largely focuses his attention on Western art
music, although he does provide some examples from ethnomusicological studies of other
musical traditions. In a well-known 1982 article, Charles Boilés adopts much of the theo-
retical perspective that Nattiez had developed in his early work (1975), although he moves
Nattiez’s apparatus even further beyond the analysis of Western art music, while also point-
ing to the problems with the musicological and textualist approaches to musical semiotics
discussed above. Boilés’s essay critiques, among other things, the analysis of musical sound
as a kind of syntax removed from its historical and cultural contexts, as well as the presump-
tion that one might treat a musical work as a unitary set of signs without accounting for the
subject positions of its listeners. This latter point is expanded into a useful set of semiotic
tools for unpacking the various interpretations of a musical event.
Thomas Turino (1999, 2008) has developed one of the most important semiotic ap-
proaches to ethnomusicology by working directly from Peirce, rather than from Peirce’s
interpreters in musicology, as others have. Deploying the Peircean semiotic to explain why
music has an affective power that is so often difficult to describe through language, Turino
(1999) argues that iconicity and indexicality are critical for understanding the connections
between music and group identities, shared experiences, and social memories. Like Nattiez,
Turino illustrates how signs never operate in isolation from other signs but are necessar-
ily interconnected with each other through a process that he calls “semiotic chaining”
­(222–24). Following from this insight, he compellingly argues that the lower order signs in
music like icons and indexes have greater affective potential than the higher order symbols,
which, by their nature, tend to operate on the cognitive rather than affective level. Turino
suggests that, for most people, music largely operates through icons and indexes, rising to
symbolic signs only for specialists. It is because signs associated with memory and affect
dominate music, he argues, that music has the kind of evocative power that it does. And
through their connection with memory, indexes accrue meanings over time and increase in
their density, a phenomenon Turino labels “semantic snowballing” (235), a term which is
roughly analogous to Nattiez’s “symbolic form” described above. In his later work, Turino
(2008) goes on to apply the Peircean semiotic to an elegant discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus and to show how the analysis of iconic and indexical signs can provide
scholars with insights into the relationships between music and the rest of social life.17
One of the strengths of semiotic approaches vis-à-vis structural linguistic analogies is
that they do not presume that music and musical experiences operate as hermetic systems.
In other words, language, gesture, dance, music, and other modes of cultural expression
40  Jayson Beaster-Jones
generate significances that necessarily emerge through manifold genres of interaction.
­Indeed, the very inseparability of music from the rest of social life makes semiotic analysis,
like other language-in-use perspectives, a valuable paradigm for analyzing the contribu-
tions of music to dense social and multimedia contexts. It is not difficult to imagine, for
example, that listeners versed in music and architecture might see an iconic relationship
between sonata form in Western art music and their perception of a particular abstract
theme and its development in a building or architectural style. Moreover, because sign
vehicles are determined in part by their objects, one can see how interpretations of mu-
sical sound derived from interpretations of objects in the world might not be entirely
arbitrary, in Saussure’s sense of the term. For example, following Alan Merriam’s discus-
sion of the potential for universal musical symbols (1964, 229–35), one might point out
that it would be unlikely for iconic interpretations of the percussive strings, prominent
timpani, metrical changes, and dissonant harmonies of the “Ritual Abduction” section of
Igor ­Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to center upon peaceful, pastoral images for most listeners,
regardless of the musical communities to which they belong. Further, for those who have
seen Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, interpretations of “Ritual Abduction” are likely to be
framed, at least in part, by the visual representations of exploding volcanoes and lands
rising from the sea that accompany this music in the film. In semiotic terms, a wide range
of signs and sign types connect music and image in the film (resemblances, contiguities,
associations, etc.), and they do so in ways that are more or less stable for listeners who are
familiar with Western art music conventions.
One influential monograph that draws extensively from Peircean semiotic approaches
and the language-in-use paradigm in linguistic anthropology is Ingrid Monson’s Saying
Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996). Based on extensive fieldwork in New
York City, the book shows how jazz musicians create meaningful performances in which
musical ideas are developed within and between performative contexts, and how musicians
use language metaphors to describe the musical practice of improvisation. For Monson,
the most poignant of these metaphors is the notion that improvisation is a “conversation”
between musicians who are performing together onstage; in this context, the musicians
label a particularly good improvisatory performance as one in which the performers are
“saying something.” While Monson takes seriously her interlocutors’ perspectives on the
connection between music and language, she also acknowledges that their ideas require
some unpacking to fit within contemporary linguistic theory. To make this point, Monson
draws extensively from linguistic anthropology to move beyond the structural linguists’ fo-
cus upon referential meanings. In so doing, she shows how language and music do not only
convey ideas, but also create social and affective relationships between people.
Monson’s language-in-use approach has significant implications for the politics of music.
In ways that parallel Paul Gilroy’s work on African American musics (1993), Monson ar-
gues that race and racial consciousness are critical for understanding musical performance
in jazz. This is an important ethical and political point, as African American genres of
­artistic expression have been consistently denigrated throughout American history yet have
come to dominate the international music industry. Jazz music, she notes, has always been
inflected by the jazz musicians’ styles of speaking, which have, in turn, been inflected
by African  American cultural practices of conversational play. Monson’s exploration of
­music and verbal play is particularly productive for her analysis of musical allusions in jazz,
which includes not only the improvising soloist’s quotation of melodies from other pieces
or performances, but also rhythms, timbres, and other subtler musical components. Despite
drawing connections between musical and linguistic performance, Monson is unwilling to
reduce musical experience to a species of text. Thus, rather than interpreting jazz in terms
of “intertextuality,” a term employed by literary critics to describe how any text emerges
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  41
out of and refers to the literary fields of other texts (Kristeva 1980; Hanks 1989), Monson
understands jazz in terms of “intermusicality,” a term that she coined to describe how
performers within a musical tradition respond in the moment to musical ideas in ways that
do not require the mediation of language (127–29). Drawing from Peirce and the linguist
Michael Silverstein, she notes that any instance of musical quotation involves both an iconic
relationship with the musical idea that is quoted and an indexical relationship to a previ-
ous performance. She further argues that musical quotation, and musical allusions more
broadly, necessarily involves semiotic transformation (i.e. shifts in musical meaning), as
quotation and allusion foreground the differences between past and present performances.
In some cases, these allusions ironically invert the meanings of past performances. One
of the examples that Monson develops to describe this phenomenon is John Coltrane’s
1960 recording of the Broadway standard “My Favorite Things.” In her analysis, Monson
demonstrates how Coltrane’s transformations of the harmony, form, and melody of the
composition not only comment on the original song, but also provide subtle reflections
upon the aesthetic values of jazz as compared to those of Broadway music, and ultimately,
upon race in American music and culture.
Monson’s insights have important implications for the study of musical form, as her work
shows the impossibility of separating music analysis from social analysis. In the same way
that people create social structures and social contexts in their linguistic interactions, so too
does improvisation simultaneously draw from traditions and create new contexts. The real
achievement of Monson’s work is to bring linguistic approaches into the analysis of musical
form in ways that do not reify music or language into structures but instead reveal the un-
folding of significances over time.18
While Monson’s notion of intermusicality provides a useful approach to understanding
musical meaning on the basis of musical sound, other scholars have examined the way that
music and language are combined in performance, such as when words are set to music in
song. Examining the connections between music, song texts, and the sound of the human
voice, Aaron Fox’s Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (2004) works
through the implications of developing semiotic approaches in ethnomusicology, while
incorporating Bakhtin’s notions of “dialogism” and “chronotope” ([1979] 1987). In this
ethnography of the country music scene of Lockhart, Texas, Fox illustrates how the mean-
ings of voice and lyrics cannot be simply or easily disentangled in American country music,
or, indeed, any genre of vocal expression. As both spoken and sung texts, country songs
are interwoven into everyday conversation, and Fox shows how their connections enable
his interlocutors to voice their experiences of the world from a variety of perspectives that
are irreducible to language alone. (On language choice and dialect in music, see Berger and
Carroll 2003; on voice, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.)
At the start of this chapter, I pointed to the difficulties with the idea of music as a uni-
versal language. Setting that idea in the context of linguistic approaches to ethnomusi-
cology, we can see that music need not make fixed references to things in the world (i.e.
signifieds) in order to be meaningful. When it is performed in speech events, language
itself does not have wholly fixed meanings, as language-in-use might dynamically evoke
any number of associations and social implications. While some kinds of music might
have relatively stable sets of meanings within a musical community (with or without
mediation by language), most musical experiences and identities can, at minimum, be
framed through speech about music. In this context, semiotic approaches provide a way
to analyze the processes of meaning making in music without reducing musical meanings
to linguistic ones. In so doing, such approaches allow us to understand how meanings are
created and shared between performers and audiences, even as we account for the possi-
bility of divergent perspectives.
42  Jayson Beaster-Jones
“Pal pal hai bhaari”: Music and Meaning in a Bollywood Song
To illustrate the utility of some of these linguistic and semiotic approaches to music, I turn
to an analysis of the song “Pal pal hai bhaari” (These heavy moments, hereafter referred to as
PPHB), which was written by the legendary composer A. R. Rahman and sung by Madhushree
(voicing the heroine) and Vijay Prakash (voicing the hero)19 in the 2004 ­Hindi-language film
Swades (Dir. Ashutosh Gowariker).20 The song appears at a musically and socially rich m ­ oment
in the film with many layers of meaning—layers that can be productively interpreted using the
tools of linguistics and semiotics. The song itself is multidimensional, with lyrics, melody, me-
ter, musical form, instrumentation, vocal timbre, studio recording, and sound ­engineering op-
erating in tandem with the acting, dance, cinematography, lighting, set design, and ­narrative
to create an extraordinarily dense set of signs. Of course, the scene in which this song appears
can be made meaningful by different audiences in different ways, and the same audience
member will find different meanings each time she sees and hears the film. One could write
a book about this song alone and still not encompass all of its rich meaning. In the discussion
that follows, I focus on only a few of these many elements.
A short account of my own relationship to PPHB might prove to be instructive. I first
encountered this composition when I listened to the Swades film soundtrack while con-
ducting fieldwork in India from 2003 to 2005. The soundtrack was released several months
before the film’s debut, a conventional practice for big-budget Bollywood films that is used
to generate an initial buzz through promotion of the music. While I heard the song many
times before watching Swades in a Mumbai movie theater in 2004, I did not know how it
fitted into the film’s narrative. Because the meanings of PPHB were so closely connected
to the scene in which the song appears, it never became a hit single, like other songs from
the film (e.g. “Yun hi chala” and “Yeh taara woh taara”). After 2004, I had little exposure
to the song until I began teaching Swades to my Bollywood film class in 2013. In this new
context, I gave the song the attention that it deserved. Since then, I have listened carefully
to it many times. Most of my insights about PPHB did not come to me at once: they un-
folded over time, as the product of many repeated encounters with the audio recording of
the song and the video of the film.
The meanings that one might attribute to the music of the song, its lyrics, and cine-
matographic representation are inflected by its role within the narrative context of the film.
Swades [Homeland] was a flop at the Indian box office, but it remains relatively popular among
Indian diasporic populations. It depicts an Indian expatriate, played by the actor Shah Rukh
Khan, who, after being reminded of the untimely death of his parents, travels to an ­Indian
village in hopes of bringing the nanny who raised him back to the United States to share
his life of relative luxury. Meanwhile, he grapples with his own Indian-ness and learns that
his skills as a NASA engineer are needed at home to address India’s social problems. One of
seven songs written for Swades, PPHB appears approximately three-quarters of the way into
the film, during a depiction of the festival of Dussehra, an important holiday in the Hindu
calendar, which occurs in October or November of the Gregorian calendar. This religious
festival is observed differently in various regions of the Indian subcontinent. In western India
where the film is set, Dussehra celebrates the victory of the Hindu god Ram over the demon
god Ravana, as well as the reunification of Ram with his consort Sita. Further, the festival is
also the season for performances of the folk religious play Ramlila, which enacts the Hindu
epic known as the Ramayana.21 The seven-minute song sequence that contains PPHB de-
picts the end of the village’s performance of the Ramlila. Here, Ram defeats Ravana and is
reunited with Sita as the film’s protagonist works through his sense of duty to his homeland.
In the cultural context of contemporary Bollywood film music, PPHB is a highly sig-
nificant composition, and, in many ways, is amenable to structural analysis. Unlike most
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  43
contemporary Hindi film songs, PPHB draws melodic modes from India’s raga system,
though it does so without being strictly bound by all of the melodic conventions of ragas.22
In PPHB, A. R. Rahman draws ideas from several ragas. In the opening, unmetered por-
tion of the song, for example, the singer gestures toward the pakad (repeated identifying
phrase) of Rag Jaunpuri, and the central refrain is based upon a Jaunpuri-derived musical
mode. Similarly, the melodies of other parts of the song gesture toward other ragas (e.g.
Rag Kaafi, Rag Jaijaiwanti) in ways that do not always explicitly follow their melodic con-
ventions. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the raga form is well-suited to methods of music
analysis adapted from structural linguistics, as the system-internal differentiation among the
modes of correct raga performance are well-defined within India’s philosophical traditions,
which date back at least to the eighth century CE and were further systematized by subse-
quent philosophical treatises. A system of sign values in Saussure’s sense of the term, ragas
are defined in relationship to one another; as a result, a change in the way that the notes and
ornaments of one raga are performed will result in a change in the definition of other ragas
in the system.23 These performative modes were further developed by late-colonial Indian
musicologists like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936), who sought to construct a
pan-Indian art music in service of cultural nationalism. In this context, the distinction in
Indian music theory between the raga system and its embodiment in performance is broadly
analogous to Saussure’s distinction between language and speech, insofar as they both im-
agine that the creation of meaningful musical ideas is developed from within an abstract
system possessed by a musical community. Likewise, Chomsky’s notion of “generative
grammar” is analogous to Indian ideas about musical creativity, with both theories imag-
ining novel forms emerging from an underlying set of rules ( Jairazbhoy 1971; Wade 1977).
The analysis of a musical performance that draws from the raga system is also amenable to
semiotic analysis, insofar as the performance of each raga indexes a wide range of meanings,
such as particular seasons, times of day, stylized emotions (rasa), and gods and goddesses.
For audiences attuned to classical Indian aesthetic theories in music, drama, and dance, the
use of Raj Jaunpuri in the melody of PPHB might index the aesthetic experience of karuna
rasa (sadness, lamentation, compassion), the late morning, and/or the place and history of
Jaunpur (a city in North India). For educated listeners, each of these associations operates
as symbols in Peirce’s sense, as the connection between the sound of the raga and its mean-
ing is based on sets of conventions. For other listeners, however, these musical gestures do
not point to the individual ragas but instead index the raga system as a whole, which, in
turn, is iconic of Rahman’s familiarity with Indian classical music and the broad cultural
nationalism to which it is tied. Most contemporary listeners, I would speculate, simply do
not hear any relationship between PPHB and India’s art music traditions and draw most of
their insights about the song from the experience of watching it on-screen.
The song’s melody and its meanings do not exhaust the significance of PPHB, as there
are many other qualities of the composition, its performance, and its relationship to ­Indian
society more generally that can be revealed from semiotically inflected perspectives. For in-
stance, the stylized (or mediated) folk performance style of the Ravana character in the song
sequence (voiced by Ashutosh Gowariker) is recognizable as a Bollywood r­ epresentation of
a folk performance because it bears an iconic relationship with other Ramlila performances
that are recognizable to all Indian audiences.24 Sung in a declamatory style, the music
indexes and is iconic of other varieties of Hindu folk performance, as well as televisual
and cinematic renditions of these songs (e.g. the Mahabharata and Ramayana television se-
ries). For audiences who are well-versed in the Ramlila and who are cognizant of how this
cinematic rendition deviates from folk performances, this moment in PPHB operates on
the iconic and indexical levels. However, there are other, more subtle signs in this song.
For many audiences familiar with Hindi language cinema, this recording will index A.
44  Jayson Beaster-Jones
R. Rahman’s “sound” or “style”—even if they cannot describe the aspects of the song and
its production that evoke his work. The combination of a synthesizer pad with an Indian
classical drone is in line with Rahman’s approach, as is his distinctive orchestration of
low strings, his emphasis on the bansuri bamboo flute (performed by Naveen Kumar), and
the integration of North Indian folk instruments with choral singing, synthesizers, and
drum loops.25 As important for indexing Rahman’s style as melody, harmony, timbre, or
orchestration is the track’s studio production—the clarity of each instrument in the mix,
the recording’s broad frequency spectrum, and the use of certain digital effects (e.g. delay
and compression), which become signs of the era of film song in which he is compos-
ing. Another Rahman signature is the song’s overall structure, which extends the typical
­mukhda-antara (refrain-verse) form found in most Hindi film songs (see Beaster-Jones 2015)
to include the declamatory style in the voice of Ravana, discussed above.
The last section of PPHB shifts from a duet between the lead singers to a full-fledged
bhajan (Hindu devotional hymn) sung by a chorus; here, the solo singers drop out, the meter
changes, drums and finger cymbals are added to the instrumentation, and a chorus sings a
repeated refrain (“Look, Lord Ram has come… here he comes to rescue me”). The use of
bhajan style is also signaled in the film with images of villagers rising to their feet, praying,
singing, and clapping—an index of the hymn’s affective power for the villagers, and, pre-
sumably, for some members of the film audience as well. The meanings that the sound of
the bhajan carries in the film, coupled with its representation of that genre’s importance in
folk culture, support Turino’s argument about the way that dense sets of indexes operate as
signs of and for affect and experience; these semiotic processes are amenable to an analysis
through Nattiez’s tripartition model, as well. Finally, the lead singer’s timbre and vocal style
index the period in which the song was produced—a moment when the sound of women’s
singing voices on-screen were moving away from earlier norms of vocal production. Singer
Madhushree performs in the vocal register and style of the widely recorded singer Lata
Mangeshkar, adopting her use of Indian semi-classical ornamentation. Despite drawing on
the vocal inflections of classic Hindi film song vocalists, Madhushree’s timbre and the style
of music production in the track clearly locates the music in the early twenty-first century,
even as it reflects the musical values of earlier periods of film song.
This discussion of PPHB has identified some of the diverse ways that this song might
invoke meanings for its Indian audiences. However, following from Turino’s work, I would
emphasize that as an individual listener, I too have developed my own affective and mne-
monic relationships with this music. Each of my own encounters with PPHB has accreted
new sets of associations and meanings, ones that transcend any of its musical characteristics.
The collected sounds that make up this song are connected to my experience of a particular
historical moment, the stages of my life in which I heard it, and innumerable other inef-
fable connections. As these affective resonances of PPHB suggests, linguistic and semiotic
analysis provides ethnomusicologists with tools to account for manifold forms of meaning,
from those that are widely shared to those that are highly individual, and from those that
are relatively stable to those that change over time.

Looking Ahead
The study of music making as a mode of communication has many parallels with the study
of language as a mode of communication, not the least of which is the shift from a focus on
systems to an attention to situated meaningful practices. One result of this paradigmatic shift
is the recognition that, in their cognitive, affective, and social dimensions, music and language
both communicate far more than we once thought. Treating music as a mode of communi-
cation and a form of situated practice, a range of new questions are coming into the view of
 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  45
contemporary ethnomusicologists. To what extent are the meanings created by and through
music an inherent property of music sound and music structure? How does interpreting those
sounds and structures require musical competence, and what might “competence” mean in
the context of music? Inasmuch as the meanings associated with sound emerge from outside
of the musical system (e.g. habits, practices, ideologies, worldviews), how can we integrate the
structural analysis of music with pragmatic and contextual approaches? Is it possible to develop
an analytically useful science of music that would provide comparable insights to linguistic
science? With these and other questions in mind, perhaps we can finally turn away from the
question of music as a universal language, and instead study language as a universal music.26
To that end, a number of recent and innovative approaches in ethnomusicology expand
the investigations of music and language as modes of communication into new domains.
Some of these approaches operate on a Peircean semiotic infrastructure that extends into the
social and cognitive science realms. For instance, Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager, and Udo
Will (2005) and Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante (2013) explore the phenomenon
of “rhythmic entrainment,” that is, the ways in which individuals and groups synchro-
nize their speech patterns, behaviors, and music making. Inasmuch as these authors draw
from biological and neuroscientific studies of circadian rhythms, as well as from research on
­m icrosocial interaction in music and speech, they suggest that even if music is not a uni-
versal language, rhythmic entrainment is a universal human capacity. Entrainment has thus
become one fruitful way to explore how the rhythms of speech, ritual, poetic and musical
meter, and other expressive forms illuminate the ways in which humans experience coordi-
nation, solidarity, and intimacy, and they do so in ways that can inform the quantitative so-
cial sciences. Anna Stirr (2010a, 2010b, 2017) explores similar questions of human sociability
by drawing from the work of linguistic anthropologists and literary theorists. She shows how
competence in both poetic and musical meters, and their performance in time, enables the
creation of social worlds through song. Finally, a body of work exploring language revital-
ization movements and their relationship to musical revitalization (Faudree 2013; Minks
2013; Grant 2014; Samuels 2015) is providing significant insights into the cooperation of
music and language as modes of communication, while also evoking classic questions about
musical communities and identities, which are at the core of ethnomusicology as a discipline.
It is clear that, taken as a whole, linguistic and semiotic approaches to ethnomusicological
analysis are very much relevant to the contemporary field of ethnomusicology, even if the
kinds of questions that we ask today are significantly different from the questions of our
predecessors.

Notes
1 These questions have been addressed by a wide variety of ethnomusicologists. See, for example,
Charles Seeger’s work on musical communication (1977) and John Blacking’s discussion of the social
value of music (1969).
2 Like other scholars whose work is inflected by linguistic theory, I use the term semiology as the label
for Saussure’s theory of sign relations and theories derived from it, and semiotic (without an “s”) as a
label for Peirce’s theory of sign relations and theories derived from it. To refer to the study of signs in
general, scholars typically use the term semiotics.
3 This notion—that in any given society, musical structure and social structure will have the same
form—is often referred to as “homology theory” and appears in many different guises in twentieth-
century research on music and culture. See the primary discussion of homology theory in Peter
­Manuel’s chapter on Marxism and ethnomusicology, and a related analysis in Matthew Rahaim’s
chapter on theories of participation. —Harris M. Berger
4 Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) is best known for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the notion that the
structure of an individual language conditions the ways in which its speakers experience the world
around them. Many of the essays in which Whorf framed this hypothesis were published in the 1930s
and early 1940s, and are reprinted in Whorf (1964).
46  Jayson Beaster-Jones
5 On the politics of representation, see also Berger and Stone (this volume, introduction, n. 1). On
colonialism in ethnomusicology, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
6 The theme of situated practice is also central to a body of theoretical work known as practice theory.
See Text Box 2.1.
7 Jakobson, along with Goffman, Bateson, and Austin (discussed below), were also foundational for the
development of performance studies. See Waterman (this volume).
8 The language-in-use perspectives discussed here were also foundational for the branch of perfor-
mance studies that developed within linguistic anthropology and folklore, and Richard Bauman was
a central figure in this area. For a brief history of performance folkloristics, see Text Box 6.1.
9 See also the work of linguist Michael Silverstein (1979, 2004), whose dense prose style can be difficult
for newcomers but nevertheless reveals fascinating insights into the way in which language both sit-
uates and is situated by cultural context.
10 For a useful discussion of Peirce’s model of the sign, see Parmentier (1994) and Atkin (2013).
11 Indeed, linguistic interactions are as much about mistakes, misfires, or misinterpretations—that is,
moments when the intentions of the speaker do not match the interpretation of the hearers—as they
are about shared meanings that are communicated within a shared language structure.
12 See Faudree (2012) for a discussion of the ideological distinctions between music and speech.
13 For example, in certain social science disciplines (e.g. linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology),
scholars like Steven Pinker (2003), Daniel Levitin (2006), and Aniruddh Patel (2010) have taken a
reductionist approach to music by suggesting that it evolved as little more than a species of language
prosody (patterns of language stress and rhythm), a view that focuses entirely upon the biological
and neurological evolution of human music making while dismissing as largely irrelevant all of the
cultural dimensions of music.
14 See Jairazbhoy (1971) and Wade (1977) for further discussions of the raga system.
15 Scholars in the branch of performance studies associated with folklore and linguistic anthropology
made related critiques of textualism. See Text Box 6.1.
16 See Brackett (2000) for a discussion of how this operates in the context of Western popular musics.
17 On Bourdieu, see also Manuel (this volume), Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.1.
18 For further discussion of Monson’s insights into music and race, see Mahon (this volume). On ­Monson’s
place in critical improvisation studies, see Waterman (this volume).
19 Very few actors in Indian cinema sing: the singing voices of their characters are recorded in studios
by professional “playback singers.” Actors then lip sync to these pre-recorded songs.
20 As of the time of this writing, this song can easily be viewed on YouTube and other online streaming
services.
21 The Ramlila primarily exists in oral tradition, and hundreds of versions of the Ramayana are per-
formed in different parts of Asia (Ramanujan 1991). For discussions of Ramlila performances, see
Schechner and Hess (1977) and Sax (1990).
22 Until the 1960s, it was common for film song composers to self-consciously use elements of the raga
system in their work, but, by the twenty-first century, the practice has become quite rare.
23 Kaufmann (1965) and Manuel (1981) both discuss historical changes in the ragas in ways that are
amenable to Saussure’s notion of sign value systems. Manuel discusses Rag Juanpuri in particular.
24 See Beaster-Jones (2015) for a discussion of the mediation of musical styles.
25 See Sarrazin (2008) for a general discussion of Rahman’s contributions to Hindi film song.
26 I borrow this turn of phrase from my colleague Katherine Meizel (personal communication).

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2 Marxist Approaches to Music,
Political Economy, and the Culture
Industries
Ethnomusicological Perspectives
Peter Manuel

Marxist analytical approaches to art and culture have significant affinities with those of eth-
nomusicology. Both sets of approaches insist on studying an aspect of expressive culture—
such as a musical entity—not merely as a text or artifact, but also as a product or practice
embedded in and conditioned by its broader socio-historical context. Both approaches seek
to understand the nature and extent of the agency and autonomy that artists and con-
sumers can exercise within their socio-economic milieus, as well as the ways that music
can either reinforce or challenge a dominant social order. And just as ethnomusicologist
­Steven Feld (1988) has explored ways in which the sound structure of New Guinean tribal
music recapitulates aspects of social structure, so Marxist-informed theorists have argued
that musical forms in modern Western society—be it of popular songs or a piano sonata—
have evolved in accordance with general aesthetic principles ultimately conditioned by
the socio-­economic base of capitalism. Accordingly, a number of ethnomusicologists have
used explicitly Marxist approaches, and a great many others have been at least indirectly
informed by them. Particularly influential has been the field of cultural studies, which de-
veloped a flexible and nuanced understanding of the dynamics of hegemony and resistance,
and extended such analytical tools beyond the traditional Marxist emphasis on class to en-
gage dimensions of ethnicity, race, gender, and other social categories.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the single most original and influential economist and
political philosopher of the nineteenth century, and, arguably, of the entire century after
his death. Marx lived in a time of epic political struggles and convulsions, including the
French Revolution of 1848 and the brief rule of the Paris Commune in 1871. This was
a period in which a triumphant industrial and bourgeois capitalism generated unprec-
edented wealth and development, while at the same time condemning masses of peo-
ple to new forms of urban exploitation, squalor, and misery. Such conditions generated
widespread working-class radicalism and animated Marx’s own interpretation of current
events and European history. Most importantly, the overt class dynamics of upheavals
such as the Parisian uprisings inspired Marx to see class struggle as the single most impor-
tant aspect of history in general.
Marx’s prodigious literary output included journalistic articles, obscure partisan
­polemics, and major analytical studies, which are still widely read. His most important
work was Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), a rigorous study integrating his
theoretical perspectives with an exhaustive account of contemporary working conditions
in Great Britain. A more accessible and concise work is the “Manifesto of the Communist
Party” ([1848] 1959, co-authored with Friedrich Engels), whose opening section presents a
remarkably pithy, powerful, and eminently quotable history of the triumph of capitalism.
This section can also be read as a seminal and classic description of the effects of moder-
nity in general, in its various facets encompassing technological revolution, capitalism, the
52  Peter Manuel
nation-state, rationalism, conceptions of universal human rights, and new social forma-
tions and senses of individual subjectivity.1 Modernity, as Marx showed, engendered an
unprecedented degree of personal and collective liberation and achievement, unleashed re-
markable powers of economic productivity, and freed much of Europe from the authority
of the aristocracy and the Church. At the same time, it immiserated the working classes,
accelerated the growth of colonialism, and engendered unprecedented forms of spiritual
alienation. With the ascendancy of capitalism in modern Europe, Marx and Engels noted,
“all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away,” and “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….”
([1848] 1959: 10).
In retrospect, it is easy to see that Marx’s predictions about proletarian revolution were
mistaken and that he greatly overestimated the extent of working-class consciousness and
solidarity, both in his own time and in the future. Much of his writing, however, is re-
markably prescient in its descriptions of the dynamics of globalization and the penetration
of capital and bourgeois ideology throughout the world.
Marx’s extensive writings are primarily devoted to the critical analysis of capitalism as a
socio-economic system and do not discuss the arts in detail. However, his insights on cul-
ture and ideology are powerful and provocative. Embedded in a deep and original analysis
of capitalism, these insights have inspired generations of theorists to develop diverse sorts of
Marxist-informed analyses of expressive culture. While many such studies have been purely
analytical, others have been activist and engaged in character, often seeking to challenge
aspects of capitalist economic and ideological hegemony. (On the distinction between ana-
lytic and activist theory, see Berger and Stone, Introduction, this volume). The failure and
abandonment of communism in China and the former Eastern Bloc have not diminished
the value of Marxist interpretations of the complex relationships between society, economy,
and culture.

Music and Modes of Production: Epochal Changes, from

Feudalism to Neoliberalism
A fundamental concept in Marx’s work is the means of production—the ensemble of tech-
nologies and forms of social organization by which a society satisfies its material needs.
Throughout his work, Marx makes a fundamental and seminal distinction between a so-
ciety’s socio-economic base (that is, the mode of production predominant in a society)
and its cultural and ideological superstructure (the sets of beliefs and practices circulating
in that society). Marx believed that the base ultimately informs the superstructure. As he
wrote, “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the
social, political, and spiritual processes of life” ([1859] 1959: 43). An analytical “vulgar
materialism” would see the economic base as directly determining the nature of the super-
structure. Marx, however, disavowed the crudely deterministic versions of this idea, and
the thinkers who followed him have developed more nuanced and productive ideas about
the relationship between a society’s economic base and its culture. British Marxists such
as Raymond Williams (1921–1988) and Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) devoted much of their
writings to this question, attempting to understand how the realm of culture could enjoy
a certain sort of “relative autonomy” within the constraints and pressures exerted by the
socio-economic base (Williams 1980; Eagleton 1976, 1983). Williams, while insisting on
the importance of these economic factors, argued astutely that they have been most visible
in terms of grand epochal stages (e.g. feudalism or capitalism); that base and superstructure
are constantly in flux; that the two together constitute a single organic entity, such that,
 Marxist Approaches  53
for example, capitalism comprises a cultural as well as economic system; and that the cul-
tural superstructure itself is a heterogeneous entity encompassing a range of practices and
beliefs, including both “residual” elements that linger on from past historical periods and
newly “emergent” ones.
Various scholars of Western culture have written, from diverse Marxist perspectives,
about the epochal transition from feudalism to capitalism and its ramifications in the arts,
including classical music. As Marxists and others have stressed, feudalism and capitalism
constituted not only modes of production, but also associated systems of social practice
and personal subjectivity. Hence, feudalism comprised, in a primarily agrarian society, a
system in which commerce, commodity production, and the use of money were limited,
and surplus value was extracted from vassals by landed lords who, in turn, owed fealty to
a more powerful court or despot. Social relations, subjectivity, and aesthetics in feudal so-
ciety were characterized by a dogmatic and unquestioning conservatism and a disinterest
in rationality and individualism. For its part, capitalism implies such features as extensive
wage labor, commodity production for sale, systems of credit and finance, and compe-
tition that generates mass production and industrial innovation. In the realm of culture
and social practice, this mode of production, in turn, has promoted a spirit of innovation,
individualism, and a freedom from tradition which can be experienced either as exhila-
rating or alienating.
Marxist theorists have taken much interest in the cultural ramifications of the advent
of capitalism. A particularly magisterial study is A Social History of Art ([1951] 1957), by
the Hungarian scholar Arnold Hauser (1892–1978). Hauser offered penetrating insights
into the cultural and economic forces that allowed European composers to free them-
selves from feudal patronage. Haydn, for example, labored largely as a court musician
for the Count of Esterhazy; his contemporary Mozart also worked for nobles but began
to compose as well for public performances of music and light operas, which were mar-
keted to a paying audience, including the emerging bourgeoisie. With Beethoven, the
transition was complete, engendering in the process several developments, including: a
new Romantic conception of the artist as an individualistic genius; a celebration of music
(and art in general) as an autonomous entity valuable precisely because it was free from
church and court patronage; the cultivation of a personal, dramatic, often sentimental
style (in contrast, for example, to the impersonal and erudite Baroque fugue); and a
new attitude toward compositions as pieces that could be performed repeatedly, rather
than being commissioned for a single performance or event by a court or the church.
Concomitant with these developments was an explicit aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,”
involving, as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) put it in A Critique of Pure Reason (1780), a
“­d isinterested” stance on the part of the audience. (This would contrast with a non-­
aesthetic, “­interested” attitude on the part of, for example, the viewer of a painting,
who considers whether he should buy it as an investment or who fantasizes a romantic
relationship with the person depicted therein.)
An influential perspective on this aesthetic was developed by the French social theorist
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). In his book Distinction (1984), Bourdieu shows how this
­K antian disinterestedness, this “purposiveness without a purpose,” is itself paradoxically
functional and purposeful, in the sense of being cultivated by the well-educated elite as a
sign of social superiority. Bourdieu popularized the notion of “cultural capital,” connoting
the actual material advantages that can accompany the acquisition of education and aes-
thetic sophistication.2 While Bourdieu himself saw cultural capital as a feature uniquely as-
sociated with elite culture, a wide range of scholars have developed this idea to understand
the dynamics of popular music scenes (e.g. Thornton 1996, Kahn-Harris 2006).
54  Peter Manuel

Text Box 2.1  Practice Theory

Bourdieu’s work is part of movement within sociology and related disciplines known
as “practice theory,” which seeks to make social practice the focus of theoretical and
empirical research in the humanities and social sciences (Rouse 2007). Central con-
cerns of practice theory include the relationship between structure and agency, the
ways in which situated social conduct is both shaped by and constitutive of ­macro-level
social orders, the role of culture in patterns of domination and exploitation, and the
nature of embodiment. (On embodiment, see Text Box 1.1.) In many of its forms,
practice theory was developed as a variety of neo-Marxism, and it emerged in the
1970s and 1980s with a group of key publications by Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Anthony
Giddens ([1976] 1993, 1979, 1984), and Michel de Certeau (1984). (It is worth noting
that while Giddens’s early work could safely be categorized as neo-Marxist, his views
shifted dramatically in the 1990s [Giddens 1994, 1998], when he embraced so-called
“third way” politics. See Berger and Del Negro 2016 for further discussion.)
In the last fifty years, practice theory has been highly influential. Sherry Ortner’s
often-cited article “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties” (1984) chronicled the
early adoption of practice theory in anthropology, and her writings continue to be
central to the practice-oriented work in that field (2006). Within ethnomusicology,
a range of scholars have drawn on ideas from practice theory to examine the role of
music in social reproduction, the relationships among culture, power, and identity,
and an array of linked issues (e.g. Seeger 1987; Sugarman 1997; Berger 1999, 2010;
Mahon 2004). Ideas from the tradition have also become increasingly influential in
folklore studies (e.g. Bronner 2012; Buccitelli and Schmitt 2016). Setting this work
in a wider context, we can observe that practice theory is part of a broad trend across
the humanities and social sciences that seeks to redirect attention toward situated
activity, sees the analysis of decontextualized texts or abstract cognitive structures as
misguided, and resists the idea that embodied social conduct is a fundamentally sep-
arate order of reality from social structure. In this book, the chapters by Sugarman,
Mahon, and myself (Berger) address practice theory directly, but practice-oriented
themes are present in many other chapters, including Beaster-Jones’s discussion of
­language-in-use perspectives in linguistics, Meizel and Daughtry’s remarks on the
study of listening practices in sound studies, Rahaim’s history of theories of par-
ticipation, and throughout Waterman’s chapter on performance studies and critical
improvisation studies—fields that are fundamentally oriented toward the study of
social practice. For a useful introduction to practice theory, see Rouse (2007; see also
Schatzki et al. 2001). On Bourdieu and French post-structuralism, see Sugarman’s
chapter in this volume. —Harris M. Berger

German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) developed his own idiosyncratically

Marxist perspectives on these developments. Among other topics, Adorno (1975) explored
with great subtlety how music’s liberation from feudal patronage at once rendered it auton-
omous in certain ways while subjecting it to new market pressures. After Beethoven—who,
for Adorno, represented a sort of sublime transitional figure—music was doomed either
to be commercial in nature or else resolutely esoteric and thus socially marginal. In some
respects like Bourdieu and unlike most ethnomusicologists, Adorno was more interested
in ambivalently analyzing elite Western art culture than in exploring the music practices,
forms, and aesthetics of other classes or ethnic groups.
 Marxist Approaches  55
If Marxists within traditional humanities disciplines have explored the relationship be-
tween economic base and music in Europe, ethnomusicologists have written about paral-
lel developments in non-Western cultures. A comparable case of an “epochal” transition
from feudal to bourgeois capitalist patronage took place in India, starting around 1900 and
reaching completion around 1950, when independent India abolished the remaining feudal
princedoms. Before the twentieth century, patronage of classical music had been largely in
the hands of the feudal nobility and, in the south, of Hindu temples. Feudal princes con-
tinued to employ musicians until losing their estates, but increasingly, from the turn of the
century, public concerts were held for the emerging middle class. With the encouragement
of activists such as V. D. Paluskar (1872–1931) in North India and liberal Brahman organi-
zations in South India (especially Madras/Chennai), this new social class eventually came to
enthusiastically support Indian classical music and dance as proud emblems of national iden-
tity that could be simultaneously Indian and modern. Without specifically invoking Marx,
several ethnomusicologists, including Matthew Allen (1997, 2008), Lakshmi Subramanian
(2006), and myself (Manuel 1989), together with scholars from other disciplines, such as
historian Janaki Bakhle (2005), have written extensively about this complex transition. The
process involved dynamics of gender as well as those of class, as women of “respectable”
middle-class backgrounds gradually replaced courtesan performers. It also involved religion
and ethnicity, as the predominantly Muslim feudal patrons and hereditary musicians in the
North were increasingly supplanted by Hindu bourgeois patrons and performers. Using
a more specifically Marxist perspective is Regula Qureshi (2000, 2002b), who was able
to draw on recollections by elderly performers, as well as archival materials, to present an
intriguing portrait of late feudal music patronage in North India, with its distinctive sorts
of mutual obligations between artists and patrons. As she noted, several senior performers
spoke nostalgically about the sophistication and generosity of the princes who supported
and often lionized them, even as the new bourgeoisie—who proved to be ardent patrons of
art music themselves—came to regard the feudal gentry as decadent relics of a bygone era.3
It was with the advent of industrial capitalism—and especially after the spread of record-
ing technology from around 1900—that modern music industries emerged, introducing
into music cultures new dimensions of commodification and new sorts of links and barriers
between producers and consumers. Marx himself died in 1883, prior to these developments.
In one of his few comments on music (in the Grundrisse, [1857–1861] 1973: 305), Marx
stated that while a piano maker is clearly a productive worker, the labor of a pianist, al-
though essential to the value of the piano itself, would stand somewhat ambiguously outside
this process of reproducing capital, having use value but no exchange value. As has often
been noted, this distinction obscures more than it clarifies, and with the advent of music
industries, the labor of the performing musician would become inextricably bound up
with capital, especially as commercial recordings became commodities with clear exchange
value. Even radio and television audiences became commodities of sorts, with program
content serving—from a financial perspective—merely as means to deliver consumers’ at-
tention to commercial sponsors. Hence, less important than Marx’s problematic statement
about music performance have been the ways in which his analytical approaches can be used
to understand the operations of the new industry.
The advent of modern music industries and commercial mass media had dramatic ef-
fects on music cultures throughout the world. Before the twentieth century, ordinary
people everywhere used to make music, whether singing while working or in festive
gatherings, or playing instruments as amateurs or professionals. In a classical Marxist
view, the commercial music industry took the practice of music making away from most
people and returned music to them in the form of a commodity to be purchased. Hence,
whether in Turkey or Thailand, where a farm laborer might once have sung alone or with
56  Peter Manuel
others, he would now be seen wearing headphones or earbuds, tuned in to the commer-
cial hit parade produced in some distant city. At village weddings in India, the wedding
songs sung by elderly women in local dialects and styles have increasingly been drowned
out, or entirely replaced, by ­Bollywood film music blaring from overloaded loudspeakers.
In the process, such individuals and their communities may become effectively alienated
from their music-making ability, becoming passive consumers whose agency is reduced
to choosing preferred music from the fare mass-produced for common-denominator au-
diences by giant multinationals based in far-off cities. Many years ago, ethnomusicologist
Alan Lomax warned that the onslaught of corporate-produced pop music would precip-
itate a “cultural grey-out” in which unique, venerable music traditions around the world
would be “swept off the board.” As a result, he argued, whole cultures were being “left
with a sense of belonging nowhere and we, ourselves, losing our local roots, become daily
more alienated” (1968: 5).
There is undoubtedly some truth to this scenario, though Marx himself would doubt-
less note that the mass media can fruitfully broaden one’s musical horizons beyond the
proverbial “idiocy of rural life” (referred to in [1848] 1959: 11) At the same time, ethno-
musicologists have found that many amateur and professional music-making traditions
around the world have proven to be surprisingly resilient, even as they may adapt to
changing times by selectively borrowing from commercial pop sounds. Moreover, new
social classes may themselves become active patrons of new sorts of performance traditions.
In her 1970s fieldwork among the Kpelle of Liberia, Ruth Stone (1982) found that a new,
quasi-­proletarian class of rubber workers had emerged who were in a position to sponsor
dance-music events. One ensemble she worked with offered its own syncretic style incor-
porating stray English phrases and elements of East African pop from records produced in
Nairobi. The music, with its contemporary, cosmopolitan flavor, responded to (and would
actively shape) the experiences and aspirations of the younger generation of workers in
a way that traditional music could not. David Coplan reached similar conclusions about
popular music elsewhere in West Africa, noting how genres such as highlife, rather than
being superimposed by a remote corporate music industry, reflected and helped mold the
sensibilities and aesthetics of wage-earning, media-connected city-dwellers who no longer
related to “bush” life and culture (1982).
The transition from feudalism to capitalism, the triumph of bourgeois ideology, and
the emergence of modern music industries have together constituted aspects of an ep-
ochal change whose ramifications cannot be holistically understood without reference to
Marxist-derived analytical approaches. Scholars have also identified major transformations
within the capitalist period itself. Laissez-faire industrial capitalism was at its height in the
Western world at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centu-
ries and was characterized by the unfettered growth of monopolistic corporations, intense
conflicts between labor and management, the zenith of European colonialism, and wild
boom/bust cycles. The so-called “golden age” of capitalism in Western Europe and the US
emerged in the period after World War II and was typified by a détente between labor and
management, a culture of consumption, relatively stable economic growth, the transition
from political to economic colonialism, and various state measures to reign in the excesses
of the capitalist system (e.g. social welfare provisions, anti-trust regulations, and health
and safety legislation in the workplace). Many would argue that since the 1970s, another
epochal transformation has occurred, to what has been variously called “late capitalism”
or, more commonly in the contemporary intellectual scene, neoliberalism. While neolib-
eralism is in many respects a return to or intensification of laissez-faire capitalism, in some
senses it constitutes a new entity, distinguished by increased privatization, deregulation,
the deindustrialization of Europe and the US, globalization of production process and the
 Marxist Approaches  57
circulation of media, a weakening of the state, and the expansion of capitalism and consum-
erist ideology into all aspects of daily life around the world.
These developments have had various sorts of impact on global cultures. One has been
the spread, especially since the 1980s, of a postmodern aesthetic sensibility which scholars
such as Fredric Jameson (1984) and David Harvey (1990) have interpreted from ­Marxist
perspectives as being grounded in structural economic changes. Postmodern aesthetics,
with its use of playful pastiche, bricolage, “blank irony,” and quirky simulacra, has ­become
a typical feature of much modern popular music,4 from music videos, to sampling in
­h ip-hop, to electronic dance music and beyond (Kaplan 1987; Straw 1988; Manuel 1995).
As Javier León (2014) has noted, the impact of neoliberalism on music cultures would also
include many other developments, from the defunding of state systems of music patronage
to the collapsing of dichotomies of production and consumption. In Music and Capitalism
(2016), Timothy Taylor explores various other ramifications of neoliberalism on music cul-
ture, including: the advent of new dimensions of marketing and branding; new forms of
accommodation and interaction between musicians and commercial advertising; and new
sorts of connections between music consumption, personal identity, and digitally mediated
social interactions.
Gavin Steingo’s work on popular music in South Africa (2016) illustrates other dynamics
of musical production under conditions of neoliberalism. While Marx’s own analyses of pro-
duction were mostly oriented toward the manufacturing of physical commodities, Steingo
notes how musical production is, in fact, quite typical of the twenty-first century, where
so much economic activity and production are based on information, intellectual property,
and intangible entities like music, rather than the manufacturing of tangible goods. In fact,
the advent of neoliberalism has coincided with—and been inseparable from—that of digital
technologies, some of whose impact on music will be outlined below.
As many scholars have noted, characteristically pre-modern, sentimental attitudes
and aesthetics can exist in symbiotic relationships with modern, commodity-oriented
counterparts. In an erudite 2002 article, Martin Stokes takes a neo-Marxist approach to
the modes of musical production found in two different sorts of Turkish music scenes.
In one scene—typified by a professional performer named Ibrahim—the inexorable
force of capital and capitalism has “disenchanted” many aspects of traditional music
making; Ibrahim is shrewdly up-to-date, pragmatic, and professional in his activities
and happy to integrate his region’s distinctive traditions with the modern “national”
aesthetics and instrumentation promoted by the state-run radio, for which he often
composes and performs. Another musician, Necmi, epitomizes what could be seen as a
more typically pre-modern aesthetic: he is indifferent to commercial concerns, adheres
to the distinctive fiddle music of his particular region, and is committed to keeping his
music rooted in intimate social gatherings, rather than professional gigs and national
projects. Stokes, however, uses a reinterpretation of Marx to argue that these seemingly
distinct attitudes and practices can coexist and nourish each other, just as capital itself
can operate through and use “difference,” rather than merely homogenizing music and
socio-musical ideas.

Music and Socio-economic Class

The Communist Manifesto asserted, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the his-
tory of class struggles” ([1848] 1959: 7). Accordingly, subsequent Marxist studies of culture
have consistently foregrounded class dynamics, even if most contemporary scholarship also
recognizes the importance of other social factors, such as gender and ethnicity. Scholars
also recognize that class boundaries are often indistinct, and even definitions of classes in
58  Peter Manuel
capitalist society have varied. Marx conceived of the bourgeoisie as the dominant capitalist
class that owns the means of production, though some contemporary authors—largely out-
side the Marxist tradition and writing in a loose and non-technical fashion—conflate the
bourgeoisie with the “middle class,” encompassing relatively educated, white-collar w ­ orkers
as a whole. However conceived, these groups would stand in contrast to the w ­ orking class,
or proletariat—consisting quintessentially of wage-earning, blue-collar workers—and the
lumpen proletariat of assorted drifters, hustlers, buskers, and the like.
A number of ethnomusicological studies have highlighted the relations between particular
music genres and the social classes in which they are grounded. As I have noted elsewhere
(1988: 18–19), the urban lumpen proletariat, with its “unbound” creative energy and acute
self-consciousness as a class, has played a disproportionately dynamic role in the creation of
various music genres, including Greek rebetika, the Argentine tango, Indonesian kroncong,
Jamaican dancehall, and African American hip-hop. Other works have explored in greater
depth how music serves as a focal site for the articulation of working-class senses of com-
munity, identity, and aesthetics. In Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture
(2004), for example, Aaron Fox shows how country music and convivial discourse serve as
twin vehicles for the affirmation of a rural proletarian identity rooted in sociability, n
­ ­ostalgia,
“redneck” pride, and a combination of machismo and emotional vulnerability. A somewhat
different form of working-class alienation—here in deindustrialized Akron, Ohio—is in-
terpreted as animating the experience of the heavy metal fans in Harris M. Berger’s 1999
­monograph, Metal, Rock and Jazz.5 Yet another study of music in working-class culture is
Manuel Peña’s The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (1985). Peña
explores how the proletarian population in question has cherished accordion-based conjunto
music as a distinctive emblem of both their ethnic and class identity, in contrast to more
mainstream American musics and the more “genteel,” large-ensemble orquesta music.
A different sort of perspective on class and music is presented by Taylor in The Sounds of
Capitalism (2012). In one chapter, Taylor builds on Bourdieu’s ideas (1998, 2003) to focus on
the experiences of the “new petite bourgeoisie,” a group that is akin to what Barbara and
John Ehrenreich (1979) and others have called the “professional managerial class.” Taylor
shows how such contemporary cultural workers (such as producers, music marketers, and
agents) cultivate an aesthetic of hipness and coolness, comfortably mediate between high
and low culture, and readily embrace consumerist dimensions of music, including its use
in advertising.
Charles Keil, a consistently original ethnomusicological thinker, offered still another
kind of Marxist perspective on the relations among class, capitalism, and music in “Peo-
ple’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony” (1994). Exam-
ining the trajectories of the blues and polka music in the US, Keil argued that dynamics
of socio-economic class have in some respects been more important for these styles than
factors of race or ethnicity. (While blues is traditionally celebrated as an African American
art, Keil—somewhat blasphemously—pointed out that there were very few commercial
recordings of black blues artists until around 1930, and by the latter 1960s the audience for
blues was overwhelmingly white.) In such conditions, the efforts of black blues performers
to cultivate a style cohering with the tastes of a proletarian black community had to be
mediated through the pressures of the stereotypes sought by white bourgeois audiences.
Keil identified similar dynamics in the polka music of Eastern European ethnic minorities
in the US. In polka as with blues, style was conditioned by class forces. More specifically,
Keil argued that a working-class ­community—be it a racial or ethnic minority—must
somehow accept, digest, and “work through” dominant-class stereotypes in order to even-
tually transcend these borrowings.
 Marxist Approaches  59
As Keil would acknowledge, the working-class aspects of both blues and polka are, of
course, ultimately inseparable from their ethnic or racial associations, involving the sort of
interplay between multiple dimensions referred to by contemporary scholars as “intersec-
tionality” (see the chapters by Sugarman and Mahon, this volume.) Such ­intersectionality—
whether labeled as such or not—is especially evident in studies of apartheid-era South
Africa. As books by Veit Erlmann (1991) and David Coplan (1985) have shown, while class
dynamics—especially involving proletarian and lumpen proletarian blacks and bourgeois
whites—were clearly important, they were inseparable from issues of race and ethnicity
(­involving, for instance, the complex relations between Zulus and Xhosas). Any black per-
son’s sense of social identity—as reflected in or even shaped by his or her musical tastes—
would necessarily be bound up with that person’s membership in a particular class and
ethnic group. In these situations, music served as a particularly prominent site in which
ethnic and class identity was negotiated.

Ideology, Hegemony, and Resistance in Music

A recurrent theme of Marxist studies of art and culture concerns the ways that class
struggle and class dynamics condition not only forms of art patronage and production,
but also the implicit or explicit ideologies that art conveys. In some contexts, the word
“ideology” can be used in a neutral sense to refer to a set of meanings, values, aesthetics,
expectations, socio-political attitudes, and ways of conceiving the self and society in a
culture. In ­M arxist thought, however, the word ideology is often given a more specific
meaning, referring to the ways that these sets of ideas serve to legitimize, naturalize, and
perpetuate the ­socio-economic hegemony exerted by the dominant class. Hegemonic ide-
ologies, rather than being explicit and overt, are typically taken for granted and are most
powerful when they are effectively invisible. Thus, for example, the hegemonic bourgeois
ideology referred to by Marxists is so pervasive in contemporary capitalist societies that
its existence is generally unquestioned, but, in fact, it would stand in sharp contrast to the
prevailing worldview in contemporary North Korea, highland tribal New Guinea, or a
Chinese village of the fourteenth century. Marxists would stress that bourgeois notions of
individualism, rationality, private property, and modern political institutions are products
of specific historical circumstances rather than “natural” and inevitable entities. Marxists
have argued that while bourgeois ideology is dynamic, productive, and inclusive in its
way, it also serves to obscure class consciousness and systems of domination, reinforcing
exploitation and often inculcating a false consciousness in which people think, act, and
vote in ways that are often contradictory to what would otherwise be their enlight-
ened self-interest. Art and music are parts of the ideological superstructure, and, as noted
above, even those forms of expressive culture that appear to be disinterested, socially
autonomous forms of “art for art’s sake” are paradoxically ideological in celebrating their
supposed freedom from ideology.
Marx and Engels articulated a fundamental premise regarding ideological hegemony in
The German Ideology ([1846] 1968):

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The
class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same
time over the means of mental production…
([1846] 1968)
60  Peter Manuel
Like Marx and Engels, many ethnomusicologists have been attentive to the broader
­socio-political dimensions of culture, especially in societies marked by sharp socio-­
economic and political divisions. Hence, ethnomusicologists have written extensively
about such topics as the role of music in Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation
(McDonald 2013a, 2013b), the struggle for social justice in Latin America (e.g. Moore
2003), and a­ nti-nuclear protests in Japan (Manabe 2016). However, not all of these
studies utilize Marxist perspectives per se, which would entail not so much a pro-­
communist viewpoint but rather a use of Marxist analytical approaches to hegemony
and resistance.
Such perspectives have, in fact, animated a number of writings on Western popular
music, which has been seen variously as a countercultural, subversive, and liberat-
ing form of grassroots art, or, alternately, as an inescapably commercial entertainment
idiom that ultimately serves to reinforce bourgeois ideology by fetishizing stars and
songs, and distracting and stupefying consumers. In fact, the first thinker to write
incisively about commercial popular music was Adorno, whose 1941 essay “On Pop-
ular Music” has constituted a sort of starting point for critical discussions of the genre
([1941] 1976). Together with other scholars originally associated with the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Adorno used Marxist ideas not to ad-
vocate socialism but to develop critical perspectives on capitalist society, especially in
the wake of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The ­F rankfurt School theorists—especially
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer—saw capitalist mass culture as ma-
nipulating and creating public needs rather than responding to them, and ultimately
indoctrinating individuals being into passive consumers rather than critical thinkers or
mobilized, self-aware activists.
Adorno himself, largely uninterested in politics per se, mostly wrote about aesthetics
and art, especially music ([1948] 1986, [1962] 1988, 1998). Adorno saw popular mu-
sic as the product of a monolithic culture industry that works to exploit consumers
while encouraging them to imagine that they are exercising free choice. Basing his
assessment primarily on Tin Pan Alley songs of the 1930s, Adorno lambasted popular
music for what he saw as its reliance on standardized, hackneyed formulas (such as the
32-bar aaba form) to mass-produce insipid, “pre-digested” songs that give, at best,
a false impression of being original through a process of “pseudo-individualization”
(1976, 2005). Adorno’s critique might seem to suggest simple elitist snobbery, but he
was equally critical of aspects of high culture, and, in Marxist fashion, he saw com-
mercial popular culture as being imposed on the public by a corporate entertainment
industry rather than emerging from working-class society itself (2005). David Buxton
([1983] 1990) extended Adorno’s Marxist critique, arguing that the commercial music
industry replaces organic culture with an alienating, consumerist star system, and that
it profits from the regulation and organization of l­eisure time, just as Frederick Taylor’s
principles of scientific management regimented the practices of factory workers at the
turn of the twentieth century. A different Taylor—the aforementioned T ­ imothy—has
employed a Marxist framework to document the history of music in ­A merican adver-
tising, from sponsored radio programs through radio jingles to the ­present-day use of
all manner of pop genres in television ads (2012).
Adorno’s ideas have been much criticized, especially for their inattention to live
performance, to the ways that listeners can derive their own uses and gratifications
from music, and to the sociocultural spaces, margins, and ruptures in music cultures
that allow various sorts of alternative, independent, and innovative music subcul-
tures to develop (see, for example, Middleton 1990: Ch. 2; Paddison 1982).6 However,
 Marxist Approaches  61
a few ethnomusicological studies have drawn selectively on Adorno’s approach. In my
book Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (1993), I argued that
the North Indian popular music industry exhibited some of the alienating features of
“mass culture” critiqued by Adorno. Until the spread of cassettes in the mid-1980s,
­commercial popular music in North India consisted overwhelmingly of film music,
set in a single language (Hindi), performed in a fairly standardized style, produced
by a tiny coterie of Bombay-based composers and singers, and, via commercial Hindi
films, effectively imposed on a vast, and vastly diverse, listening public. The advent
of cassettes, however, dramatically democratized and decentralized the music indus-
try, precipitating the emergence of hundreds of recording companies, large and small,
that tailored their products to an unprecedented diversity of regional and community
markets.
The 1980s saw the emergence of the discipline of cultural studies, which expanded
and enhanced Marxist-derived ideas in ways that have informed much subsequent schol-
arship in the humanities and social sciences, including ethnomusicology. In the UK,
the field originated at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University
of Birmingham. One basic contribution of Birmingham School cultural studies, as ar-
ticulated by Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and others, was to develop ideas about hegemony
outlined in the 1930s by the Italian social theorist and Marxist revolutionary A ­ ntonio
Gramsci (1891–1937). Writing about capitalist societies (rather than communist dicta-
torships), Gramsci elucidated how dominant-class hegemony relies less on force than
it does on the consent of the dominated. This ideological hegemony—including the
“ideas of the ruling class” noted by Marx—is not a complete and stable set of beliefs
forcibly foisted upon the masses, but rather a fluid entity that is constantly being con-
tested in various ways (e.g. Gramsci 1971: 60, 80, 182–84).7 Similarly, as Hall (1981) and
others noted, popular culture—including music—is best seen not as something crudely
imposed by the entertainment industries (as Adorno might argue), but instead as a
site of ongoing negotiation and contestation, a ground on which transformations are
worked. Hegemony, in this conception, must continually be adapted and won again,
as it responds to various sorts of challenges, however contradictory in nature, from
diverse social or artistic movements. This more flexible and subtle understanding of
hegemony bears certain affinities with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (a “system of dispo-
sitions” [1977] that regiments conduct in everyday life), and also with the intangible yet
all-­enveloping workings of power as explored by French philosopher Michel Foucault
(1926–1984). Perhaps the most influential study of music to come from British cultural
studies was Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which explored how the
1970s punk movement constituted a semiotic subversion of dominant ideologies—a
kind of “graffiti on a prison wall” (1979: 3)—not in the form of overt political action,
but rather through an artful and ideologically subversive resignification of symbols,
from swastikas and safety pins to rudimentary guitar chords.
Another significant contribution of British cultural studies has been to extend Marxist
concepts of hegemony and resistance to relate not only to dynamics of class, but also to
gender, ethnicity, race, and other dimensions of power and identity. Several ethnomusi-
cologists have found this approach valuable in their work on non-Western cultures and of
ethnic minorities within the West itself. A representative example is Raúl Romero’s study
of music culture in the Mantaro Valley of Peru (2001), where, for the last century, Wanka
Indians and mestizos have cultivated a vigorous regional culture—including syncretic mu-
sic forms—through which they can preserve local identity while resisting cultural domi-
nation by nearby Lima.
62  Peter Manuel

Text Box 2.2  Relationships among Differing Traditions

of Critical Research

The Birmingham School’s application of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to gender

and race was one of many examples in twentieth- and twenty-first-century social
thought in which scholars brought ideas from two or more traditions of critical re-
search together to understand the relations among differing forms of power. While
there have certainly been substantial tensions between Marxist and feminist thinkers,
for example, there have also been rich connections between them (see, for example,
Townshend 1996; Brown 2014). One particularly resonant meeting place of Marxism
and feminism can be found in a movement called Italian autonomism, where writers
such as ­Mariarosa Dalla Costa (2019) and Silvia Federici (1975, 2004) have showed
the centrality of ­women’s ­non-waged domestic labor for the emergence and repro-
duction of capitalism, and illustrated how a society’s means of production shapes its
dynamics of gender and sexuality. Likewise, a wide variety of thinkers both within and
beyond the B ­ irmingham School have brought critical approaches to race into conver-
sation with Marxism, ­exploring the political economy of racial orders and the racial
foundations of capitalism and ­colonialism (e.g. Gilroy 1982, 1987; Robinson 1983;
James 1992; B ­ lackburn 1997; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002; Parry 2004; Hall 2018).
Since the 1960s, cultural studies and post-colonial studies have served as key sites in
which ­scholars have examined the interaction of multiple forms of domination, and the
­chapters in this volume by Sugarman and Mahon discuss cultural studies approaches to
gender and race, respectively. As Manuel observed above, the interplay among different
dimensions of power is most frequently referred to in contemporary academic dis-
course as “intersectionality,” a term coined by the black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé
Crenshaw (1989). Mahon’s chapter provides the primary discussion of Crenshaw’s work
and intersectionality more broadly, but Sugarman explores this topic as well. Marxism
and post-colonial studies are discussed in the chapter by ­Wallach and Clinton. —Harris
M. Berger

The Mass Media and Mode of Cultural Production

Many of the key themes of cultural studies—including neo-Marxist ideas of hegemony,
resistance, and alienation—have been explored in complementary fashion in the field of
media studies.8 Media studies scholars make a fundamental distinction between the cor-
porate, centralized, capital-intensive “old media” and the decentralized, democratic, and
participatory “new media,” which are more conducive to grassroots input and diversity. As
modes of music production and dissemination, the “old media” were quintessentially repre-
sented by cinema, network television, and the vinyl record industry, which was dominated
for decades by the “Big Five” multinationals. Cassettes were the first form of “new media”
in music production, as cassette players, duplication machinery, and cassettes themselves are
inexpensive and user-friendly. Cassette technology had a particularly dramatic effect in the
developing world, enabling the emergence of innumerable grassroots, community-based
record labels that marketed an unprecedented variety of music types for diverse audiences,
including subaltern groups whose music had never enjoyed mass-media dissemination. As I
explored in Cassette Culture (1993), the cassette’s impact was particularly dramatic in India,
where a music industry previously dominated by a handful of Bombay-based producers and
artists gave way in the 1980s to a lively scene in which hundreds of companies, large and
 Marxist Approaches  63
small, came to produce an extraordinary variety of musics, including folk-pop fusions, for
local and regional markets. The democratization of the music industry did not promote any
progressive social mobilization or challenge the existing political hegemony in India, but
it did revitalize diverse community and regional music cultures that had been on the de-
fensive against the standardized, one-size-fits-all mass culture emanating from Bollywood
studios.
In South Asia and elsewhere, subsequent decades saw music distribution shift from cas-
settes to MP3 discs and VCDs (video compact discs), and subsequently to digital media
with the spread of the Internet and “Web 2.0” media. With the easy availability of free
downloaded music and streaming music services, with their inconsiderable royalty pay-
ments, musicians have increasingly reverted to a pre-industrial or early twentieth-century
modus vivendi in which recordings serve primarily as promotional entities and profits are
made only through live performances—or perhaps through various sorts of flexible gigs in
the digital economy, such as composing or performing for advertisements. In much of the
developing world, direct Internet access is not even necessary for participation in the file-­
sharing culture, as mobile phones and USB sticks come to constitute predominant media
for the distribution and consumption of music. In the process, sales of physical recordings
have evaporated, the brick-and-mortar stores that sold them have disappeared, and many
music producers have gone bankrupt.9
The present chapter need not explore all the ramifications of such developments, though
some pertain directly to Marxist themes. Many studies of digital music culture in the
­neoliberal era have examined the actors and forces that control the new mode of music
production, as well as the new media’s potentials for hegemony and resistance. Some studies
emphasize how the Internet has led to new forms of concentration and consolidation in
the music industry (Krims 2003; Azenha 2006), while others show how it has constituted
a vehicle for a wide variety of progressive, counter-hegemonic music idioms (e.g. Manabe
2017). In many ways, Internet mediation has transformed the dichotomous power relation-
ship between producer and consumer, precipitating the emergence of “prosumers” who
enact both roles, whether through amateur mashups or YouTube comments and playlists
(see, e.g., Ayers 2006; Kot 2009). The digital revolution has also transformed the use and
exchange value of recorded music, turning it into what Jeremy Wade Morris (2015) calls a
“digital music commodity,” with its own distinctive forms of materiality, uses, and social
meanings. The technological revolution has also enhanced the aforementioned sense in
which the consuming audience itself has become a commodity, whose tastes—as reflected,
for example, in YouTube views and music downloads—are tracked, surveyed, and mar-
keted via sophisticated algorithms to corporate interests (even as downloaders fancy them-
selves to be bypassing the music industry; see, e.g., Taylor 2012).

Capitalism, Bourgeois Subjectivity, and Musical Form

Over the decades, ethnomusicologists have often been intrigued by the notion that so-
cial structure can condition not only forms of musical patronage and ideology, but also
the actual form of music itself—that is, that sound structure can recapitulate social struc-
ture. This idea has frequently been referred to as “homology theory” and has taken many
forms.10 Alan Lomax’s project of “cantometrics” is one well-known articulation of ho-
mology theory. Lomax assembled a large mass of information about the musical styles and
forms of social organization of cultural groups from around the world and attempted to
find correlations among these data sets (1968). Although most ethnomusicologists have
found this work deeply problematic, Lomax was certainly correct in noting, for example,
how relatively egalitarian classless societies—such as the Central African BaAka—make
64  Peter Manuel
music in characteristically “groupy” ways, with individual parts combining in a loosely
collective composite.11 Thomas Turino (1993) noted similar patterns of loosely communal
music making and composition among highland Andean Indians; in contrast, those Indians
who had migrated to Lima developed more rationalized, hierarchic social sensibilities and
formed much more regimented ensembles, with distinct leaders and composers and accord-
ingly more smooth and homogeneous musical textures.
Neither Lomax nor Turino used Marxist approaches per se, which are in any case more
oriented toward the analysis of stratified societies with distinct social classes. However, a
few scholars have used Marxist theory to note how the epochal transition from f­eudalism
to capitalism in Europe precipitated a new bourgeois aesthetic with, in music, a prefer-
ence for closed, tightly structured forms—especially sonata form and “song”—with a
clear sense of dramatic direction, climax, and closure. Such closed, symmetrical forms
have been relatively uncharacteristic of traditional non-Western musics, or of music in the
­pre-Renaissance West. More typical of the latter are entities based on theme-and-variation,
the ostinato (a repeating musical figure, often in the bass, against which various melodies
are set), the strophe (where a group of thematically independent song texts are set to a single
melody), or the rhythms of dance (in which various tunes may be strung together in no
particular order or length). These all stand in dramatic contrast to the forms that came into
vogue in Europe starting from the eighteenth century, especially sonata form, with its clear,
if flexible, structure of exposition, development, and recapitulation. In popular and ver-
nacular music, the parallel development was the emergence of 32-bar aaba (or often aababa)
song form, which has dominated Euro-American popular music for more than a century,
from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, Beyoncé, and beyond.
Marxist scholars have found a variety of ways to link the emergence of these highly
structured forms to the changing economic base of European societies. Arnold Hauser
argued that this new sensibility was rooted in the unprecedented importance of rationali-
zation in socio-economic life attending the advent of capitalism. With the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, the material foundation of European societies shifted from farm-
ing, hunting, and craft guilds—with their dependence on the vagaries of nature and the
authority of ­t radition—to economies based on rational, man-made systems of planning,
banking, credit, investment, and the like. Disorder, blind habit, and lack of control were
anathema to the new sensibilities that came to govern commerce and extended to art as
well. The things that came to be seen as beautiful involved the logical conformity of in-
dividual parts to the whole. The Italian Renaissance humanist Leone Alberti (1404–1472)
was one of several thinkers who articulated this view explicitly, describing the proper
work of art as “so constituted that it is impossible to take anything away from it or add
anything to it without impairing the beauty of the whole” (Alberti in Hauser 1957: vol. 2,
p. 89). This aesthetic came to govern all arts. The busy clutter typical of pre-Renaissance
painting gave way to a unified, balanced structuring of the surface, using perspective to
give the impression that the scene is being depicted from the vantage point of a single
viewer. Similarly, pre-modern literary forms like the epic (such as Homer’s The Odyssey)
or the bardic ballad would consist of a series of episodes which—aside from the opening
and concluding chapters—occurred in no particular order and could be rearranged or
shortened in performance. In the eighteenth century, such forms gave way to the novel,
with its tightly knit, rationally structured form. There is an obvious parallel between this
narrative structure and sonata form, in which the protagonistic first and second themes
wander afar and eventually return home, and the disorder and tension introduced in the
development section are logically resolved.
In an impressive and original study (1974), Hungarian Marxist musicologist Janos
­Marothy traced the gradual evolution of song and sonata form and supplemented Hauser’s
 Marxist Approaches  65
interpretation by positing a relation between such closed, structured entities and the new
phenomenon of the “bourgeois Ego,” or what many scholars today would call the bourgeois
subject. This new sort of personal identity, with its heightened self-awareness, was based
on capitalism and the importance of the individual (or nuclear family) as productive unit,
rather than the village, clan, or guild. Hence, literature, drama, and poetry came to focus
on the infinitely nuanced emotional lives of ordinary people (as opposed to the stock heroic
characters of epics and ballads, such as Ulysses or Roland). Paintings increasingly portrayed
ordinary individuals, rather than traditional stereotypes and religious icons. Communal and
line dances gave way—initially through the waltz—to intimate couple dances. And musical
forms, in a more abstract but nevertheless tangible sense, acquired their own character as
structured “individuals”—rather than loose, meandering, or additive entities—typically
with their own internal dramatic sense of climax and closure, of foreground and back-
ground, and of “home” and the threatening/exciting outside world. Adorno (e.g. [1948]
1986: 55–56, especially as interpreted by Witkin 1998, and Subotnik 1976) offered his
own complementary perspective on this aesthetic. In my own writing (1985, 2002), I have
attempted to extend this analytical approach beyond the developed West, noting parallel
sorts of historical transformations in Indian and Latin American musics, in which strophic,
open-ended, or ostinato-based forms adopt symmetry and closure as they modernize and
urbanize. Finally, postmodernist scholars inspired by Jameson and others could argue for
a similar broad coherence between socio-economic structure and sound structure—such
as much electronic dance music—conditioned by the arguably “epochal” transition to
neoliberalism.

Conclusions
Karl Marx may not have been thinking of world music when he wrote in 1852, “Men
make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it
under circumstances chosen by themselves” ([1852] 1959: 320). Nevertheless, most ethno-
musicologists would agree that while men and women make their own music, and create
their own styles, aesthetic ideas, and conventions of listening and performing, they do so in
ways that are ultimately conditioned by broader historical contexts. Music, of course, does
not merely “reflect” society and culture; its practices, events, aesthetics, and styles are often
significant entities that themselves not only constitute parts of culture, but also can serve as
focal sites for broader socio-cultural developments. And yet, these entities do not evolve in
a socio-historical vacuum, but rather in the context of more fundamental material condi-
tions. Marxists of various sorts have attempted to interpret these relationships, stressing the
influence of socio-economic base on culture while allowing for certain sorts and degrees
of autonomy in the superstructure. Over the years, ethnomusicologists have been interested
in these same issues, and many have used Marxist approaches, especially as expanded and
adapted by the field of cultural studies. While some Marxist theory—such as the work of
Louis Althusser (see Sugarman, this volume)—has been criticized for a tendency to be ex-
cessively abstract, arid, and ahistorical, ethnomusicologists have made significant contribu-
tions in showing, more tangibly, how music may constitute a rich site for understanding the
dynamics of hegemony and resistance, and the relations between social structure and sound
structure. Further, in a modern Euro-American socio-political context in which bour-
geois ideology and the mass media often actively obscure class ­consciousness—­especially
­working-class solidarity—Marxist approaches to culture can offer particularly unique in-
sights. The contemporary student of ethnomusicology who takes the time to engage Marx’s
seminal writings and those other scholars in this tradition will find them to be a rich source
of insight.
66  Peter Manuel
Notes
1 A number of the themes that Manuel raises here are discussed further in the chapter by Jeremy
­Wallach and Esther Clinton, where they are set in the context of globalization. These include the
literature on alternative modernities, globalization and colonialism, globalization and neoliberalism,
and the role of new media technology in the global spread of music. —Harris M. Berger
2 Oddly, Bourdieu himself endorsed this elitism by dismissing the idea that working-class people could
have their own sort of aesthetics or art forms, saying that the expressive forms of the proletariat could
consist of no more than “scattered fragments of an old erudite culture” (1984: 395).
3 Qureshi’s interest in Marxism is part of a larger school of Marxist studies at the University of Alberta,
where she has been based (see, for example, Qureshi 2002a).
4 As explored by Jameson (1984), postmodern bricolage and pastiche typically combine entities from
disparate media, such as cartoons and photographs, calling attention to their artificiality; blank
irony mocks something without assuming a stance of normality and righteousness. A simulacrum—­
especially as described by Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1988)—is a media entity (such as an obviously
doctored photograph), which does not signify or represent any real-world entity.
5 A contrasting view of the relationship between heavy metal music and capitalism is found in Robert
Walser’s Running with the Devil. Where Berger focuses on a single working-class music scene and un-
derstands metal as expressing specifically proletarian frustrations, Walser looks at the genre of metal
as a whole and understands it as articulating the cross-class experience of terror and exhilaration
that emerge for anyone living under the relentlessly competitive conditions of late capitalism (1993:
165–71).
6 In the present intellectual scene, scholarly readings of Adorno’s work vary widely; on the contempo-
rary reception of Adorno, see the remarks by Berger in Wallach and Clinton (this volume, n19). On
Adorno’s influence on early ethnomusicological studies of the world music industry, see Wallach and
Clinton (this volume).
7 Gramsci’s insights were presaged by Marx’s own observations that the force of capital, in all its
­d imensions, “moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited”
([1939] 1973: 410).
8 A useful survey is McQuail (1987).
9 For a rich social history of the decline of brick-and-mortar music retail in India, see Beaster-Jones
(2016).
10 On homology theory in structuralism, see Beaster-Jones (this volume). On homology theory
and theories of participation, see Rahaim (this volume). On homology theory in first-generation
­Birmingham School culture studies, as well as Dick Hebdidge’s attempt to replace it with the idea of
“signifying practices” developed by Julia Kristeva and other thinkers from the Tel Quel group, see
­Hebdige (1979: 117–27).
11 While Lomax’s schematic attempts to link cultural traits and musical style are generally seen as crude
and mechanistic, his approach has resurfaced, for better or worse, in such work as the “Natural His-
tory of Song” project (Natural History, n.d.).

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Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rockin’ Round the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New
York: Methuen.
Kahn-Harris, Keith. 2006. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. New York: Berg.
Keil, Charles. 1994. “People’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony.” In
­Music Grooves, by Charles Keil and Steven Feld, 197–217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kot, Greg. 2009. Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. New York: Scribner.
Krims, Adam. 2003. “Marxist Music Analysis without Adorno: Popular Music and Urban Geography.” In
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León, Javier. 2014. “Introduction: Music, Music Making, and Neoliberalism.” Culture, Theory and ­Critique
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Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
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Manabe, Noriko. 2016. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. New York:
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———. 2017. “The Unending History of Protest Music.” Music and Politics 11 (1). http://quod.lib.umich.
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———. 1989. Thumri in Historical and Stylistic Perspectives. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
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———. 2002. “Modernity and Music Structure: Neo-Marxist Perspectives on Song Form and its Suc-
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70  Peter Manuel
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3 Theories of Gender and Sexuality
From the Village to the Anthropocene
Jane C. Sugarman

It was in the 1980s that the topic of gender was first given concerted attention in North
American ethnomusicology, prompted initially by the recognition of specific imbalances in
the discipline. For example, in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts
(1983), Bruno Nettl noted that, despite a high percentage of women scholars in the field,
most studies “described music cultures largely as they were presented by male informants,”
a fact he attributed in part to the “dominant role of men in determining approaches and
methods” in the discipline (334). Indeed, it could be argued that, because of the prominence
of male academics in the field’s early years, women scholars had generally been trained by
male mentors (or their female students), and in many cases, modeled their methodologies
and choice of study objects on those of their teachers. Further, in many societies, men were
the principal performers of music in public settings and were thus often more accessible to
researchers, male or female. But the problem ran deeper: many ethnomusicologists drew on
theoretical models from the social sciences, and these too had a male bias, as many anthro-
pologists at the time had begun to argue (Reiter 1975). As a result, the view of music that
emerged in ethnomusicology scholarship, and that was taught both to general students and
to future generations of specialists in the field, was an androcentric one.
In the 1980s, a group of primarily female ethnomusicologists began to turn their atten-
tion to the musical activities and perspectives of women, often within an explicitly feminist
framework. Gradually, such scholarship shifted from an emphasis on “women and music”
to a consideration of “music and gender” and, more recently, to issues of sexuality as well.
This chapter traces that intellectual trajectory by reviewing some of the ways in which rela-
tionships among music, gender, and sexuality have been analyzed in ethnomusicology and
related disciplines.1 I discuss several major theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality
that ethnomusicologists have used, beginning with the feminist anthropology of the 1970s
and 1980s and continuing with poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, gender performa-
tivity and queer theory, interventions in Western feminism by scholars of color (including
the concept of intersectionality), theories of masculinities, and writings interrogating the
concept of resistance with regard to gender norms. This overview is followed by a dis-
cussion of several significant music studies that have drawn on these and other theoretical
writings, and then a brief case study drawn from my own research. The chapter closes with
a look ahead toward theoretical formulations that are on the horizon.

Activism and the Academy

At the outset of this chapter, it is important to be aware of the complex relationships that
exist between, on the one hand, feminist and LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender)
activism and, on the other hand, research on gender and sexuality, as well as the many
forms that the politics of gender and sexuality has taken in differing national contexts.
Within the Western academy, scholars often distinguish between feminism and LGBT
72  Jane C. Sugarman
rights as political movements and the academic fields of women’s studies, feminist studies,
and gender and sexuality studies. Further, these political movements have not been con-
fined to Western democracies but have unfolded in various forms around the world. The
issue of gender equality, in particular, has at times been aligned with nation-building efforts
or national liberation movements. It is not only popular and mass activism that has played
a role in the politics of gender and sexuality: throughout the twentieth century, policies
regulating gender relations and sexual behaviors have been an intrinsic part of most state
legal systems. In these contexts, it is important to acknowledge the differences between
Western social movements and the diverse forms of activism and governmentality that have
developed around the world.2
With regard to feminism, scholars in Western countries frequently speak of three “waves”
of intensive feminist engagement, most often expressed in a language of rights. The first
wave is said to encompass the period roughly from the early nineteenth through the early
twentieth centuries. At this time, feminists were primarily concerned with women’s legal
rights, including the right to own and inherit property and to vote (which was called “suf-
frage” during this period). The second wave of intensive activities is said to have begun in
the early 1960s and continued into the 1980s. Activism in the US in this period was spear-
headed by women who were attending college or had received a college degree, and is often
interpreted as a reaction against the expectations placed on women after World War II that
they forsake the employment they had undertaken during the war and return to the domes-
tic sphere and the role of housewife. The major concerns of this wave included achieving
“equal pay for equal work,” reproductive rights, and equal access to professional opportu-
nities, as well as phenomena such as domestic violence and workplace harassment. Third-
wave feminism is the term generally attributed to political stances of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, in which greater attention has been given to issues of sexuality
and gender fluidity, as well as the intersection of gender with other aspects of identity such
as race, class, and ability. The notion of waves has itself been widely criticized, particularly
for ignoring the activities of working-class women and women of color.3
LGBT rights movements in Western countries have followed a similar trajectory. Unlike
women’s movements, however, individuals identifying with any of these categories have
campaigned not only for legal, economic, and social parity, but also for the decriminali-
zation and demedicalization of their sexual activities. There has also been ongoing debate
within and beyond these movements as to how individuals should best identify themselves.
Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there was
a general trend in North Atlantic countries to criminalize what only became known as
“homosexuality” in the mid-nineteenth century, in a period that also marked the be-
ginnings of medical and psychiatric research into sexual behaviors. In the US, although
subcultures based on a “gay” or “lesbian” identity developed in individual locales in the
early twentieth century, it was not until the 1950s that the first successful organizations
campaigning for gay and lesbian rights were founded. Political activism increased through-
out the 1950s and 1960s, and by the early 1970s a “gay (and lesbian) liberation” move-
ment began to consolidate across the US, modeled in part on—and at times intersecting
with—the civil rights and women’s movements. Gradually, gays and lesbians were joined
by individuals who identified as bisexual or transsexual (later, transgender), bringing into
being the acronym LGBT. By the late 1980s, the term “queer” began to be advocated by
activists in the US who were uncomfortable with the essentialization of identities that was
being emphasized within this movement. Others adopted the term in opposition to a shift
in activism toward goals such as same-sex marriage or service in the military, which were
seen as conservative and assimilationist. Most recently, the term “queer” has been incorpo-
rated into longer acronyms such as LGBTQIA2 (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer
 Gender and Sexuality  73
[or  questioning]-intersex-asexual-two spirited) in an attempt to encompass all forms of
non-heteronormative self-identification.4
The relationship among these diverse forms of activism and between social movements
and the Western academy is highly complex. For example, as a result of the feminist agita-
tion of the previous decade, the early 1970s saw the founding of the first academic programs
in women’s studies in the US, in a period when programs in ethnic studies were also emerg-
ing. Members of the black feminist Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1979) were among
the first to propose the term “identity politics” to refer to activism in this period that fore-
grounded social inequities on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identi-
fication.5 Such writings anticipated the development of both intersectional and critical race
theory beginning in the later 1980s (see below). Beginning in the late 1970s, scholars in
Western Europe began to group women’s, civil rights, and gay rights (later LGBT) move-
ments together with environmentalism, peace movements, and anti-­g lobalization activism
as “the new social movements” (Buechler 1995; see also Laclau and Mouffe ([1985] 2014).
In this same period, scholars associated with British cultural studies began to highlight race
and gender, in addition to class, in their politically engaged writings. More recently, in
response to LGBT activism, many women’s studies programs have expanded their scope to
encompass gender and sexuality studies. In both Europe and the US, much of this scholar-
ship has been prompted by a recognition that all such forms of activism challenge the cen-
tral place that class held in earlier struggles and are less amenable to some forms of Marxist
analysis. In turn, feminism and LGBT activism in recent decades have been strongly influ-
enced by academic theorizing, several strains of which are discussed below.

Women’s Studies and Feminist Anthropology in the

1970s and 1980s
During the early 1970s, as women’s studies was beginning to be recognized as an academic
field of study in the US, much of the scholarship in disciplines such as English literature,
sociology, and psychology focused on Western societies, and specifically on the situation
and experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Among the topics addressed
were the character of Western family structures, the “sex roles” that defined Western soci-
eties, and the identification of “traits” that were inherent to each sex. Gradually scholars in
both the humanities and the social sciences began to move away from an exclusive focus on
“sex” to the recognition of a distinction between “sex” and “gender.”6 As these terms have
come to be used, “sex” refers to chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical ­characteristics,
which together are taken to distinguish males and females. “Gender” refers to societal
beliefs about the sexes, such as how members of each sex are expected to behave or what
characteristics they are believed to have, as well as how individuals choose to identify
themselves. Sex is seen to be universal and fundamental, while gender is societally specific.
It is important to note that, although such a distinction is still widely observed, it has been
criticized over the decades from a variety of perspectives. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist
and feminist scholar who has researched “intersex” individuals whose bodies are not readily
classified as male or female, has suggested that a “sexual continuum” exists, with male and
female “on the extreme ends” (2000: 31). When scientists or medical professionals identify
an individual as male or female, their decision is ultimately made on the basis of social
consensus (3). Fausto-Sterling has argued further that Euro-American scientific research,
which earlier recognized various configurations of sex characteristics, came to distinguish
more rigidly between categories of male and female during the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, a period that coincided with increased agitation for gender equality (39–40).
More recently, writers associated with the “new materialism” (see below) have argued that,
74  Jane C. Sugarman
by emphasizing a split between sex/nature and gender/nurture, the sex-gender distinction
constructs the biological and the cultural as discrete domains that interact, rather than as
“a differentiation within one system, where the differentiated parts are entangled such that
they cannot be distinctly and separately identified” (Davis 2009: 76).
Parallel with other early developments in women’s studies, a field of feminist anthropol-
ogy began to coalesce in the 1970s, composed largely but not exclusively of women scholars
(see, for example, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1975; Ortner and Whitehead 1981;
Moore 1988). In contrast to scholars in other disciplines, feminist anthropologists attempted
to create an approach to the study of gender that could be applied cross-culturally. Much
early literature in this area focused on issues of male dominance: Were all societies patri-
archal? Were women universally oppressed or subordinated? Were there any societies that
were matriarchal or completely egalitarian? A concern with such issues meant that Western
feminist scholars had to weigh their political ideals, formulated within the context of their
own society, against their need to be sensitive to the specificity of the societies that they
were examining. This tension led to difficult questions. On the one hand, did giving prec-
edence to the “native’s point of view” (cf. Geertz 1983), which was highly valued among
many anthropologists at the time, privilege the perspective of those with greatest status and
authority? Did males and females even share a common viewpoint? On the other hand, did
a focus on power relations involve imposing constructs that were insensitive to the local
context? Did such a focus recapitulate discourses that constructed non-Western societies
as “backward” in comparison to the West (Mohanty 1988; see also Mohanty 2002)? Such
considerations continue to challenge any researcher of gender and sexuality (Monson 1997).
With few exceptions, anthropologists of this period assumed that a society’s “sex/gender
system” (Rubin 1975) or “gender ideology” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981) was charac-
terized by only two genders and heterosexual sexuality. Consistent with anthropological
practices of the time, most researchers also based their analyses on intensive, face-to-face
fieldwork within small communities, rather than considering urban populations, the poli-
tics of the nation-state, or transnational processes. Only gradually have researchers “scaled
up” to address larger geopolitical units or other forms of gendered and sexual identification.
In the early 1970s, a number of feminist anthropologists began to use the ideas of Claude
Lévi-Strauss to develop a structuralist approach to what was still regarded as sexual dif-
ference (on Lévi-Strauss, see Beaster-Jones, this volume). For example, in her article “Is
Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Sherry Ortner (1974) drew on Lévi-Strauss’s The
Raw and the Cooked (1969) to argue that females were universally regarded as being “closer
to nature,” while males were aligned with the domain of “culture,” by which L ­ évi-Strauss
referred to the various actions that humans perform on the natural environment. For schol-
ars of music, such an analysis held the promise of explaining the musical roles that each
gender plays in various societies—why females are frequently encharged with songs that
mark important points in the life cycle, and why males are most often the principal build-
ers and players of instruments, as well as the creators and performers of the most valued
musical genres. Ultimately, however, two factors suggested that a different approach to the
study of gender was needed. First was the realization that categories such as “nature” and
“culture”—as well as a framework within which they are viewed as binary opposites—are
not universally recognized (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). Second, ethnographic re-
search revealed countless exceptions to these generalizations. In some societies, both males
and females perform life-cycle genres, adult women may be prominent public performers
or esteemed ritual specialists, and individuals not clearly defined as male or female may be
encharged with important musical roles.7
By the 1980s, many anthropologists of gender had come to replace structuralist ap-
proaches with the framework of “symbolic” or “interpretive” anthropology advanced
 Gender and Sexuality  75
by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) and others. (On Geertz and ethnomusicology, see Berger
and Stone, Introduction, this volume; on Geertz and performance studies, see Waterman,
this volume.) Rather than taking a universalist approach to signs and symbolism, Geertz
treated individual cultures as distinct systems of signs, each with its own unique set of
meanings (1973, 1983). In this context, the ethnographer studied a society by investigating
and synthesizing the meanings behind its members’ linguistic categories and its charac-
teristic forms of behavior. At the time, one rival school of anthropological thought em-
phasized the close observation of behavior as its principal research method (Harris 1979).
Because he wished to emphasize the meanings underlying and informing behavior, Geertz
termed his method “thick description” (Geertz 1973: 3–30), in the sense that it added a
second layer of analysis to that of behavior alone. Scholars working within a Geertzian
framework approached their task not in terms of sex as a biological given, but rather in
terms of gender as one component of a society’s larger symbolic system. Instead of as-
suming from the outset, for example, that females were aligned with nature and males
with culture, it was necessary to investigate how a society’s members spoke about gender
relations, which attributes and practices they associated with each gender category, what
sorts of explanations they gave (or could be deduced) for those associations, and how those
associations related to other domains of conceptualization and action. In the course of such
research, anthropologists began to note a variety of behaviors and forms of identification
that could not be understood within a binary, heteronormative framework. They thus
began to give explicit attention to individuals who identified with gender categories other
than male and female (“third gender”), who identified sexually in non-heteronormative
ways, or who transitioned from one gender to another (Herdt 1994). Clearly, it was not just
gender characteristics that were socially constructed but the full configuration of genders
and sexualities within any given society.8
In an attempt to integrate such analyses with materialist approaches, some scholars argued
that gender relations should not be viewed as deriving from more “fundamental” aspects of
society, such as economic or political organization, but as interacting with those dimensions
as “mutually determining aspects of a complex social whole” (Collier and Rosaldo 1981:
279). If anthropology is the study of culture and society, feminist scholarship challenged
how those phenomena were to be analyzed and suggested that a consideration of gender
should be intrinsic to all forms of analysis. Such a stance necessitated an appraisal of how
gender and sexuality were implicated in the larger realm of power relations that character-
ized any given society.

French Poststructuralism
The emphasis on power relations that emerged in the anthropology of the 1980s was
prompted in large part by the increasing influence of two major bodies of theory (see ­Ortner
1984). The first was Marxism—not only the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, but
also the work of Antonio Gramsci, Immanuel Wallerstein, and the British literary critic
Raymond Williams. (On Gramsci, Marxism, and cultural studies in ethnomusicology, see
also the chapters by Manuel and Mahon in this volume.) Second were several strains of
theoretical literature that emerged in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, this work is
often referred to as poststructuralism, although this term was not used by these authors
themselves. Less a unified school of thought than a diverse group of thinkers, many of
whom studied at or were associated with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, French
poststructuralists addressed a common set of issues and, at times, made similar claims. To-
gether with British cultural studies theorists such as Williams and Stuart Hall (e.g. 1986),
their work bears witness to a growing interest among many Western European scholars in
76  Jane C. Sugarman
issues raised by Gramsci’s writings, which drew attention to roles that cultural forms might
play in societal reproduction, contestation, and transformation.
In this chapter, I will discuss three scholars whose theories have been applied most directly
to the analysis of gender and sexuality. It must be emphasized, however, that poststructur-
alism represents a major shift in Western thought and has had an enormous influence on a
wide range of academic disciplines. As I explain below, poststructuralists developed radi-
cally new perspectives on the notion of the subject and challenged many aspects of Western
humanist and Enlightenment thought regarding agency and the self.9 Their writings have
thus been crucial to recent scholarship that theorizes any process of social identification (e.g.
Hall and Du Gay 1996). More specifically, their attention to the role of bodily practices
in such processes has spurred much of the literature on embodiment and performance (see
Text Box 1.1 and Waterman, this volume). By emphasizing the role of social practices and
institutions in the production of knowledge and claims to truth, they have also contrib-
uted to the foregrounding of issues of representation, seen most prominently in the field of
post-colonial studies (see Wallach and Clinton, this volume), but also in studies of race. In
anthropology, many scholars have abandoned the notion of a homogeneous culture for a
poststructuralist emphasis on discourses and practices.10
Fundamental to poststructuralism is a new notion of the subject, as advanced initially by
the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990). In “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)” ([1968] 1971), Althusser attempted to identify
the processes through which, in Marxist terms, a society’s “ruling ideology” is reproduced
from one generation to the next. Drawing on Gramsci’s distinction between “state” and
“civil society,” Althusser argued that the reproduction of power relations primarily occurs,
not through the repressive organs of the state such as the police or the military, but rather
through civic institutions such as the family, the media, religious organizations, and the
educational system. He termed these institutions “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs).
­A lthusser’s major theoretical contribution was to argue that individuals should not be re-
garded as voluntarist subjects who encounter their society’s ideology as something exter-
nal to themselves. Rather, individuals are “always already” constituted as subjects within
that ideology (172–73), which is then constantly reinscribed in them as they engage in the
practices that are characteristic of each ISA. He referred to the process through which in-
dividuals are thus “subjected” to ideology—in the sense of being formed as subjects—as
“interpellation.” Althusser’s concept of interpellation can be helpful to scholars of gender to
explain how, and in which domains, individuals come to internalize their society’s views of
gender relations and to experience themselves as belonging to one of the dominant gender
categories (in Western societies, heterosexual males or females). It has been left to other
scholars, however, to theorize how his ideas might be applied to individuals who experi-
ence themselves as belonging to subordinate or minoritarian categories (see below).
A second theorist who was concerned with social reproduction was the ethnographer
and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Bourdieu presented an early formulation of
his theoretical framework in Outline of a Theory of Practice ([1972] 1977), which drew on
ethnographic fieldwork he conducted in Kabyle Berber communities in Algeria.11 Rather
than conceptualizing a subject within ideology, as Althusser had, Bourdieu developed his
own version of Aristotle’s concept of “habitus,” by which he meant the individual’s inter-
nalization of the defining structures of her or his society. Like Althusser, Bourdieu gave
particular attention to the role of social practices in the constitution of subjectivity. In
his view, an individual’s acquisition of a “habitus” takes place through a process that he
referred to as a “dialectic of objectification and embodiment” (87 ff ). In the embodiment
phase of the dialectic, individuals gain a mastery of the basic organizational features of their
society as they engage in aspects of behavior such as posture and gesture, dress, manner
 Gender and Sexuality  77
of speech, and movement through space. At the same time, their actions are objectified,
in the sense of being made tangible to others. This objectification, in turn, contributes to
the ongoing formulation of the habitus of all those who perceive their actions. Bourdieu
emphasized the non-discursive dimension of such processes, distinguishing the knowledge
that an individual acquires non-verbally (which he referred to as “practical mastery”) from
that acquired through verbal means (“symbolic mastery”). Since much of what an individ-
ual understands about society exists in the form of “practical consciousness,” it is often not
examined through verbal means and is thus naturalized and regarded as self-evident, a state
that Bourdieu referred to as “doxa” (164).
Because an individual’s habitus is formed from that person’s specific experiences, it is
different from the anthropological notion of a shared “culture,” in that it is unique in its
content. Nevertheless, Bourdieu argued, because the habitus of individuals within a com-
munity are formed through many similar experiences and thus contain many common el-
ements, the actions of community members are inevitably “orchestrated” (80), in the sense
of being consistent and predictable, albeit to varying degrees. Many of Bourdieu’s examples
in the Outline relate to gender, which he saw as fundamental to both the division of labor
in Kabyle society and to individual differences in habitus. In line with his overall approach,
Bourdieu’s analysis implies that the gendered aspects of habitus are naturalized for Kabyle
because they have been acquired largely through unspoken, practical means. Gender identi-
fication is thus an embodied practice, a stance that renders his approach particularly suitable
for studies of performance. The doxic quality of many aspects of gender relations can also
help to explain how one’s gendered behavior may be at odds with one’s conscious under-
standing of gender ideals. Many years after the Outline, Bourdieu elaborated on his ideas on
gender in Masculine Domination ([1998] 2001).
The French theorist who has had the greatest impact on studies of gender and sexuality is
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Rather than researching contem-
porary societies, Foucault’s major project was writing what he referred to as a “history of the
present” ([1975] 1979: 31)—an attempt to trace back through the centuries the development
of concepts, practices, and institutions that characterize post-medieval Western societies.
He referred to his methodology variously as “archeology” ([1969] 1972) and “genealogy”
(1984). Most of Foucault’s monographs are case studies that focus on a particular aspect of
society and that may be seen to operate on two levels: one pertaining to the particular phe-
nomena addressed in the study, and the other contributing to his ongoing formulation of a
more general theoretical framework.
Two of Foucault’s case studies have been particularly influential for research on gender
and sexuality. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ([1975] 1979), Foucault traced
the transition in Western societies’ treatment of behavior labeled as “criminal” from corpo-
real punishment to imprisonment. For Foucault, the techniques of the prison became the
template for the disciplining and surveillance of the body—techniques that were later in-
troduced to other institutions, such as the military, the school, the hospital, and the factory.
Producing what Foucault referred to as “docile bodies,” these techniques became the de-
fining features of Western societies. Foucault portrayed the modern state as exerting power
over its citizens not, primarily, by passing restrictive laws but by subjecting individuals to
practices that simultaneously discipline them and produce scientific knowledge about them
(192). Through such processes, individuals are constituted as particular categories of sub-
jects within the logic of a political order, which individuals then experience as real and true:

The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of so-

ciety; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have
called ‘discipline.’ We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
78  Jane C. Sugarman
negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘con-
ceals.’ In fact, power produces: it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and
rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong
to this production.
(1979: 194)

Discipline and Punish can be read as elaborating on the views of Althusser, with whom Fou-
cault studied, in that it details the role of specific institutions and social practices in consti-
tuting individuals as subjects (see especially Foucault 1982). However, rather than seeing
power as encapsulated within ideology, as Althusser had, Foucault conceived of power as
exerted through a multitude of “technologies” (bodily practices and techniques) that per-
vade society. His notion of the disciplined body is also similar to Bourdieu’s habitus. But
whereas Bourdieu regarded the formation of habitus as a given process within any society,
Foucault focused, in a highly critical way, on forms of bodily disciplining that he regarded
as specific to the modern West.12
Foucault’s interest in the character of power and its relationship to both knowledge and
bodily practice was further developed in The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction
([1976] 1980). Here Foucault shifted his emphasis to “discourses”: authoritative ways of
speaking (and by extension writing) whose aim is to produce knowledge about a specific
domain and thus to make truth claims about it (see also Foucault [1969] 1972). In Foucault’s
view, discourses do not describe a pre-existing reality but rather “form the objects of which
they speak” ([1969] 1972: 49): that is, they both define the terms of what members of a soci-
ety experience as reality and constitute the categories to which individuals are, in Althusse-
rian terms, interpellated. Foucault’s approach to discourse broke decidedly with two major
intellectual practices. First, rather than approaching language as a system of signs, as in
structural linguistics (see Beaster-Jones, this volume), Foucault emphasized its productivity:
the capacity of language to exert power and constitute reality. Second, rather than focusing
on the intentions of those who contribute to the development of discourses, he emphasized
the ongoing effect that discourses have upon the societies in which they circulate.
The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 traces a “genealogy” of Western discourses regard-
ing sexuality, beginning with the Roman Catholic practice of confession and continuing
through the development of myriad medical and psychological or psychiatric formula-
tions (including the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and others).
Through the deployment of such discourses, individuals in particular historical periods have
been constituted as specific types of sexualized subjects, such as the “hysterical woman” or
the sexual “pervert.” At the same time, such categories have established what has been
considered to be known and true. Discourses have thus defined the terms of any state’s reg-
ulatory regimes, such as those examined in Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, discourses of
sexuality are among those that have come to exert power in modern societies through legal
systems and a range of practices that define what counts as the “norm” and, by contrast,
what may be viewed as “abnormal” or “deviant.” Power and knowledge are thus insepara-
ble, a concept that he captured with the construct “power/knowledge.”13
For Foucault, power does not reside in the discourse itself but rather is exerted through a
discourse’s deployment. This idea is illustrated through the category of the “homosexual,”
which first developed in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. On the one hand,
the deployment of a medical discourse of homosexuality constituted certain individuals as
homosexuals, thus claiming a truth about them and enabling them to be regulated by the
state. On the other hand, individuals so constituted came to deploy a “reverse discourse” in
which they advocated for themselves in the name of the category to which they had been
interpellated. In this way, discourse can be used as a form of resistance but only in relation
 Gender and Sexuality  79
to its deployment as a means of social control (1980: 101; see also Foucault 1982). Thus,
while power inevitably produces resistance, resistance can also have the effect of reinscrib-
ing power.

Gender Performativity and Queer Theory

When they were first introduced to Anglophone readers, Foucault’s ideas, and those of
French poststructuralists more generally, posed major challenges to the feminist theories
and political strategies of the period. These ideas entered the academy at a time when
women, as well as sexual and ethnic/racial minorities, were consolidating themselves po-
litically within Western democracies and demanding a voice in the public sphere. In
this context, Foucault’s theories could be read as suggesting that the gender, sexual, and
racial categories that had developed in the modern West were not real but rather were
constructed through specific discourses and practices. How could one act politically as a
“woman” when “woman” was merely a construct? How could resistance be effective if it
merely reinscribed existing power relations? And if power was something exerted through
countless micro-processes, rather than residing in specific societal structures, how could
one speak meaningfully of notions such as “male domination” and “patriarchy”? More
generally, the challenge that poststructuralist theories posed to the Enlightenment notion
of the voluntarist subject made it difficult to conceive of oneself as an actor consciously
exerting one’s agency, either in the academy or in politics. How could one escape the ide-
ology into which one was interpellated or the technologies of power/knowledge that con-
stituted one within a particular regime of truth?14 Despite these problems, many scholars
saw in poststructuralism a way to reconceptualize gender and sexuality that might avoid
some of the pitfalls of earlier formulations, leading to new approaches in feminist as well
as queer theory.
Principal among these was philosopher Judith Butler (b. 1956), who emerged in the 1990s
as the most influential Anglophone theorist of gender and sexuality. In her early writings
(1990, 1991, 1993, 1996), Butler drew on a wide range of thinkers in order to formulate
her approach, including Althusser, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, French feminist theorists
Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig, psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacques
Lacan, anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and speech-act theorist J. L. Austin, among others.
Rather than seeing gender as an expression of an underlying biological sex, Butler argued
that gender as a form of subjectivity is “performed”: it is constituted through the repetition
of actions that are taken—by oneself and others—to define the “norm” for one’s category of
gender. Through such repetitive performances, “regulatory ideals” of gender are produced
and sustained within particular societies. In characterizing gender as “performative,” Butler
was not placing an emphasis on staged performance, but rather on an individual’s everyday
actions, which are carried out largely outside conscious awareness. Thus:

… gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative
in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express. It is a
compulsory performance …
(1991: 24)

Butler argued further that, because repetition can never be exact, gender performance is
never entirely consistent and that gendered subjectivities are thus inherently unstable. De-
spite her emphasis on everyday gender performance, Butler has become an important figure
in the field of performance studies, where scholars have for many years examined the rela-
tionship between mundane and theatrical behavior (see Waterman, this volume).
80  Jane C. Sugarman
Although Butler did not formulate her approach in conjunction with Bourdieu’s writ-
ings, one can see her model of gendered subjectivity as similar to Bourdieu’s notion of hab-
itus, with two important differences. First, whereas Bourdieu’s primary concern was social
reproduction, and thus the reinscription through time of relatively stable forms of subjec-
tivity, Butler has seen in the incapacity of individuals to fully repeat their performances the
possibility of effecting changes in gender norms through incremental variation. Second,
whereas Bourdieu’s writings are premised on heteronormative gender categories, Butler has
attended both to individuals who have been interpellated to such categories and to those
who have not: those who experience themselves as “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “queer”;
those who have been categorized as “intersex”; and those who have transitioned from one
gender category to another (see especially Butler 2004). In her early writings (1990, 1991),
she explored these possibilities in part through an interrogation and reworking of Freud’s
concept of the “Oedipal complex” ([1923] 1960), a process through which, as Freud argued,
most individuals come to desire one gender, either male or female, and identify with the
other, thus normalizing heterosexuality. For Butler, not only is it possible to desire someone
of the gender with which one identifies, but desire and identification may also be inter-
twined in complex ways in one’s self-presentation as well as in the roles that one plays in
sexual relations. In addressing such issues, Butler has become a central figure not only in
women’s studies and feminist theory, but also in queer theory. If, as Butler suggests, female
and male genders are performed, then they need not be aligned with particular bodies nor
with particular forms of sexual behavior. An individual’s performance need not consistently
reinscribe a single gender, and an individual may transition from one gender to another.
Understood in this way, gender identification is fluid rather than fixed, a process rather than
a foreclosed status.
These ideas have substantial consequences for Butler’s politics. Following Foucault, she
has seen a danger in any politics that treats a stable gender category, such as “woman”
or “lesbian,” as a rubric under which to engage in resistant activism. Taking this stance,
she has countered Gayatri Spivak’s well-known concept of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak
1990: 11; see also Wallach and Clinton, this volume): the notion that one can embrace an
identity category strategically so as to participate in collective political action even while
recognizing the constructed character of all such categories. Butler has advocated instead
what she calls “strategic provisionality”—a strategy of not confining oneself to a stable per-
formance of gender so that “identity can become a site of contest and revision” (1991: 19).
In her earliest writings (1990, 1991), Butler saw drag performance as one way of challeng-
ing the alignment between gender and sex, and highlighting the performative character
of gender: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself—as well as its contingency” (1990: 137). She then posed the query, “And what kind
of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way
that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire[?]” (139). In Bodies That
Matter (1993: 219), she suggested that one answer might be found in the notion of “dis­
identification” developed by French Marxist theorist, Michael Pêcheux (1982). Building
on Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Pêcheux distinguished three possible processes of
identity formation. “Identification” refers to the situation of individuals who have success-
fully been interpellated to the dominant ideology and thus to dominant identity categories,
while “counteridentification” characterizes individuals who have directly confronted such
categories in a way that ultimately confirms and validates them (cf. Foucault’s notion of
a reverse discourse, discussed above). In contrast to both of these ideas, Pêcheux defined
“disidentification” as “a desubjectification of the subject” in which ideology “operates as it were
in reverse, i.e. on and against itself, through the ‘overthrow-rearrangement’ of the complex of
ideological formations” (1982: 158–59; italics in the original).
 Gender and Sexuality  81
In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), queer theorist and
performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) used Pêcheux’s ideas to exam-
ine the work of US Latinx performance artists. For Muñoz, a “disidentificatory subject” is
one “who tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form,” often
by challenging the dichotomy between an individual’s desire for and identification with an
other (12–13). In his best-known analysis, he examined the various incarnations of Vaginal
Creme Davis, a drag artist of color who performed in the Los Angeles punk scene during
the 1990s. One of Davis’s most striking stage personae was Clarence, a white male suprem-
acist who represented an ideal that Davis’s female persona had viewed as “so hot” that she
had transformed herself into him by undergoing racial and gendered reassignment. At one
point in the performance, Clarence, who was deeply anxious about Los Angeles’s racial
and sexual diversity, sang a song in which he addressed his sawed-off shotgun in an erotic
manner in order to reassure himself of his safety in the city. In ­Clarence, Davis created a
character who, although identifying himself as white and straight, emerged in the body of a
queer transvestite of color—the very aspects of identity that he most deeply feared. Davis’s
performance thus embodied the complexity of desire and identification across axes of iden-
tity (race, gender, and sexuality) that are central to US society and showed how they might
converge to form one individual’s subjectivity. Drawing on Gramsci (1971: 3–23 and pas-
sim), Muñoz portrayed Davis not only as a performer but also as an “organic intellectual”
who, through her connection to her community of queers of color, was able to analyze
and then make tangible the multiple processes of othering that maintained their margin-
alization. Such an interpretation raises the issue of who counts as a “theorist” of gender: a
scholar such as Butler or Muñoz, or a performer such as Davis? Indeed, within the realm
of Anglophone popular music, one can view a number of prominent musicians, including
Prince (Walser 1994) and Laurie Anderson (McClary 1991b), as having performed complex
dimensions of identification in Western societies years before Butler and other academic
theorists proposed their analyses.

Feminist Women of Color and Intersectionality

During the period that Butler was first formulating her critique of the biological basis of sex
and gender, a different sort of gender analysis was being developed by feminists of color.
Beginning in the late 1970s, African American women writers such as the Combahee River
Collective ([1977] 1979), bell hooks (1981), Angela Davis (1983), and Audre Lorde (1984)
worked to consolidate a body of black feminist thought that would counter mainstream US
feminism (see also Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982, Smith 1983, Collins [1990] 2000).
They were joined by a number of Latina, Asian-American, and Native American women
who addressed their particular situation within US society (see, for example, Moraga and
Anzaldúa 1983). These writers argued not only that the “women” of the US “women’s
movement” had largely been white and middle-class, but also that women of color had
often been deliberately excluded from the very category of “women” in whose name de-
mands had been made (hooks 1981; Davis 1983). Any analysis of the situation of women of
color would thus need to consider gender and race together. Both Lorde and the Combahee
River Collective advocated further that issues such as sexuality, class, and age should also
be addressed.
By the late 1980s, the term “intersectionality” emerged among African American schol-
ars as a rubric for approaches that would highlight in particular the interrelationship of
gender and race (see Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016). Although
they recognized that the concept could be extended to other axes of social differentiation,
their primary focus was the situation of black women. The theorist who coined the term,
82  Jane C. Sugarman
and whose writings have become fundamental to both gender theory and critical race the-
ory, is African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (b. 1959). In a series of articles
(1989, 1991, 1993), Crenshaw argued that, in political, academic, and legal writings, the
“woman” of US feminism was generally assumed to be white, while the “black” of antira-
cist writings was assumed to be male. As a result, these discourses marginalized or ignored
the experiences of black women, who became the primary focus of Crenshaw’s legal and
theoretical efforts. On the one hand, she argued that black women had distinctive life ex-
periences that did not fit the formulations advanced by the women’s movement, and that
gender relations in black communities, or between whites and blacks, were often portrayed
by white commentators in ways that upheld racism. On the other hand, she argued that
black women were often asked to subordinate their own concerns to those of the African
American community in general, particularly regarding issues such as domestic violence,
which implicated the behavior of black men. One of Crenshaw’s fullest expositions of an
“intersectional” analysis addressed a topic in music—the 1989 obscenity trial of the Florida
hip-hop group 2 Live Crew (Crenshaw 1993). Following a nuanced examination of both
the trial and its coverage in the media, Crenshaw advanced two major conclusions. The first
was that there had been a racial basis to virtually every aspect of the case: not only to much
of the rhetoric that circulated within the courthouse and in media representations of the
trial, but also to the bringing of the obscenity charge itself. Second and equally important,
Crenshaw argued that the case had failed to address the implications of the group’s often
violent lyrics regarding sexual relations, and hence had neglected the interests and concerns
of black women.15
Since Crenshaw’s seminal writings, the notion of intersectionality has been both ex-
tended and critiqued. As Jennifer Nash has argued (2008), Crenshaw’s focus on legal cases,
and specifically those targeting violence against women, has meant that the literature has
not given sufficient attention either to the positive aspects of black women’s subjectiv-
ity or to factors of class, sexuality, or nationhood that further complicate the category of
black women. Echoing Butler, she has pointed out that intersectional approaches can have
the effect of reifying binary schemas (man:woman, white:black, heterosexual:homosexual,
etc.), rather than recognizing the diversity that exists within any identity category. She has
also posed the question of whether only marginalized social groups should be scrutinized
through intersectional analyses, or also those who are in a more privileged position with
regard to gender, race, class, sexuality, or other aspects of identity. Despite such critiques,
the idea that any analysis of gender should include a consideration of its intersection with
other forms of identification is now an established principle in US feminist scholarship and
politics. In recent years, the concept of intersectionality has also been embraced by a variety
of United Nations initiatives that consider gender relations on a worldwide basis. Jasmin
Puar (2012) has questioned such efforts, arguing that they risk reinforcing the primacy of
US feminism within global women’s forums by imposing identity categories that may be
incommensurable with the ways in which individuals in other societies experience them-
selves.16 As Nira Yuval-Davis emphasizes (2006), the notion of intersectionality needs to be
applied in ways that account for the complexity of local forms of identification and social
differentiation, and the ways that they are intertwined in specific circumstances. (For a
further discussion of black feminist thought and intersectionality, see Mahon, this volume.)

Masculinity Studies
In a period when writings on intersectionality and queer theory were drawing increas-
ing attention to subordinated groups, scholars also began to scrutinize the largely un-
marked category of masculinity. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the field of “men’s studies”
 Gender and Sexuality  83
or “masculinity studies” began to develop, primarily within sociology (Kimmel, Hearn,
and Connell 2005), but also in anthropology (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). Perhaps
the single most influential publication of this period was Masculinities ([1995] 2005) by the
­Australian sociologist R. W. (now Raewyn) Connell (b. 1944). Since its writing, Connell
has authored or co-authored many additional writings refining her initial theories. On the
one hand, her work has been heavily informed by empirical research carried out by herself,
as well as other scholars influenced by her ideas. On the other hand, her approach has been
formulated with careful attention to a broad range of theories of gender: from psychoana-
lytic and poststructuralist writings to sociological and anthropological case studies. Connell
has characterized masculinity and femininity as “gender projects”: “processes of configuring
practices” that unfold through time. She locates these processes in three principal realms:
that of the formation of individual identities (she uses the psychological term “personality”);
that of symbolic practices, whether characterized as discourse, ideology, or culture; and that
of institutions, whether the school or workplace or, at a larger scale, the state (72).
In Masculinities, Connell advances two principal arguments. First, there is never only one
form of masculinity that characterizes a society in a given historical period; rather, multiple
forms of masculinity coexist and interact, often differentiated by factors such as race, class,
and sexuality. Further, a society’s diverse masculinities are organized hierarchically, so that
one form is hegemonic—a cultural ideal that often characterizes the identities of men in the
most privileged social positions. While some other forms of masculinity may be subordi-
nate to the hegemonic one (e.g. working-class or gay masculinity), there are also complicit
forms evident in men in relatively privileged positions who, while avoiding certain stances
associated with the hegemonic form, nevertheless benefit from male privilege through what
she terms the “patriarchal dividend” (79). By characterizing the dominant form of mas-
culinity in terms of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, she emphasizes that the relationship
among forms of masculinity within any society is unstable and open to contestation and
challenge.
This last observation is linked to her second point that, for any given society, masculinities
have a history: specific forms have developed in specific ways in specific periods, generally
in conjunction with economic and political factors. For example, she shows how the notion
of the “man of the frontier” developed in settler societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and characterizes as “gentry masculinity” the dominant form in North Atlantic
countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In turn, gender dynamics may
actively precipitate developments in the economic or political realm: as one example, she de-
scribes the rise of fascism in the interwar period as “a naked reassertion of male ­supremacy”
(193) in an era when women had been gaining significant political ground. Connell’s writ-
ings have informed studies in fields as diverse as psychology, s­ociology, anthropology, ethnic
studies, criminology, and international relations (see, for example, Morrell 1998; Roberson
and Suzuki 2003; Hooper 2008). In 2005, she and an associate evaluated this literature, to-
gether with criticisms of her earlier writings, and published a reformulation of the concept
of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005).
There is no reason why Connell’s concept of multiple masculinities, with its attendant
ideas about gender identity hierarchies and historical specificity, cannot be extended to
forms of femininity. Furthermore, her attention to the dynamics of dominance and sub-
ordination within gender categories, particularly on the basis of race or class, can be seen
as one possible approach to issues of intersectionality. Beyond examining the masculinities
found within Western democracies, Connell has attended to processes of colonialism and
imperialism, which she sees both as having been propelled by gender ideologies and as
having introduced Western gender orders into other parts of the world, often challenging
or displacing local ones (Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). She has also
84  Jane C. Sugarman
noted new forms of masculinity that have gained ascendance in the realms of transnational
business and finance (Connell 2012). Such dynamics only complicate the already complex
portrait of gender relations that Connell has sketched within individual societies.

Reconceptualizing Agency and Resistance

One of the basic assumptions of Western feminism has been that relations of gender and
sexuality are asymmetrical, with heteronormative males claiming a patriarchal dividend
and females and members of non-heteronormative groups occupying subordinate positions.
Based on this assumption, a great many analyses have highlighted arenas in which women
and sexual minorities have mounted “resistance” to patriarchy and/or heteronormativity.
Because of the challenges that poststructuralist theories present to voluntarist notions of
agency—and, as a result, to the idea of resistance—some scholars have drawn on such
writings to rework both these concepts, in a manner consistent with the concerns of post-­
colonial theorists. Here I illustrate contrasting approaches to this issue through the writ-
ings of two prominent anthropologists who have examined gender in the context of late
­t wentieth-century Islamic movements in the Middle East.
In her 1990 article “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power
through Bedouin Women,” Lila Abu-Lughod (b. 1952) analyzed power relations in an
Egyptian Bedouin community in terms of Foucault’s argument that power produces its
own forms of resistance, and thus that “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault
1980: 95). By reversing Foucault’s terms, Abu-Lughod embarked on an effort to identify
sites of resistance within the community as a means of diagnosing the workings of power
(see also Foucault 1982). She took as her primary example the poetic genre ghinnawa (little
song), which women, as well as young men, historically recited or sang to express “senti-
ments of vulnerability and love” (Abu-Lughod 1990: 46). Such sentiments ran counter to
the honor-related discourses that upheld asymmetrical power relations based on gender and
age in Bedouin society (see also Abu-Lughod 1986). In the late 1980s, as young men be-
gan to transform ghinnawa into a largely male, commercial form of music, young women
turned to new resistant practices, ones that simultaneously allied them with their husbands
or husbands-to-be while expressing rebellion toward their elders. These involved the pur-
chase of mass-produced (and often imported) items such as makeup, lingerie, and bobby
pins, which framed the young women in a more sexualized way consistent with notions
of femininity that urban Egyptian women were embracing. Rather than highlighting the
young women’s initiative and resistant spirit, Abu-Lughod argued that it was important to
ask whether their actions were enmeshing them in new sets of power relations: ones based
on consumerism fueled by transnational capital, as well as a breaking up of family ties that
served the interests of the Egyptian state. In turn, some young women were refusing both
the expectations of their elders and the seeming Westernization of Egyptian society by
adopting emergent forms of Islam, which she analyzed as situating the women within yet
another set of transnational power relations.
In The Politics of Piety (2005), a study of Egyptian women who meet regularly at mosques
for discussion and religious teaching, Saba Mahmood (1962–2018) offered a more fun-
damental challenge to established approaches to agency and resistance. In her analysis,
­scholars—and specifically those writing from a Western feminist perspective—often equate
these two concepts, evoking the idea of agency only in instances where individuals are seen
to be resisting societal constraints. As she argued, such an approach situates agency within a
Western liberal framework, presenting it as entailing a casting off of societal norms so as to
realize oneself as an autonomous, “free” individual (8). What would it mean, she asked, for
agency to be conceptualized outside such a framework? Rather than depicting practices of
 Gender and Sexuality  85
Islamic piety as forms of resistance, Mahmood analyzed the women of the “mosque move-
ment” as purposefully engaging in something akin to Foucault’s notion of “technologies
of the self ” (1988)—consciously pursuing bodily practices, arrived at through an engage-
ment with Islamic texts and historic interpretations, that produced them as pious subjects.17
Here agency was exerted not to resist norms, but to embrace and “inhabit” them. In line
with Foucault’s earlier writings, Mahmood argued that the “discipline” provided by such
practices did indeed constrain the women, but it also enabled them to realign their inte-
rior dispositions in a way consistent with their religious ideals. Rather than arising from
a conscious exercise of free will, their agency thus needed to be understood as emerging
“from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its
enactment” (15; cf. Butler 1993: 12–15).
By focusing on the women of the mosque movement, Mahmood’s account does not
address women from other segments of Egyptian society who, having embraced certain
precepts of Western liberalism, might indeed view their engagement with Islam as a form
of resistance to Western hegemony. Nevertheless, her study represents a notable interven-
tion in the literature on gender dynamics in and beyond the West. It prompts one to ask if
there is a better framework within which processes entailed in the reproduction and trans-
formation of societal norms might be considered. Following the logic of Butler’s writings,
in which what she refers to as a “lapse in repetition” (1991: 28) may work to destabilize
norms of gender and sexuality, it might be possible to formulate an approach that accounts
for diverse types of lapses: from small variations in performances of gender and sexuality
that take place below the level of consciousness but that nevertheless might suggest incre-
mental reworkings of the norm, to deliberate practices—such as those of the women of
whom Mahmood wrote—whose goal is to embrace and conform to a new set of norms, to
calculated disruptions of the logic of norms effected by performers such as Vaginal Creme
Davis. In such a scenario, resistance emerges as too circumscribed a concept to encompass
the diversity of possibilities.

Ethnomusicological Studies of Music, Gender, and Sexuality

In the 1970s and 1980s, as anthropologists were developing cross-cultural approaches to
gender research, ethnomusicologists began to examine how the sound-making activities of
men and women complemented or contrasted each other, although they did not explicitly
relate their findings to the growing gender literature (e.g. Feld 1982, Seeger 1987). The
first major effort to relate musical practices to issues of gender appeared only in 1987—the
volume Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Ellen Koskoff. More than
any other publication, Koskoff’s book established the topics of women and music, and mu-
sic and gender, as crucial ones for ethnomusicological research. The book’s chapters were
wide-ranging and were often richly historical. Its topics included women’s (and sometimes
men’s) musical roles in domestic and ritual contexts, historical transformations in the roles
of professional female performers, and women’s musical activities in the US in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, right up to the rise of “women-identified music” and fem-
inist choruses, both of which were associated with second-wave feminism.
In her introduction, Koskoff surveyed and systematized the ethnomusicological literature
on women’s musical activities, as well as studies that documented gendered divisions in
musical practice, situating her remarks within a framework drawn from feminist anthropol-
ogy. She then offered a theoretical summation of these accounts and suggested how studies
of “women and music” and of “music and gender” should be approached going forward.
Among her principal concerns was the effect of musical performance on a society’s gender
relations—how aspects of musical practice relate to social ordering and whether musical
86  Jane C. Sugarman
performance maintains and confirms a society’s gender ideology or offers a challenge to it.18
More than many anthropologists of the period, she attended to social dynamics that might
alter the character of a society’s gender relations over time and also examined the important
role that cultural forms such as music might play in such processes. Since its publication, a
number of ethnomusicologists have produced additional edited volumes on music and gen-
der (e.g. Herndon and Ziegler 1990; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Magrini 2003; Harris,
Pease, and Tan 2013; Magowan and Wrazen 2015). In 2014, Koskoff published A Feminist
Ethnomusicology, a collection of writings on music and gender from across her career, which
also reviews the literature in this area and provides an extensive bibliography. This book
both complements and expands the work of the present essay.
By the late 1990s, scholars in many disciplines had begun to shift their focus from women
to gender and to draw increasingly on the writings of French theorists. It was in this context
that I published my 1997 study Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian
Weddings, which examined the relationship between the contrasting song performances
of women and men in a diasporic Albanian community and their senses of themselves
as gendered individuals. Drawing on the writings of Bourdieu and Foucault, I argued,
in a manner similar to Butler, that singing at large community weddings “engendered”
­individuals—it served as a crucial site for both the constitution of gendered subjectivity and
the negotiation of ongoing community understandings of gender norms. In my ­analysis,
I distinguished between discursive and non-discursive aspects of such processes. On the
one hand, many of the gender-specific aspects of singing were learned and performed
with little or no verbal explication. Through their singing, participants thus drew on their
“practical mastery” (Bourdieu 1977) of the community’s repertoire to perform in ways
that most often reinscribed community understandings of gender. However, as immigrants
who were encountering very different gender norms in North America, individuals were
also introducing small changes into their performances, often in an unreflexive manner
that suggested gradual revisions of those norms (cf. Butler). On the other hand, community
members frequently evoked established discourses linking aspects of singing to notions of
morality. Men in particular often deployed a discourse of “honor” (cf. Foucault; see also
Abu-Lughod 1986) to evaluate their musical performances. In doing so, they asserted the
role that they, as male heads of their households, played in sustaining a community ethos
of egalitarianism among family groups while simultaneously claiming authority over other
household members. It was necessary, I argued, to combine a Bourdieusian attention to
non-verbal practices with a Foucauldian attention to discourses if one wished to arrive
at a comprehensive understanding of the relationship of music to gender. Taking such an
approach did not prevent me from attending to the meanings that individuals ascribed to
singing, nor to their lived experience, but it did entail a consideration of the fundamental
role of discourse and practice in constituting both shared meanings and experience.19
Whereas Engendering Song touched upon themes of agency and resistance in the negotia-
tion of gender norms, more recent scholarship has addressed these themes more explicitly.
In The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi, folklorist Lisa
Gilman places the singing and dancing of Malawian women in the context of the country’s
political life (2009). During the period of British colonial rule, women frequently danced to
their own singing as part of their country’s independence movement. Malawi became inde-
pendent in 1964, and in 1971 Hastings Kamuzu Banda was declared president for life and a
single party state was established. Women from rural areas were now required to travel long
distances to dance at massive rallies in honor of Banda and thus found themselves coerced
into a performance role that served to validate his authoritarian regime. Here Gilman draws
on Abu-Lughod (1990) to argue that, in resisting colonial rule, the women had established
a link between dance and politics that drew them into a new set of largely disadvantageous
 Gender and Sexuality  87
power structures. Such a process continued in the period of multi-party rule that followed
Banda’s death, when women were recruited to dance at the rallies of newly emergent polit-
ical parties. Although their participation was voluntary, many women felt pressured to do
so because of political or economic factors.
Gilman’s research explores the ways in which women related and responded to their po-
litical activities. How did they analyze their role as dancers? Did they participate willingly
and, if so, why? If not, what options did they have for avoiding compliance with the state,
and how did they choose among them? Based on extensive interviews with women of var-
ious social classes, Gilman draws a complex picture of the women’s responses and utilizes
a number of theoretical resources. On the one hand, she notes that, during the period of
multi-party rule, women were able to exert political agency by criticizing a specific party
in their song texts or by dancing in support of women candidates. On the other hand,
following Mahmood, she shows that, while the Western idea of individual resistance was
salient for elite members of women’s organizations, this concept was not meaningful for
the majority of women who were asked to dance. By constituting dance as “traditional”
and “African” and casting opposition to it as unpatriotic, Malawian state discourses in fact
made it difficult not to participate. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Gilman
demonstrates that many aspects of women’s participation were naturalized for the dancers,
so that they did not directly question them. Using ideas from Foucault, she traces how, at
times, women explained their decision to dance by situating themselves within the dis-
courses deployed by various political parties. Ultimately, Gilman concludes, women danc-
ers made decisions regarding their participation based on their reading of their immediate
circumstances but did not engage in more comprehensive diagnoses of their place within
Malawian society. As a result, their choices of political action had a limited effect on the
country’s political culture and did not improve their social standing. Gilman’s study stands
out as a particularly probing exploration of the character of agency and both the possibility
and limitations of the notion of resistance.
Men in African societies have faced their own sets of issues related to gendered identity.
In her article “Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain” (2004), ethnomusicologist Louise
Meintjes examines the Zulu men’s song and dance genre ngoma as “a critical means to at-
taining responsible manhood” (173). To do so, she draws on writings in phenomenology as
well as extensive research on South African masculinities (Morrell 1998; cf. Connell 2005).
A form of competitive dance accompanied by song, ngoma evokes the Zulu masculine ideal
of the warrior and is performed by migrant men, both individually and in groups. Meintjes
shows how performers use the verbal and bodily practices of ngoma to enact male power
by balancing explosive, “hard” chants and movements with softer, “sweet” ones. Whereas
the group songs that accompany ngoma dances outline positive aspects of manhood that
any man might strive to attain, the elaborate nicknames that are shouted to dancers during
their individual performances highlight a wide range of contrasting masculine qualities that
individual men might cultivate so as to navigate a social world in which they face unem-
ployment, high rates of AIDS, and frequent calls to violence. Meintjes traces several ways
in which ngoma serves as a “source of power” for participants, one that might lead them to
make either constructive or destructive life choices. The challenge for ngoma participants
is to learn to balance the hard with the sweet, and individuality with group solidarity, so as
to thread their way through the treacherous possibilities that migrant men face. (For a more
extended analysis, see Meintjes and Lemon 2017.)
To understand the complex ways in which music and dance relate to gender and sexual-
ity, scholars not only engage in ethnographic research on contemporary practices, but also
trace performance histories through archival research. African American studies scholar
Jayna Brown takes the latter approach in her book Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers
88  Jane C. Sugarman
and the Shaping of the Modern (2008). Brown’s study charts the history of African ­A merican
women artists on the variety stage from the late nineteenth century to World War II. These
women were not only prominent performers in the US; in many cases, they made multiple
tours of Europe and at times centered their activities there. Whereas for A ­ merican audi-
ences, the women embodied everything from the “primitive” plantation slave to the ul-
tramodern career woman, European audiences saw them as representatives of the pure folk
or as erotically charged colonial subjects. Combining semiotic analysis with a Foucauldian
attention to discourses of race, nation, and colonialism, Brown examines the women’s per-
formances as “multi-signifying practices” that “glanc[ed] in all directions” (97): they met
and then returned the gaze of various audiences in ways that both played into and played
with audience expectations. If at times their performances reinscribed existing stereotypes,
they also found ways to undermine and explode them. Brown pays particular attention
to relations between black and white women performers. To do so, she posits a cultural
dynamic of “racial mimicry,” in which white women frequently laid claim to repertoires
and styles of performance learned from black women. By detailing the ways in which race,
gender, class, and nationality interacted in diverse contexts, Brown’s study extends inter-
sectional considerations into a trans-Atlantic arena. Her work serves not only to affirm
black women performers as central to the history of US jazz, but also to complement Paul
Gilroy’s work on the black Atlantic (1993) by highlighting the role that women played in
early ­t wentieth-century Afro-diasporic imaginings of the modern. (On Gilroy and the
black Atlantic, see Mahon, this volume.)
Much of the ethnomusicological literature on gender has been developed within a binary,
heteronormative framework. One major exception is Anna Morcom’s 2013 book, Illicit
Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion, which examines the diversity of sexual practices
and gender identities that have informed a range of song and dance genres in contemporary
and historical North India. Morcom’s study, which combines historical and ethnographic
methods, focuses on two groups that were pushed to the margins of society, as performance
styles in India were “reformed” in the early twentieth century as part of the country’s inde-
pendence movement. (For more information on scholarship on this period, see Manuel, this
volume.) The first group is composed of female singer-dancers, categorized historically in
a number of ways, who were members of hereditary lineages. The second group comprises
what Morcom calls “female impersonators”: biological males performing, and sometimes
living, as females, known by the term kothi. In the past, both groups were associated with
forms of performance that included erotic elements, and members of both groups at times
had sexual relations with their male patrons, who were most often members of the elite.
A landscape of complex gendered and sexual arrangements thus emerges that defies any
binary analysis. With little public recognition of their legacy as artists, many members of
both groups are now making their living as sex workers in increasingly impoverished and
dangerous circumstances. One of Morcom’s aims in the study is to help these groups gain
greater recognition as heirs to longstanding performance forms—a recognition that could
lead to more secure and safer livelihoods.
Morcom’s nuanced account of the situation of contemporary kothi is a particularly val-
uable component of her study. Today, some kothi are married to women and live publicly
as heterosexual men, while others identify as female and, in some districts, are able to
marry male partners. In contemporary India, as Morcom explains, it is only relatively elite
individuals who identify with Western notions of LGBT identity; the Indian state and
various aid organizations therefore designate kothi as MSM (“men having sex with men”).
Following Butler, however, Morcom argues that many kothi should be regarded instead as
transgender and that it is in dance performance that they are most able to experience them-
selves as women, their desired gender identity. Morcom’s book serves as a reminder that
 Gender and Sexuality  89
realms of music and dance have often served as protected spaces and sources of livelihood
for individuals who have been marginalized by their society’s gender norms, and conversely
that many acclaimed genres of music and dance have been created by and associated with
such individuals. As research continues on the complexity of gendered and sexual practices
worldwide, one hopes that more musical studies such as this will be undertaken.20

Case Study: Researching Dance, Gender, and Youth

Culture in a Diasporic Community
During the 1990s, I attended several weddings in Canada of Prespa Albanian couples who
were a generation younger than those discussed in my 1997 book. One striking aspect of
these weddings was the popularity of a new form of dance, called çoçek or çyçek, that was at
the time also a major fad among young people in several southeast European states. What
made this dance so attractive to young people, and particularly young women? My initial
hunch was that çoçek, which was much more sensual and attention-getting than older
forms of Prespa women’s dance, enabled young women to present themselves at social oc-
casions as a new type of Prespa woman: proudly Albanian and Muslim, but also recast in
the mold of contemporary youth culture. I saw their performance of femininity as breaking
with historical precedents and as potentially contributing to the negotiation of new gender
norms within the community (cf. Butler). And so I embarked on a research project that
would trace a “history of the present” (cf. Foucault), both of the dance itself and of the form
of femininity that Prespa women were performing through it (Sugarman 2003).
I quickly discovered that the movements associated with çoçek originated in the early
Ottoman period in types of entertainment presented for elite audiences. One aspect of my
work thus needed to be archival, and involved locating and analyzing historical accounts
and visual depictions of Ottoman dance that were produced by both Ottoman subjects and
Western European travelers. Beyond the descriptive information that I gleaned from such
sources, I found that depictions of Ottoman dance were often deployed within either orien-
talist discourses21 about Ottoman society or nationalist discourses developed by individual
Balkan national groups. In both instances, Ottoman dance was used to cast Balkan Muslims
and their culture as other to Europe and to Christianity. A second aspect of my research
was ethnographic. This involved attending dance events and conducting interviews among
Albanian communities in North America, and as well as Western Europe and the Republic
of Macedonia. Through my ethnographic inquiries, I was able to examine the significance
that çoçek had come to have for young Albanians (cf. Geertz) and how it related to current
gender relations within their community. Exploring this topic, I drew on the theoretical lit-
erature on gender and sexuality, nationalism, and colonialism, as well as studies of diaspora,
media representation, and the body. Writings on former Ottoman territories or contiguous
areas were especially helpful.
In the course of my research, I arrived at three main conclusions. First, as Morcom found
in India, gender and sexuality in Ottoman territories had been constructed in complex
ways that had implications for the movement repertoires associated with male and female
dancers. Until the early nineteenth century, the most prominent professional Ottoman
dancers had been young men, known as köçekler (sing. köçek, from which the term çoçek de-
rives), who dressed in semi-feminine attire and were the objects of desire of male patrons.
I posited that, as European discourses on monogamy and heteronormativity were intro-
duced into the Empire in the nineteenth century (cf. Connell), and as male-male relations
were no longer publicly acceptable, köçekler were replaced as public dancers by women, most
often from the low-status Romani ethnic group.22 Furthermore, among more elite strata
of society, two distinct categories of women had been recognized: domestic women, who
90  Jane C. Sugarman
were regarded as “respectable,” and “public” women, who were not, among whom were
included professional dancers.23 As “respectable” domestic women, what young Prespa
women were doing was incorporating movements into their dance that had been associated
in earlier times with “public” women, in ways that enabled them to challenge community
norms of respectability.
A second conclusion was that Prespa women were incorporating more than Ottoman
movements into their dance: they were combining those with contemporary movements
associated either with Turkish belly dancing (also descending from Ottoman forms) or
North Atlantic club cultures. They had learned about both of these primarily through
electronic media. In all of these genres, women dance in a more sensual, or even sexually
suggestive, manner that invites the male gaze.24 As I spoke with women and attended com-
munity events, I learned that gender-segregated dances, at which young women performed
for the approval of prospective mothers-in-law, were being replaced by integrated events
at which young women danced for the approval of potential male suitors. Here, a young
woman’s dancing was no longer meant to demonstrate that she was physically healthy and
able to do household chores, but rather to signal to young single men that she would be
an attractive sexual partner. As part of this shift in courtship practices, young women
were also changing their physical appearance by cultivating slimmer, more “fit” bodies and
wearing tighter, more revealing clothing—practices learned from the transnational media
and current North Atlantic youth cultures. By evoking the imagery of MTV and the world
of fashion, they were thus performing a version of femininity that, while confirming their
Balkan Muslim roots, also situated them firmly within a Western form of commodified
sexuality. Here I invoked Abu-Lughod’s argument that, by challenging community norms
of respectability, the young women were also entering into a new set of power relations,
one characteristic of North Atlantic advanced capitalism.
In closing, I pointed out similarities between developments in this one Albanian com-
munity and those in a range of other societies, from India to Indonesia, North Africa, and
the US. In all these contexts, certain performance forms of respectable women have, over
time, drawn on repertoires or styles once associated with “other” categories of women:
slaves, courtesans, religious performers, or—in the US—exotic dancers. In doing so, they
have not so much challenged patriarchal norms as they have encapsulated norms formerly
associated with multiple categories of woman within a single woman’s body. As in the
­A lbanian example, those “other women” have often come from marginal segments of soci-
ety, distinguished from respectable women by ethnicity, race, caste, religion, marital status,
or sexuality. While it can be tempting for scholars to interpret new cultural forms, such as
Prespa çoçek, as instances of resistance that free young women from older notions of pro-
priety, it is important to acknowledge both the new sets of power relationships in which
such forms enmesh them and the ways in which these new practices have, in many cases,
removed marginalized groups from the realm of performance.

Looking Ahead
The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in studies in ethnomusicology and re-
lated fields on gender and sexuality. The great majority focus on the activities of women: a
compensatory project that is still much needed. (Many of these are noted in Koskoff 2014.)
In addition, monographs highlighting masculine identities (Spiller 2010; McCracken 2015),
non-heteronormative subjects (Amico 2014; Hubbs 2014; Morad 2015), the interaction of
multiple gender categories (Sunardi 2015; Hutchinson 2016), and intersecting aspects of
identity (Hayes 2010) have all appeared in recent years. Scholars have also begun to inte-
grate considerations of gender, and less often sexuality, into studies that foreground other
 Gender and Sexuality  91
topics, including nationalism (Yano 2002), colonialism and post-colonialism (Weidman
2006), war and conflict situations (Ceribašić 2000; Pilzer 2014), diaspora (Maira 2002), reli-
gion (Rasmussen 2010), citizenship and the public sphere (Stokes 2010), affect (Gray 2013),
and the rise of digital technologies (Miller 2017). This “gender plus” approach is one that
all scholars would do well to keep in mind, since few topics that ethnomusicologists address
are devoid of a gendered dimension.
On the horizon are emerging theoretical frameworks in the humanities and social
sciences that promise new ways to approach relationships among music, gender, and sexual-
ity. Whether these will coalesce into a major theoretical paradigm shift, as some advocates
argue, or whether they will be added to the array of approaches that are already available
to researchers (and that are discussed in this volume), is not yet clear. I think of these as
approaches “beyond,” in that each attempts to expand the scope of existing disciplines and
paradigms as they are currently constituted. One such approach is the move beyond music
to the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. Much of the sound studies literature to date
has focused on technologies and their effects, and has therefore privileged domains histor-
ically dominated by males; it is thus not surprising that male scholars predominate in the
field itself. Perhaps as a consequence, gendered aspects of sound remain under-researched,
with some important exceptions (Keightley 1996; Naeem 2011; Perea 2017). (On sound
studies and ethnomusicology, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.)
A second approach seeks to move beyond traditional conceptions of the human. This
work has been prompted by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), certain strains of af-
fect theory (Massumi 2002; Ahmed 2004; Gregg and Seigworth 2010), approaches labeled
as the “new materialisms” (Coole and Frost 2010), and the interdisciplinary field of science
and technology studies (or STS; Felt et al. 2016). Writings in this vein work against post-
structuralism’s perceived overemphasis on language, discourse, and representation, and seek
to conceptualize gender and sexuality in terms of “how the body is materialized, rather
than what the body signifies” (Puar 2012: 57). At least three variations of these concerns
may be discerned in recent literature on gender and sexuality. The first includes “new ma-
terialist” approaches that seek to undo the Western dualities of nature/culture and mind/
body by linking work on gender and sexuality more closely to the material world (Grosz
1994; Barad 2003; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). A second
strand has explored relationships between humans and technologies through concepts such
as the “cyborg” (Haraway 1985) and the “post-human” (Hayles 1999; Braidotti 2013; see
also Parisi 2004). A final strand looks to the relationship of humans to other species and to
the Anthropocene (the epoch of natural history defined by human impacts on the environ-
ment; see Grusin 2017), including writings in ecofeminism (Mies and Shiva 1993). Taken
together, very different views of gender and sexuality are emerging from such writings,
although it is as yet unclear how they might fruitfully be applied to studies of music and
sound.
These scholarly developments raise a host of questions for future ethnomusicological re-
search. As a new generation of scholars emerges that has grown up with more fluid notions
of gender and sexuality, how will such a perspective be reconciled with attempts to analyze
persisting forms of global inequality based on these and other forms of social differentia-
tion? Will concern for the environment and for human relationships with other species be
seen as so urgent that it will override a concern for social divisions among humans? Finally,
to what extent can the North Atlantic basis of much of the present and past theorizing on
gender and sexuality, based as it is on Western epistemologies and ontologies, be reconciled
with efforts to “decolonize” ethnographic disciplines? Such issues will need to be addressed
in any future scholarship that relates music, or any form of sound, to notions of gender and
sexuality.
92  Jane C. Sugarman
Notes
1 There is also an extensive literature in musicology, dating largely from the 1980s on, that often draws
on different theoretical approaches than those discussed here. See, for example, Clément (1988),
­McClary (1991a), Solie (1993), Brett, Wood, and Thomas (1994), Smart (2000), and Borgerding (2015).
2 Estelle Freedman’s reader (2007) is notable for its inclusion of women’s writings from many world
areas. Baksh and Harcourt (2015) survey contemporary transnational feminist movements.
3 Major recent histories of feminist theory (Mann 2012; Tong and Botts 2017) and compilations of
feminist writings (Mann and Patterson 2015; McCann and Kim 2016) now diverge from the model
of “waves” in various ways and offer criticisms of its shortcomings. Taken together, these books pres-
ent a far fuller and more nuanced overview of feminist theory than can be attempted here and are
strongly recommended, particularly for highlighting approaches that have rarely been employed in
music studies. Running counter to these trends, writers such as Munro (2013) and Rivers (2017) now
posit the emergence of a “fourth wave.” Pilcher and Wehelan (2004) provide a helpful guide to major
concepts in gender studies.
4 Some other current acronyms are LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-queer-­questioning-
intersex-pansexual-two spirit-asexual-ally; see D’Souza 2016), and Queer/LGBTIQA2Z (­lesbian-gay-
bisexual-transgender-intersex-queer (or questioning)-asexual (or allies)-two spirited-gender neutral, as
proposed by an Occupy Wall Street caucus in 2011; see Queerows 2011). “Two spirit” is a designation
favored by some Native Americans.
5 The Collective is credited in some sources as having coined the phrase “identity politics” (1979: 365),
although this ascription is not uniformly accepted. Although the phrase is often criticized as encour-
aging essentialism, the Collective’s formulation, in fact, emphasized the interaction of specific forms
of oppression and their relationship to the class structure of US society: “We need to articulate the
real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and
sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives” (366).
6 This distinction was first postulated by sexologist John Money, prompted by his research with “inter-
sex” individuals—those who, biologically and/or physiologically, cannot clearly be classified as male
or female (Money 1955; see Haig 2004 for a history of usage of the term “gender”).
7 One structuralist text that remains provocative to the present day is Gayle Rubin’s article, “The
­Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), whose complex analysis draws on
Lévi-Strauss as well as Marx, Engels, Freud, and others. Rubin was unusual in this period for includ-
ing a consideration of sexuality in her analysis and for advocating for “an androgynous and genderless
(although not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one
does, and with whom one makes love” (1975: 204).
8 For readers assembling more recent anthropological writings on gender and sexuality, see Robertson
(2005) and Brettell and Sargent (2017).
9 The Enlightenment refers to a broad movement in eighteenth-century European philosophy that in-
cludes thinkers like Voltaire (1694–1778), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Immanuel Kant ­(1724–1804).
Central themes in Enlightenment philosophy include the view that science and rationality will lead to
human progress, a distrust of tradition and authority as the basis of beliefs about the world, and liberal
political philosophy, which emphasizes human rights (including a right to private property) and the
autonomy of the individual subject (see Bristow 2017). In the nineteenth and twentieth c­ enturies,
Enlightenment ideals were critiqued by a range of intellectual traditions, including Marxism (as dis-
cussed, for example, in Femia [1993: 11–67] and Sayers [2007]; on Marxism and ethnomusicology, see
Manuel, this volume), poststructuralism (discussed by Sugarman, above), and post-colonialism (see
Wallach and Clinton, this volume). Drawing on these traditions, critiques of Enlightenment ideals
also animate some of the work in sound studies and voice studies (see Meizel and Daughtry, this
­volume). —Harris M. Berger.
10 On the relationship between poststructuralism and phenomenology, see Berger, this volume.
11 Bourdieu was also a central figure in a body of social thought known as practice theory. See Text
Box 2.1.
12 On the notion of modernity, see Manuel (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
13 It is not coincidental that many Western discourses constituting “racial” groups, as well as norms of
mental and physical health, developed in much the same period (see Berger and Stone, Introduction,
note 15, this volume; Mahon, this volume). Ann Laura Stoler (1995) has extended and critiqued
Foucault’s analysis by demonstrating how crucial European colonialism was to the development of
intertwined Western discourses of gender, sexuality, and race.
14 For debates from this period on the relationship of feminism to poststructuralism, see Nicholson
(1990) and Ramazanoglu (1993). Forms of US feminist theory that resist poststructuralist arguments
 Gender and Sexuality  93
in whole or part have been labeled as “realist” (cf. Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000) or “standpoint”
(cf. Harding 2003). Ethnomusicologists have drawn very little on such writings, but they nevertheless
represent valuable streams of theorizing.
15 For an illuminating exchange on issues of gender, sexuality, and race as they intersect in the realm
of performance, see the essays by bell hooks (1992: 145–56) and Judith Butler (1993: 121–40) on the
documentary film Paris Is Burning (Livingston 1990), which profiles the drag shows of transvestite and
transgender performers of color in 1980s New York City.
16 At present, perhaps the realm of greatest contestation over identity categories at the international level
is that of LGBT or queer politics; see, for example, Waites (2009).
17 Foucault defined “technologies of the self ” as practices that
permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of
operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to trans-
form themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality.
(1988: 18)
18 Koskoff’s framing of these issues is consistent with the emphasis placed on live performance in eth-
nomusicological scholarship during the period in which she was writing. Nevertheless, her concerns
could easily be extended to other dimensions of sound or musical practice.
19 For a classic essay proposing a poststructuralist conceptualization of experience, see Scott (1992).
20 For a pioneering study of “mixed gender” individuals who have been crucial to a musical practice, see
Robertson (1989) on Hawai’ian māhū and their role in the preservation of hula.
21 On orientalism, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
22 Scholarship published since my research was completed now enables scholars to know a great deal
more than I did at the time about male-male sexual relations in the Ottoman period; see particularly
Andrews and Kalpaklı (2005).
23 The terms “respectable” and “public” are from Gerda Lerner, who notes that such a division in Mid-
dle Eastern societies can be traced back at least to ancient Assyrian law and was the basis for the earliest
documented instances of women’s veiling (Lerner 1986: 134–35; see also Ahmed 1992: 14–15).
24 The notion of the “male gaze” has been attributed both to art historian John Berger (1972) and to
feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey (1975).

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4 Constructing Race and Engaging
Power through Music
Ethnomusicology and Critical
Approaches to Race
Maureen Mahon

The music of racialized peoples—Native Americans and African Americans in the

United States and colonized people around the world—has received extensive ethno-
musicological attention. The question of race, however, has not been a central focus of
research in our discipline. Historically, the field rejected the notion of race, a system that
organized people into “unequal or ranked categories theoretically based on differences
in their biophysical traits” (Smedley 1998: 693). Instead, ethnomusicologists focused
on culture. Here, they followed the lead of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of
­A merican cultural anthropology, who argued that all humans have the same biological
capacity to develop language, religion, and kinship structures but do so in differing ways
based on cultural factors.1 In the early twentieth century, Boas’s research had shown
that the biological differences between the so-called racial groups were negligible. The
task of the anthropologist, he insisted, was to document and analyze human culture, not
race, and to do so from a perspective that avoided hierarchical models that viewed North
Western Europeans as separate from and superior to Africans, Asians, and indigenous
peoples. In his view, each cultural group was to be understood relativistically—on its
own terms and according to its own internal logic.
Focusing anthropological attention on culture was a key part of Boas’s anti-racist pro-
gram. In ethnomusicology today, scholars are carrying forward that agenda by return-
ing attention to race—not as a biological category but as a socially constructed concept
that shapes ideas and practices associated with music and social life. They work from
two key assumptions: first, that there is a long-standing relationship between racial
meanings and musical practice; and second, that as ethnomusicologists, we should map
this relationship and analyze its social, economic, political, and cultural implications.
Thinking critically about race in the context of music and about music in the context
of race, ethnomusicologists have drawn on an interdisciplinary array of texts that to-
gether enable the theorization of and insights into the relationship between race and
music. This chapter begins with an overview of some significant critical studies of race
and then turns to a discussion of ethnographic writings, including my own, that deploy
these ideas. While I primarily draw my examples from and refer to scholarship about
the United States and the African diaspora, I do not mean to suggest that the issue of
race and music is limited to these regions. This emphasis reflects my scholarly focus but
should not overshadow the fact that race-like forms of status and racialized hierarchies
exist far beyond these contexts. Whether in the United States, South Africa, Europe,
or elsewhere, ideas about race ultimately constitute a worldview through which people
perceive, interpret, and deal with human differences (Smedley 2012: 5). Reconsidering
the complex relationship between music and race is therefore a central issue for contem-
porary ethnomusicology. 2
100  Maureen Mahon
Critical Approaches to Race: Theoretical Foundations
The critical scholarship that I explore below represents some of the ways that intellectuals
have theorized race in relation to power and identity. This work offers tools for understand-
ing how a category that is not biologically real has become socially meaningful through the
thoughts and actions of individuals, communities, and institutions.
Writing from the dawn of the twentieth century through the end of his life, African
American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the preeminent black intel-
lectual of the twentieth century, made an invaluable contribution to critical race studies.
Exploring the everyday experience of being black in a white majority society, his classic
The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997) reveals the nature of the lives that African Americans
led “behind the veil” and unseen by white Americans. In a much-cited passage, he outlines
the psychic and social condition of African Americans:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s

self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
(38)

Here, Du Bois articulates the challenge of achieving a coherent identity in the face of in-
tense racial animus. The concept of double consciousness identifies the double-burden of
race—the need to fight both an external antagonist for citizenship rights and the need to
fight the internalized racism that leads to the questioning of one’s own humanity. Coupled
with a common history of forced migration and slavery, as well as contemporary experi-
ences of second-class citizenship, the psychic condition that Du Bois describes fuels a sense
of connection among African Americans, one that contributes to their unity as a group and
a “race.” His analysis of this political formation was the basis for Pan-Africanism and black
nationalism, movements with which Du Bois was associated, and the creation of the first
civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
of which Du Bois was a founding member.
As one of the earliest analyses of the meaning and complexity of racial identity, Du Bois’s
work reverberates in race and ethnic studies today. Writing some fifty years after Du Bois,
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) considered the psychic impact of race on people of African de-
scent in the Caribbean and throughout the African diaspora. A practicing psychiatrist born
in Martinique, Fanon attended to the psychology of race and questions of consciousness in
order to theorize the impact of empire on colonized peoples. In Black Skin, White Masks
(1952), he applied the tenets of psychoanalysis to the Negro in the West and tried to un-
derstand what he viewed as the pathology that blacks exhibited as a result of colonial dom-
ination. Central to his interpretation was the nature of the relationship between black and
white populations: members of the white community despised people of African descent
because of Western culture’s association of blackness with impurity; people of African de-
scent accepted this judgment and despised themselves. Fanon argues that, as a result of this,
black people imitate European speech, dress, and thought, and develop other features of
personality and behavior to insulate themselves against their own self-hatred. Fanon charac-
terizes this as the assumption of a “white mask.” Although he focused on the psychological,
Fanon acknowledged that without an analysis of social conditions and changes in the social
order, black people in the West would not be able to truly liberate themselves from colonial
alienation. (See Wallach and Clinton [this volume] for a discussion of Fanon in relation to
decolonization. See Berger [this volume] on Fanon’s relationship with phenomenology.)
 Constructing Race  101
Both Fanon and Du Bois assumed that black people had a common group identity be-
cause they shared a common history and occupied a similar position in the social hierar-
chy. Indeed, it was these factors, Fanon and Du Bois felt, that brought people of African
descent together as a race.3 By the late twentieth century, a point at which the mainstream
of scientific opinion had rejected the view that there were significant biological differences
between the races, social science scholars began historicizing the emergence of both the
concept of race in the United States and the accompanying social processes of racial forma-
tion.4 This work emphasized that race is a social construction (a conceptual framework that
Du Bois, Fanon, and Boas did not use) and related its development to colonialism in the
New World. In the 1990s, responding to public discourses that rested on the assumption
that there were meaningful biological differences among the races, the American Anthro-
pological Association issued a statement on the biology and politics of race that continued
Boas’s battle against scientific racism. Tracing the history of and rationale behind the con-
cept of race, the statement asserted:

“[R]ace” was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial sit-
uation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European
attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery
in particular during the 19th century used “race” to justify the retention of slavery.
The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, es-
tablished a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories[,] underscored and bolstered
unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequal-
ity was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and
Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.
(AAA Statement on Race 1998)

A comparison of the ways in which race is defined in differing societies makes clear that
race is a social construct. Describing the distinctive ideas about race that developed in the
United States, Audrey Smedley observes:

First, the dichotomous race categories of black and white are [seen in the US as] set and
inflexible. Unlike in South Africa or Latin America, there is no legal or social recogni-
tion of a racial category in between black and white (“mixed-race” or “colored”), and
one cannot belong to more than one race. Second, the category “black” or “African
American” is defined by any known descent from a black ancestor, thus conflating and
socially homogenizing individuals with a wide range of phenotypes and ancestries into
one racial category. Third, one cannot transcend or transform one’s race status; no legal
or social mechanism exists for changing one’s race.
(2012: 7)

It is worth noting that the US system for defining race is not consistent across different
groups. While anyone with any degree of known African ancestry is categorized as black,
the federal government requires proof of at least one-quarter Native American ancestry
to be recognized as part of that group and receive the rights and benefits associated with
it. Scholarship explaining how constructions of race have changed over time and across
space demonstrates that people can redefine and even dismantle race if they have the will
to do so.5
The research on race and racial identity that emerged in post-War Britain nuanced and
challenged the scholarship on the social construction of blackness. A leading figure in this
effort was Stuart Hall (1932–2014), and to understand his work, we need to place it in its in-
tellectual and social context. Born in Jamaica, Hall helped to establish the interdisciplinary
102  Maureen Mahon
field of British cultural studies during the 1970s, and he made questions of race, identity,
and representation central for this field. Along with Hall, cultural studies scholars such as
Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby shared
a commitment to Marxist analysis that sought ways to examine the complexity of culture
(broadly defined) and its interplay with politics and economics.6 In this regard, they reacted
against a then dominant strain of the Marxist tradition that saw a society’s economic base as
ultimately determining its culture. Their work was part of a broader intellectual movement
known as “Western Marxism,” which took its cue from Marx’s early writings and empha-
sized the role of culture in history. Central to all of this were the ideas of Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937), an Italian Marxist who used the notion of hegemony to analyze relations of
power under capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the ensemble of cultural formations in
a society (e.g. education, family structure, religion, popular culture, and media) that work
together to infiltrate the daily private lives of individuals and produce a pattern of beliefs
and practices that maintain the power of capital and the state (Gramsci 1997). Gramsci
argued that hegemony is a less overt and more effective form of power than direct dom-
ination, coercion, or physical force; understanding its workings was crucial, he believed,
if radical activists were to challenge existing social orders. For Gramsci and the cultural
studies scholars he influenced, culture was a crucial site of hegemonic struggle, and any
given hegemony was only a temporary resting place in the ongoing balance of forces in a
society. Following Gramsci, cultural studies scholars focused on what they called “cultural
politics.” By this term, they meant processes of seeking, creating, and contesting meaning
through cultural practices that are outside of traditional electoral or state politics but are
still shaped by larger social forces and have significant consequences for the maintenance of
power relations in a society. (See Manuel [this volume] for a discussion of cultural studies
and Marxism.)
Hall’s interest in race, media, and cultural politics inspired him to focus attention on the
issue of representation. Based on Gramsci’s ideas but taking them in powerful new direc-
tions, Hall argued that the question of representation was important because:

[h]ow things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a
culture … play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event role [in society].
This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation—­
subjectivity, identity, politics—a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the con-
stitution of social life.
([1989] 1996: 444, original emphasis)

In other words, cultural representations, like those of racial identity, do not simply reflect
social relations; on the contrary, they are one of the means by which such relations are
established and maintained. Writing in the Britain of the late 1980s, Hall identified what
he called a “new politics of representation.” 7 In a wide range of genres, Hall argued, black
artists of the period were abandoning perspectives that presented “a singular and unifying”
vision of black experience and were instead creating work that grappled directly with dif-
ference (1996: 441). These artists acknowledged what Hall called “the end of the innocent
notion of the essential black subject” and the necessary “recognition of the extraordinary
diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose
the category ‘black’” (1996: 443). (At the time that Hall was writing in Britain, people
of West Indian, West African, and South Asian descent were all categorized as “black.”)
In this context, Hall argued for a historicized view of identity, one that recognizes it as a
“‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within,
not outside, representation” (1992: 221).
 Constructing Race  103
Applying Hall’s ideas about cultural identity to the experiences of racialized groups al-
lowed him and his followers to challenge the tendency to simplify and stereotype the iden-
tities of people of African descent. Paul Gilroy, for example, elaborated Hall’s critique of
essentializing racial discourses and theorized the experiences of and complex relationships
among people of African descent in Great Britain and the African diaspora (e.g. Gilroy
[1987] 1991, 1993, 2000). In There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Gilroy historicized
black life in England, a category of experience that was either overlooked in British cul-
tural studies and British cultural consciousness (hence his irreverent title) or depicted it in
an oversimplified manner that represented black people as either “problems” or “victims”
([1987] 1991). His study reveals the ways concepts of racial difference and racial hierarchies
were constructed in England, how these racial meanings have constituted English social
and political life, and how they shaped understandings of the nation and of national be-
longing. Concerned with analyzing “the complex interplay between struggles based around
differing forms of social subordination,” Gilroy discusses both class and race (1991: 28).
Through case studies of the legal system, anti-racist activism, and black British expressive
culture, he shows that although race does not correspond to biological reality, it remains
a crucial analytic category for understanding and addressing inequality in contemporary
Great Britain (cf. Fields 1982).
It wasn’t only British cultural studies scholars who highlighted the heterogeneity of
­people from the African diaspora; attention to difference had long been the focus of black
­feminist thinking about race as well. Indeed, the earliest political organizing among A ­ frican
­A merican women grew out of a response to the particularity of their experience as ­people
who were at once black and female. When black feminist activists and intellectuals t­heorized
their position, they highlighted the ways that the intersecting experience of race, class,
gender, sexuality, and power shaped black women’s lives.8 A foundational text in this area
is “A Black Feminist Statement,” written in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a
­Boston-based group of black feminist activists. They wrote:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are ac-
tively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression
and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based
upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of
these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.
(1983: 210)

Theorizing from their lived experience, these activists argued that they could not “sepa-
rate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experi-
enced simultaneously” (213). Their departure from a singular emphasis on race to a focus
on the intertwined impact of gender, race, class, and sexuality on women’s experiences
was disruptive to the orthodoxies that dominated the civil rights and women’s liberation
movements—ones in which the Combahee Collective members and numerous other black
women had been involved. The shift was a necessary and productive linking of personal
experience, activist practice, and political theory.
The relationships among multiple dimensions of identity that so interested the ­Combahee
River Collective were a major concern for other black feminist intellectuals and came to be
known as “intersectionality,” a term coined in the late 1980s by University of California,
Los Angeles, law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Crenshaw was one of a coterie of
legal scholars at the forefront of critical race theory (CRT), a body of writings that analyzed
the workings of race and power in US law and society. Scholars of CRT did more than
just trace the social construction of race; they sought to expose the relations of power and
104  Maureen Mahon
economic interests that keep race and racial thinking in place in the legal system. Using
a multidisciplinary approach that integrated Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism,
these scholars marshaled a race-conscious critique of US law, often integrating personal sto-
ries with legal arguments and analyses of historical context to challenge “the ways in which
race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and, more
generally, in American society as a whole” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xii). This scholarship, pri-
marily the work of people of color, sought to uncover “the ongoing dynamics of racialized
power, and its embeddedness in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit,
formal manifestations of racism” (xxix).9 Countering the prevailing legal theories of the
period, which assumed that the law was neutral, objective, and color blind, CRT scholars
showed how US law was rooted in the self-interest of the dominant group and sustained
white supremacy. (On intersectionality, see also Sugarman [this volume] and Text Box 2.2.)
The work of critical race theorists in identifying the unacknowledged workings of ra-
cialized power led legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris to focus sustained attention on whiteness.
In her essay “Whiteness as Property,” she shows how, in the United States, “rights in prop-
erty are contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race” and demonstrates that
“[t]hrough this entangled relationship between race and property, historical forms of dom-
ination have evolved to reproduce subordination in the present” (1995: 277). Her central
point is that in a society organized by racial caste, in which blacks are subordinate and whites
are dominant, whiteness is “treasured property;” it affords benefits that whites guard and
protect (1995: 277). Harris details the ways economic and legal privileges are accorded to
those who are categorized as white. “Whites have come to expect and rely on these bene-
fits,” she explains, “and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and
protected by the law” (1995: 277). Harris’s approach draws attention to whites as a group and
to their group interest in maintaining a system in which they have disproportionate power.
Informed by CRT in legal studies but hailing from the social sciences and the human-
ities, a number of scholars have followed Harris in interrogating whiteness. Helping to
establish the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies, these researchers shift focus from
the liberal, individual conception of the subject (who can claim “I’m not a racist” to deflect
blame) to an emphasis on systemic racism and the way that structural context shapes the
construction of all racial identities—not just those of blacks. By making whites visible as a
group, whiteness studies scholars counter the common-sense perspectives of many white
Americans, who do not actively self-identify by race, a category they reserve for racial
others.10 In the introduction to her interview-based study of racial identity among white
women, Ruth Frankenberg lays out the central premises of whiteness studies:

Naming “whiteness” displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an
effect of its dominance. Among the effects on white people both of race privilege and
of the dominance of whiteness are their seeming normativity, their structured invis-
ibility….To look at the social construction of whiteness, then, is to look head-on at a
site of dominance.
(1993: 6)

Whiteness studies scholars work from the belief that “racism shapes white people’s lives and
identities in a way that is inseparable from other facets of daily life” and turn the analytical lens
on white people in order to examine the persistence of racial power (Frankenberg 1993: 6).
The period following the 1960s saw a burgeoning of research that examined the cul-
tural politics of race. However, as Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman have observed,
musicology and ethnomusicology came to these topics much later.11 In 2000, Radano and
Bohlman published an edited volume intended to address this lacuna and galvanize their
 Constructing Race  105
colleagues to take seriously the fact that “the racial as it has been variously constituted
within the contested spaces of difference is the Western ground on which the musical ex-
perience and its study has been erected” (2). Seeking to make music scholars engage these
issues, Radano and Bohlman focused on the “racial imagination,” which they defined as
“the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type
and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity” (5). Calling for
“a new racial hearing” in music studies, Radano and Bohlman offered the volume’s case
studies as examples of the kind of race-conscious work that they hoped their intervention
would encourage (38).12 In the next section, I discuss ethnographies by ethnomusicologists
that continue this trajectory and address race, politics, culture, power, and the persistence
of the racial imagination in music and society.

Critical Approaches to Race in Ethnomusicology

Scholars engaged in the critical ethnomusicology of race examine the ways in which ideas
about race and ideas about music interact to construct concepts of authenticity in racial
identity and musical practices. Explicitly or implicitly, intersectionality is a focus in this
work, as these scholars consider race in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality to
ascertain how these diverse categories inform musical and social experience. Undertaken
in the wake of British cultural studies’ defining writings and the turn to practice theory
(an intellectual movement that tries to understand the nature of human action and its limits
within social structures; see Text Box 2.1), all of the studies I discuss here are concerned
with the analysis of power, particularly the ways in which power is enacted and contested
through discourses and practices related to race and music.
Louise Meintjes focuses on these themes in Sound of Africa! (2003), her ethnography of the
production practices that unfolded in a South African music studio in the 1990s. The book
traces the ways musicians and producers, South Africans and foreigners, blacks and whites,
work together to produce music that “sounds Zulu,” conveying “Zuluness” and “blackness”
through its musical qualities, vocal style, song texts, and production approaches. Meintjes
examines the racial and ethnic dimensions of the discussions that developed as her inter-
locutors debate musical meanings (particularly those associated with genre of mbaqanga),
and she traces the ways in which the recording process produces and disseminates ideas of
otherness, Africanness, and Zuluness. Analyzing the musical values that the artists express
in both performance and conversation, the book reveals the mutually constitutive processes
through which people construct racial meanings, apply them to music, and return to those
racialized musical forms to construct and represent their social identities. Approaching both
the act of music making in the studio and her own ethnographic writing as forms of me-
diation and experimentation, she demonstrates the ways cultural producers connect and
translate disparate worlds, peoples, sounds, and ideas.
Race and its intersection with gender and sexuality are the focus of Songs in Black and
Lavender, Eileen Hayes’s 2010 multi-sited ethnography of women’s music festivals in the
United States. Here, Hayes is concerned with “manifestations of black feminist conscious-
ness” in women’s music, a genre category that developed in the 1970s as white lesbian
activists created women-only networks of musical performance and production (Hayes
2010: 1). Hayes engages in participant observation and conducts interviews with African
American women musicians, so-called “flygirls in the buttermilk” (6), whose experiences
unfold in a social world that is dominated by white lesbians. Illustrating how the persistence
of racism in queer communities conditions the experiences of African American women,
Hayes explores the interracial engagements and misunderstandings that occur within the
women’s music community. Weaving together the commentaries of her interlocutors, her
106  Maureen Mahon
experiences at music festivals, and contemporary social theory, she “reveals women’s music
festivals as sites of black women’s musicking and theorizing about gender, race, sexual iden-
tity, and other issues that fall broadly under the rubric of politics with a small p” (31). Blend-
ing humor and academic rigor, Hayes’s ethnography shows the significance that women’s
music festivals hold for black lesbians, a sorely underrepresented group in ethnomusicolog-
ical and academic studies generally.
Matt Sakakeeny’s ethnography Roll With It draws on the fieldwork he conducted in New
Orleans among black working-class musicians, both before and after Hurricane Katrina, to
examine the everyday ways in which African American brass band performers experience
the nexus of race, economics, and power (2013). Working within a practice theory frame-
work, Sakakeeny shows how the young men who were his interlocutors “use tradition to
provide people with a sense of community through music,” reconfigure those traditions “to
resonate with contemporary experience,” and “accumulate status and earn a living by play-
ing music in diverse contexts” (2013: xv). While Sakakeeny highlights the agency of the
musicians in his study, he also attends to larger social forces by marking the men’s vulnera-
bility to the risks of poverty, violence, and exclusion that all working-class black people face
in the new millennium. Recognizing that these brass band musicians experience social and
professional mobility not easily available to other New Orleanians of their race and class,
Sakakeeny does not lose sight of the limits that they encounter and attends to the social
context and structural forces that condition the lives of his interlocutors. Describing how
his field experiences influenced his thinking, he explains, “I began to ask more critical and
expansive questions: How is race lived? What can the unprecedented crisis of Hurricane
Katrina reveal about the historical consistency of vulnerability, and where does music reside
within these histories?” (10). His attention to the experience of race and the lives of musi-
cians beyond the music-making event yields a compelling ethnography that illuminates the
subjectivities, identities, and circumstances of his interlocutors and offers insight into the
phenomenon of precarity—the condition of economic and social instability increasingly
faced by working-class populations under conditions of contemporary capitalism (xv).
In her 2004 collection of essays Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, Deborah
Wong draws on ethnographic research to address the politics of race and identity in the
contemporary US. The volume focuses on Asian American participation in genres not typ-
ically associated with that group, such as jazz and rap, and explores the questions of power,
access, and representation that arise when they do so. Intended to counter the invisibility of
Asian Americans in ethnic studies, music studies, and US racial discourse, Wong considers
the ways in which practices of racialization shape the experiences of Asian American per-
formers. Her ethnographic practice enables her to detail the challenges that her interlocutors
encounter as their racialized bodies limit the acceptance of their music by audiences from
other groups. Attention to both performance (the use of music and other expressive forms to
actively create representations of identity) and performativity (the everyday reproduction of
identity categories through mundane behavior and discourse) are important to Wong’s pro-
ject (6). (See Sugarman [this volume] and Waterman [this volume] for further discussions of
performativity.) With striking clarity, Wong articulates the political investments that moti-
vate her work: “I am an Asian American scholar and musician who spends a lot of time with
Asian American scholars and musicians—and I write about that interaction. I write not from
the privileged stance of a cultural insider but as an activist mindful of difference and with a
commitment to coalition politics” (2004: 8). Wong is equally clear about her commitment
to ethnography: “I think that politically responsible ethnographic work is an essential critical
inroad to the broader project of understanding people, music, power, etc.” (8).
While many ethnomusicologists of race share Wong’s investment in ethnographic
fieldwork, others conduct historical research, and two important works in this area have
 Constructing Race  107
focused on jazz in the United States. Patrick Burke’s 2008 monograph Come in and Hear the
Truth explores the “musical and racial tensions and collaborations” (3) between the black
and white musicians who played in New York City’s 52nd Street jazz scene in the 1930s
and 1940s. His study highlights “the instability of both musical and racial categories,” as
expressed through debates about genre and authenticity, and addresses issues of “mutual
influence between musical style and racial representation” (5). Burke’s purpose is not to
offer a chronological narrative of the development of jazz, but to demonstrate that ideas
about racial identity, racial authenticity, and musicianship informed the ways audiences,
critics, and musicians understood the music being created on 52nd Street. Painstakingly
researching the popular press archive of the period and interpreting his findings through
a framework that links the social construction of race to the development of jazz, Burke
shows how this vibrant music scene both challenged and reinscribed dominant racial
ideologies.
Ingrid Monson’s 2007 study Freedom Sounds focuses on a later moment in jazz history—
the 1950s and 1960s—but shares Burke’s concern with the racial politics of this genre. She
observes, “During the civil rights movement, the intractable conflicts that emerged over
race, leadership, strategy, and policy goals were quite similar in many respects to the argu-
ments over race, power, aesthetics, and economics that took place in jazz” (6). Drawing on
extensive archival research and interviews with musicians, Monson works to acknowledge
both “the historical salience of the category of race in the history of jazz and also to de-
lineate the way in which it is complicated by other sociological variables (such as class and
gender) and the history of interracial debate” (7). Monson approaches her study through
a framework informed by practice theory and the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault.
This enables her to offer a representation of the racial politics and cultural aesthetics that
were at play in jazz during the civil rights era, as well as the discourses and social struc-
tures that shaped the experiences of both African American and non-African American
participants in the jazz scene. As such, Monson’s study is an extended “critical essay on
the relationships among the music, racism, and society in a particular historical period
and what we have to learn from them” and an insightful consideration of race, power, and
music history (23).13
The ethnomusicologists I have discussed in this section pay detailed attention to musical
sound and performance, and provide carefully contextualized analyses in order to reveal
the complexities and contradictions that emerge as people confront the workings of music,
race, and power. The concept of race and the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusi-
cology were born in the context of European colonialism; the music scholars that I have
discussed here are part of a larger effort to acknowledge our field’s colonial heritage and
to develop approaches to ethnomusicological research and writing that counter colonial-
ism’s persistent negative effects. One of the leading theorists in this movement, Beverley
­Diamond, argues that ethnomusicologists must cease the practice of “‘mining’ communities
for cultural [or musical] gems.” Drawing on her extensive ethnographic experience with
First Nations and Sami culture bearers, she urges ethnomusicologists to work in “collabora-
tion with their I­ ndigenous partners, jointly defining research objectives and methods” and
­modeling an ethnomusicological practice that foregrounds reciprocity, responsibility, and
ethics (2012: 10). The shifts in emphasis and approach that Diamond proposes seek to decol-
onize ethnomusicology as a scholarly discipline and use its theories and methods to serve the
interests of communities that continue to contend with the devastating impact of colonial
relations of power and difference. Ethnomusicologists taking critical approaches to the study
of race contribute to this important effort by putting race, power, and difference—concerns
at the heart of the colonial project—at the center of their research on music. (See Wallach
and Clinton [this volume] on colonialism and the colonial legacy in ethnomusicology.)
108  Maureen Mahon
Race, Power, and Difference in the Field: New York City, 1994
The critical approaches to race and power that I have outlined in this essay informed my
fieldwork with New York- and Los Angeles-based African American rock musicians affili-
ated with the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a non-profit membership organization founded
in 1985. When I started my research in the mid-1990s, BRC members had been using
music-based activism for almost a decade to counter limiting institutionalized discourses
about black identity and cultural production. They were motivated to start the organization
because of a problem they confronted in their musical and social lives: family, friends, and
music industry executives questioned their involvement in a form that, in spite of its roots in
African American music, no longer seemed to be “authentically black.” By the 1980s, rock
was understood to be music created by and for white people. Black rockers encountered
artistic, professional, and interpersonal challenges because their musical proclivities did not
match those presumed appropriate to their racial identities. During the two years that I
conducted fieldwork—which entailed attending BRC member meetings, concerts, and re-
hearsals; listening to member recordings; and conducting interviews—my goal was to learn
how these musicians theorized and engaged in the politics of race and how they addressed
the limitations placed on black expressive culture and black identity.
The encounters and conversations I had in the field led me to attend to the intersection of
race and gender in ways that I had not considered when I was writing my research proposal
and planning my fieldwork. It was not a single event but rather the cumulative experience
in the BRC community and my positionality as an African American woman that led me
to an intersectional approach, and it was an intersectional approach that helped me make
sense of what I encountered. As I explain in my book:

I was familiar with both the persistent strain of conservatism that coexists with rock’s
more rebellious impulses and the marginal position of women in the genre when I started
this project. Still, once in the field, I was surprised to see how deeply naturalized the ste-
reotypical male and female rock roles were. The people I met in studios and clubs usually
asked if I was a vocalist or, much more frequently, a girlfriend of one of the men I was
talking with. Only a handful of people asked if I played an instrument. Time in the field
was time in a male milieu. BRC members were primarily men; the clubs and studios they
worked in were staffed almost entirely by men; and the stores where they shopped for
instruments, recording equipment, and CDs were populated almost exclusively by men.
(2004: 207)

Although I sometimes could talk about “BRC members” in collective terms, it quickly
became clear to me that gender was a significant form of differentiation that I needed to
address. My initial focus was on the challenges women members faced as they pursued
careers in rock:

Their gender and race mark them as doubly outside of rock ‘n’ roll’s white male club.
Like white women they are intruding on male space and like black men they are tread-
ing on white territory. As black women, they have to fight for recognition and respect
as legitimate rock performers.
(208)

To illustrate the decisive impact that the intersection of race, gender, and musical genre
had on BRC women, I analyzed the professional trajectories of Sophia Ramos and Felice
Rosser, artists who were prominent in the BRC at the time of my research. Despite having
 Constructing Race  109
loyal local fans and initially attracting the attention of major labels, both women saw their
careers stall. Record label executives, convinced that nonwhite women presented an insur-
mountable sales challenge in the rock market, opted not to offer them contracts or did not
support them once under contract (209).
Paralleling my attention to the impact of race and gender on women affiliated with the
BRC, I also examined the intersectional experiences of male BRC members. This focus
was also a response to my own positioning. The ethnographer’s identity is always at play
in fieldwork, and this point was driven home for me late one evening when I was the only
woman in a recording studio with five men. The musicians had just finished a rehearsal
in which one of the participants improvised a sardonic song comprised solely of the lyrics
“a black man did it.” A conversation developed that addressed personal relationships and
ranged over current events at a time when former football player O. J. Simpson was in the
news. The musicians talked about black men being blamed for crimes committed by white
perpetrators and speculated about the guilt or innocence of Simpson, who was about to go
on trial for murder. They talked about race, celebrity culture, and the limits of crossover;
they talked about the challenges of marriage; they talked about the realities of divorce;
they joked about how difficult women could be. And then one of them invited me to speak
up on behalf of women, reminding me that I was not a neutral observer but a raced and
gendered participant. Even though the conversation was not about music, I discussed it at
length in my book because it crystallized the ways a particular group of African Americans
articulated and interpreted questions of race and gender (225–28). They did so in a social
context that stereotyped black men and black masculinity. How could they, as real people
rather than caricatures, formulate their identities as African American men and, as Du Bois
might put it, achieve true self-consciousness? The conversation threw into relief the fact
that “the BRC provided a distinctively black male space in which black men could bond,
talk, and work together” to make music, but also to make themselves (228). Ideas from crit-
ical race studies—particularly those related to the Combahee River Collective’s insistence
that it was impossible to isolate race from gender when discussing lived experience and
Stuart Hall’s claim that racial identities are productions that are never complete—helped me
link the conversation to the larger questions I addressed in my study. I concluded:

BRC men and women contended with the same dominant assumptions that proper rock-
ers were white men. As BRC members attacked the racial ideologies that marginalized
blacks from rock, ideologies about gender shaped the ways they carried out the organi-
zation’s agenda. BRC men and women had to deal with the intersection of race, gender,
and rock although from different perspectives and emphasizing different concerns.
(229)

The conversation also threw into relief the differences, complexities, and conflicts that
the intersection of gender and race entail. Addressing these dynamics was critical to my
research process.

Looking Ahead
The research I carried out with BRC members and the studies I discussed in the previ-
ous section offer examples of how ethnomusicologists have taken critical approaches to
race and music. The interventions of two recent publications suggest productive new
directions that work in this field can take. Gabriel Solis’s research on music and raciali-
zation in what he calls “The Black Pacific” (2015) traces the alliances that have formed
between, on the one hand, indigenous musicians from Australia and Papua New Guinea
110  Maureen Mahon
and, on the other, people of African descent from North America and the Caribbean;
this work demonstrates the efficacy of bringing critical attention to the globalization
of the concept of race. Using both archival and ethnographic research, Solis maps the
ways the political uses of blackness have developed in the Southwestern Pacific since
the early twentieth century through the circulation of recorded music and face-to-face
connections among African diaspora musicians, activists, and sailors. Solis examines
how these links are sounded through the musical practices of indigenous people, a focus
that leads him to explore the globalization of race as both a form of restrictive differen-
tiation and a social formation that provides a positive identity. His research shows how
musical ideas and practices circulate across national borders, while considering their
aesthetic and political significance. Solis also directs attention to interactions between
marginalized groups, a decolonizing move that decenters the powerful and reveals the
ways in which disempowered people living through post-coloniality have developed
relationships across difference. (On globalization and post-colonialism in ethnomusi-
cology, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].)
Working in a different vein, Alisha Lola Jones (2017) examines the intraracial dimen-
sions of race, music, and identity formation through a focus on black male vocal per-
formance of gender and sexuality in African American Protestant churches; her work
demonstrates the value of an intersectional approach. Based on ethnographic fieldwork
in churches in Chicago and Washington, DC, Jones’s research reveals gospel music
performance as a practice through which African American male vocalists negotiate
heteronormative notions of masculinity and anxiety about black masculine identity and
sexuality. Jones’s decision to root her analysis of sexual and gender expression in black
feminist scholarship and a queer of color critique (see Sugarman, this volume) allows
her to take a layered approach to understanding the ways in which singers and the con-
gregations to which they minister assign meanings to instrumental, vocal, and physical
gestures, reading some as “effeminate” and others as “masculine.” Her intersectional fo-
cus enables her to connect these interpretations to the gender and sexuality politics that
play out in African American churches and attend to the discourses and practices that
sustain patriarchy, heteronormativity, misogyny, and homophobia, while also shaping
the male vocal performances at the center of her study. (On vocality and race, see also
Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.)
Like other ethnomusicologists doing critical race work, Solis and Jones center power
in its many dimensions, ranging from colonialism to patriarchy. I draw attention to
their research because it addresses the relationship between music and race through
frameworks—­g lobalization, post-coloniality, intersectionality, and queer studies—that
place ethnomusicologists in an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue that enriches our field.
At the same time, this work contributes more broadly to the theorization of the social con-
struction of race by emphasizing power, musical practice, and everyday life. Whether based
on long-term ethnographic research in a single community, multi-sited fieldwork, or ex-
tensive archival research, the contemporary ethnomusicology of race follows our discipline’s
assumption that music is both a social practice—in the words of the Society for Ethnomu-
sicology’s own definition of the field, “a human activity that is interrelated with its social
and cultural context” (n.d.)—and a cultural product that must be studied holistically. The
scholarship in this area offers fine-grained accounts of the practices through which people
make musical and racial meanings. This is important work. Race, a socially constructed and
scientifically debunked category, continues to have a pervasive impact on the experiences of
individuals and on our understandings of the music they make. This persistent reality makes
the critical study of race fertile ground for ethnomusicologists.
 Constructing Race  111
Notes
1 See Baker (1998) for a discussion of Boas’s efforts to use the culture concept to combat the scientific
racism that dominated the United States in the period before World War I.
2 In this essay, I focus on race rather than ethnicity, a term that has been used to talk about forms
of difference that people imagine to be cultural, rather than biological. Racialized groups have
sometimes constructed positive ethnic identities out of racial categorization (e.g. “Black Is Beauti-
ful”) and have also appropriated the term race for positive use. For example, in the early twentieth
century, a “race man” or “race woman” was an African American who did social or political work
on behalf of his or her group. Similarly, in the 1970s, Chicano Movement activists used the term
La Raza (the race) as an affirming group label. A substantial body of literature has been written about
both ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and race, but examining these topics is beyond
the scope of this chapter.
3 For critiques of this type of race-centered identification and organizing, see Appiah (1992), who ar-
gues that Du Bois accepts as real “illusions of race,” and Fields (1982), who argues that class (a material
circumstance) and not race (an ideological notion) is the appropriate lens for understanding inequality
and power.
4 For examples of this work, see Gossett (1997), Jacobson (1999), Omi and Winant (1986), and Smedley
(2012).
5 For example, see Wagley (1975) for a discussion of racial categorization in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
6 Many of the scholars who developed this approach were associated with the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, and their work is often referred to
as the Birmingham School. For examples of black British cultural studies work by Hall, Gilroy, and
Carby, see Baker, Diawara, and Lindeborg (1996).
7 The politics of representation was also an important theme in the politicized anthropology of the
1980s (see Berger and Stone, Introduction, this volume). The idea that cultural practices contribute
to the constitution of social orders is also a major theme in practice theory (see Text Box 2.1).
8 See Guy-Sheftall (1995) for a collection of formative writings in black feminism.
9 Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Marti Matsuda, Kendall Thomas, and Patricia Williams are among
the leading figures in this field. See Crenshaw et al. (1995) for representative writings.
10 See Delgado and Stefancic (1997) for a collection of key works in whiteness studies.
11 For another race-conscious perspective on historical musicology, see Ramsey (2001) and (2004).
12 Among the twenty essays collected in the volume are contributions by ethnomusicologists including
Philip Bohlman, Jocelyne Guilbault, Peter Manuel, Thomas Turino, Christopher Waterman, and
Deborah Wong.
13 For a further discussion of Monson, see Beaster-Jones (this volume).

Works Cited
American Anthropological Association. 1998. “AAA Statement on Race.” http://www.americananthro.
org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. “Illusions of Race.” In In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Houston A., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds. 1996. Black British Cultural Studies: A
Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Burke, Patrick. 2008. Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Combahee River Collective. 1983. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 210–18. New York: Kitchen
Table; Women of Color Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Cri-
tique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago
Legal Forum 1989, Article 8: 139–67.
112  Maureen Mahon
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Pellen, Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The
Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press.
Delgado, Richard, and Jeab Stefancic, eds. 1997. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. ­Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Diamond, Beverley. 2012. “Recent Studies of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Music in Canada.” In
Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada, edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond, 10–26.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited and with an introduction by David W. Blight
and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books.
Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Fields, Barbara. 1982. “Ideology and Race in American History.” In Region, Race, and Reconstruction:
Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, 143–77.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Gilroy, Paul. (1987) 1991. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:” The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
———. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio. (1971) 1997. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated
by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, ed. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New
York: The New Press.
Hall, Stuart. (1989) 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by
David Moreley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–49. London: Routledge.
———. 1992. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” In Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema,
edited by Mbye B. Cham, 220–36. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Harris, Cheryl I. 1995. “Whiteness as Property.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the
Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 276–91.
New York: The New Press.
Hayes, Eileen M. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1999. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jones, Alisha Lola. 2017. “Are All The Choir Directors Gay? Black Men’s Sexuality and Identity in Gospel
Performance.” In Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation, edited by Portia
K. Maultsby and Mellonee V. Burnim, 216–36. New York: Routledge.
Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s.
New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Radano, Ronald, and Philip V. Bohlman. 2000. “Introduction: Music and Race, Their Past, Their Pres-
ence.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 1–53.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr. 2001. “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin
Trade.” Musical Quarterly 85 (1): 1–52.
———. 2004. “The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music
­Studies.” American Music 22 (2): 284–95.
 Constructing Race  113
Sakakeeny, Matt. 2013, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Smedley, Audrey. 1998. “‘Race’ and the Construction of Human Identity.” American Anthropologist
100 (3): 690–702.
———. 2012. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
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page/AboutEthnomusicol. Accessed March 23, 2019.
Solis, Gabriel. 2015. “The Black Pacific: Music and Racialization in Papua New Guinea and Australia.”
Critical Sociology 41 (2): 297–312.
Wagley, Charles. 1975. “On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas.” In The Nacirema: Readings on
American Culture, edited by Michael A. Rynkiewich and James P. Spradley, 173–84. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge.
5 Theories of the Post-colonial
and Globalization
Ethnomusicologists Grapple with Power,
History, Media, and Mobility
Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton

Introduction
Perhaps one day it will strain credulity that theories of imperial domination and cross-cultural
exchange were once marginal to ethnomusicology. Yet it took the much-ballyhooed crisis of
representation in the 1980s and the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s 1990 essay “Disjuncture
and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” to shift the priorities of a once comfortably
colonial field. Originally a positivist discipline concerned with making formal comparisons
across cultures, then later focused on the painstaking ethnographic documentation of musical
life in specific locales, ethnomusicology was ill-prepared for the assault on its epistemological
and ethical foundations represented by the waves of highly politicized theoretical work in the
1980s and 1990s. In fact, many ethnomusicologists viewed this development with more than
a little trepidation. This chapter discusses post-colonial theory and the literature on globali-
zation, two important and related bodies of thought with which ethnomusicologists in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were compelled to engage. Their responses
took several forms, including an interest in colonial history and capitalism, the analysis of the
global circulation of technologically mediated popular musics, and attention to the musics of
diasporic communities. Post-colonial theory and the scholarship on globalization helped eth-
nomusicologists analyze these new topics and made their research more relevant to contempo-
rary life. Our aim for this chapter, then, is threefold: first, to sketch the full historical context
for post-colonial thought and debates about globalization; second, to summarize key works
and concepts in these areas; and third, to survey recent ethnomusicological scholarship and
suggest ways in which scholars in our field have contributed to the larger, transdisciplinary
conversation on cultural processes in the post-colonial, globalized world. In doing so, we will
show how ethnomusicologists have employed post-colonial and globalization discourses to
confront the injustices of a sordid history (and the present-day miseries those injustices create)
in ways that are intellectually productive and ethically responsible.1

Marx, Power, and the Post-colonial World

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Solomon has observed that,

Despite the near-ubiquity of the experience of colonialism, especially in the kinds of

places where they until recently were most likely to carry out research, ethnomusi-
cologists have barely begun to grapple with the issues that the history and legacy of
colonialism raise.
(2012: 216)

The challenge posed by theories of the post-colonial condition and globalization was first
and foremost a reckoning with the reality of power differentials in situations ranging from
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  115
the fieldwork encounter to the world geopolitical order. In the 1980s and 1990s, much of
the theoretical work in these areas led to a reconsideration of relations between the “center”
(a term that is usually used to refer to former colonial powers and, occasionally, major
cities in the developing world) and “peripheries” (former colonies and rural areas)—not,
as is sometimes claimed, the dissolution of distinctions between them. Theories of post-­
coloniality and globalization can be understood, at least in part, as responses to Karl Marx,
in that both schools of thought extend and challenge Marx’s critique of class domination.
Within ethnomusicology, early pioneers like Charles Keil ([1966] 1991) and Peter Manuel
(1988) had begun to bring Marxist-influenced perspectives to the discipline. Informed by
theories of post-colonialism, globalization, and other critical approaches, many other eth-
nomusicologists in the mid-1990s saw a new relevance in Marx’s ideas (see Wong 2014).
(On Marxism in ethnomusicology, see Manuel [this volume].)2
Approaches derived from post-colonialism and globalization theory resemble Marxist ori-
entations in that they seek to understand systems of unequal exchange. Marx famously exposed
the inherently exploitative dynamic at the heart of capitalism: the bourgeoisie underpays the
proletariat for the labor that produces commodities, and the resulting surplus value becomes
the capitalists’ profit ([1867] 1915). Thus, capitalism is premised upon an unequal exchange of
money for alienated labor between those who own the means of production (e.g. factories) and
their employees. Post-colonial theory focuses upon unequal exchanges between colonizer and
colonized, stressing that the psychosexual, cultural, and political-economic dynamics of that
relationship do not disappear when colonies become independent countries. The scholarship on
the globalization of culture centers on the unequal exchange between the global and the local,
with some writers choosing to emphasize the “top down,” coercive nature of that encounter
(Schiller 2009) and others pointing out that, despite power differentials, exchange is never
entirely in one direction (Pieterse 1994). Theories of post-colonialism and globalization—and
their concomitant schemes of unequal exchange—have been used in various ways by ethno-
musicologists.3 For example, Timothy D. Taylor’s 1997 study of world music emphasizes the
domination of non-Western musicians by the Euro-American recording industry, while Daniel
Reed (2016), in a study of Ivorian dancers in the diaspora, stresses how individual agents use
discourses of world music authenticity to their own advantage. Reviewing a wide range of di-
asporic Ivorian practices, Reed concludes that “[a]ll of these are examples of crafty and worldly
individuals exhibiting cosmopolitan sensibilities as they transform experience into labor and
form into commodity for a North American market hungry for diversity” (133–34).
Music has always been a peculiar exchange object, just as performance has always been
a peculiar form of labor. Music can be as ephemeral as sound waves, but it can also be as
material as a written score or recorded artifact (Wallach 2003). And with the ease of cir-
culation that the Internet allows, the materiality of a digital file—once solidly manifest in
the CD—is now negligible. In this context, music is simultaneously text and thing, subject
to both the limiting logic of material scarcity and the endless flow of immaterial signs.
This dual nature has created difficulties in the ethnomusicological application of theories
of post-coloniality and globalization, particularly in an age of rampant digital connec-
tivity. For example, exploring the complex dynamics of materiality and immateriality in
­music, David Novak has examined the unexpected revival of the analog audiocassette in the
­Japanese noise music scene of the early twenty-first century:

Cassette tapes relocalize Noise by distinguishing interpersonal exchanges of physical media

from the ubiquity of online access. The renewed emphasis on social copresence in inde-
pendent music has strongly impacted the orientation of cassette exchange networks, which
have shifted away from transnational connections to stress the reinvention of local scenes.
(2013: 199)
116  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
Despite their nostalgic attempt to relocalize and rematerialize this music, artists and fans
of noise continue to share their music online, and Novak points out that doing so frees the
music from its confinement to the “edges of circulation,” which had been intended to keep
the music “underground.” The tension between practices that rely on music’s materiality
(including face-to-face relationships between musicians and fans) and those that make mu-
sic immaterial (and therefore facilitate its wider circulation) characterizes musical life in
what the cultural critic Walter Benjamin famously called the “age of mechanical reproduc-
tion” ([1935] 2006).

Colonialism
It is impossible to understand post-colonial theory without a working knowledge of co-
lonial history. Many scholars, particularly those from post-colonial countries, view the
European idea of modernity and the thought of Enlightenment philosophers such as René
Descartes and David Hume as complicit in the colonial project.4 Certainly, the so-called
“Age of Exploration” that preceded colonialism grew out of European ideas of science and
reason, and made European colonialism possible on a global scale. This is not to say that no
culture had ever colonized another before the development of European empires, which
began in the 1500s. The Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Moghul, Khanate/Mongol, and
Incan empires all colonized and dominated other ethnic and cultural groups. But the term
“colonial” is rarely applied to the peoples controlled by such historic empires: generally, it
refers to the experience of “the rest” being colonized by “the West” (which usually means
Europe and, eventually, came to include the US).5
Modern European colonialism stretched across the entire globe, but its defining features
included not just its geographical scope, but its cultural and social aims. Colonial powers
were interested not merely with political and economic control, but also with religious
and ideological domination. Their desire to bring “backward” people into modernity was
perhaps best encapsulated by Rudyard Kipling’s infamous 1899 poem “The White Man’s
Burden.” Such forms of colonization were distinct from the imperialism practiced by pre-
vious empires. Since Europeans represented their colonial project as a redemptive force that
brought its subjects from the darkness of primitivism into the light of civilization (the terms
dark and light, of course, had racial implications), it was rarely enough for the colonized
to offer political and economic allegiance to the colonizer. Following then-current ideas
in cultural evolutionism, which was the primary approach in anthropology at the end of
the nineteenth century (e.g. Tylor 1871), the colonizers sought to “improve” the people
that they colonized.6 In pursuit of this project, they brought biomedicine, European elite
culture, the new idea of nation and national identity, Christianity, Western gender roles,
the scientific worldview, and other ideas and practices to the colonies, seeking not just to
change the colonized people’s political and economic situations but their very culture. As
a result, European (and later, European and American) ideas about capital, science, class
and status, art, and language were forced on colonized peoples, leading, for example, to
the elevated status of British English in countries like Singapore, India, and Kenya, which
continues to this day.
Portugal and Spain were the first of the modern European empires, and in the fifteenth
century, they ushered in what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) famously called the “Modern
World-system,” a network of planet-wide economic relationships that was the forerunner of
today’s global economy. To this day, musics influenced by Portugal and Spain can be found
throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas; their impact was strongest on the coasts because
European countries were seafaring. After the 1588 destruction of the Spanish Armada,
England became the preeminent European naval power and went on to build an overseas
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  117
empire that covered almost a quarter of the earth, extending their dominion over millions
of subordinated colonial subjects. Ever eager to challenge England, France established colo-
nies in the Americas, the West Indies, Asia, and Africa, as did the Dutch in the East Indies
and the Western Hemisphere. In the late 1800s, other European powers, such as Germany
and Belgium, began to found colonies, and in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American
War, the United States established its own overseas empire, which included Puerto Rico
and the Philippines. In the early 1900s, Italy colonized Libya and then the horn of Africa.
Throughout this period, colonies changed hands as the Europeans and Americans fought
among themselves: following World War I, France seized Cameroon from the Germans,
and in 1936, Italy’s Mussolini “liberated” Somalia from the British.
Two main kinds of expansion characterized the European colonial project: extractive
colonialism and settler colonialism. The majority of European and US-held colonies were
of the extractive type; here, the colonizers appropriated material resources—often cash
crops, minerals, or lumber—from the territories under their control. Most painfully, slaves
were extracted as human cargo from the lands seized by the colonizers. In contrast, settler
colonialism (e.g. in territories that were to become the United States, Canada, Argentina,
South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, and New Zealand) brought migrant populations from
the colonizing country and often other places as well. These settler populations generally
took the best land for themselves, displacing and exterminating indigenous peoples. Both
kinds of colonialism could involve large transfers of captive populations, either as slaves or
indentured labor, in order to meet the demand for workers in extractive industries, such as
rubber, sugar cane, or coffee plantations. Some of the most influential musics of the twen-
tieth century were produced by descendants of African slaves brought to North America
to work on cotton plantations (Gilroy 1995). African slaves were not the only victims of
the mass displacements of populations under colonialism. For example, Manuel (2000) has
documented a lesser-known musical tradition that stems from descendants of indentured
Indian plantation laborers in the Caribbean (see also Manuel with Largey 2016).7

Post-colonialism and Decolonization

The noun “post-coloniality” is primarily used to refer either to the state of having thrown
off the colonizer’s direct political control or to the effects of such a condition on a group’s
economy, psychology, culture, and social life. The adjective “post-colonial” is usually ap-
plied to cultures that have been subjects of direct colonial control, but it can sometimes
be used to describe the situation of the colonizers themselves after the end of empire or to
any culture from the period after World War II, which is when decolonization began to
accelerate. It may seem strange to talk about a country that was never colonized as having
a “post-colonial” period; however, the term is often used in this way because the effects
of colonialism were never limited to those countries that were directly colonized. For
example, Thailand was never colonized by a European power, but its history and national
development were strongly influenced by France, Britain, and their surrounding Southeast
Asian colonies (Tejasen and Luyt 2014).
Like colonialism, the bureaucratic nation-state arose during the modern period of
­European history (see Anderson 1983; Gellner 2009; and particularly Hobsbawm 2012).
This modern form of social organization was radically dissimilar from the feudal kingdoms
and multi-ethnic empires that preceded it, and created conflicts on ever larger geographic
scales, eventually leading to the two world wars. These wars were rightly called world wars,
as a significant amount of military conflict took place outside of Europe. During both world
wars but particularly in World War II, European colonizers forced the people in their col-
onies to fight in these conflicts, even though most colonial subjects had never seen Europe.
118  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
Acute food shortages and starvation were common in the colonies and soon-to-be-former
colonies. Faced with massive population losses (including a flu pandemic in 1919 that killed
more people than World War I), destruction of property and infrastructure, economic
decline, and political instability, most European colonial countries in the periods after the
wars refocused their money and political will on their homelands.8
It was in this context that, between 1918 (when World War I ended) and 1965 (twenty
years after the end of World War II), many colonized peoples successfully rebelled against
the colonizers and formed nations of their own. This wave of decolonization was undoubt-
edly a positive development, as colonization had been brutal in myriad ways and the bru-
talizers were overthrown; however, post-coloniality was, and is, fraught with difficulties.
Rejecting the cultures and infrastructure the colonizers had forced upon them, people in
formerly colonized countries were left with the enormous task of building a new society
from the remnants of their own, pre-colonial cultures and civilizations. Many had inter-
nalized Euro-American ideas of modernity and progress, which made it undesirable for
them to return to their pre-colonial states. Nor was such a return possible, even if it was
desired, because pre-colonial life had in many cases been partially or largely obliterated,
and was forgotten or inaccurately remembered. Colonizers plundered the colonial lands’
natural resources, forcibly relocated colonized peoples, and arbitrarily determined national
borders, making it difficult for these new nations, which were often impoverished, to create
stable political and economic systems. Furthermore, Western values and aesthetics had been
internalized by many educated elites, including an attitude of cultural exceptionalism that
held their ethnic group as superior to others in their new countries.
Even after colonial rule ended, many Europeans remained in these new nations, where
they were among the wealthiest and most privileged people. Local elites who cooperated
with colonial authorities, and therefore had a vested interest in maintaining at least some of
the colonizers’ institutions, often remained in positions of authority. Many of them strug-
gled to maintain their privileged positions, to the detriment of their nation and fellow citi-
zens, and the legacy of colonialism continued in a wide variety of ways. Zimbabwe is a case
in point. The country gained independence from the British Empire in 1980, comparatively
late in the history of decolonization. Robert Mugabe, the country’s first prime minister
and later its president, came to power promising to redistribute British farmland to native
Zimbabweans. Under his regime, many British farms were dismantled and apportioned to
the indigenous population. But because the British had hoarded the technology and much
of the knowledge about modern farming, the native peoples had to learn to farm through
trial and error, resulting in rampant starvation and poverty (which Mugabe and his friends
and family were largely able to avoid).9
In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of the Cold War and the eventual dis-
solution of the Soviet Union, thus leaving the United States as the world’s sole superpower.
This event was widely interpreted by elites and commercial media in North America, as
well as other regions of the world, as a victory of capitalism over communism. With even
mainland China opening its markets to foreign direct investments (while still claiming to
be a communist state), elite and media discourses in Europe and the United States promoted
as common sense the view that post-colonial nations had no economic alternative to global
capitalism (see, for example, Fukuyama 1992). This rhetoric of capitalist triumphalism has
been nearly constant in the mainstream media of the last three decades, with only brief
interruptions during periods of acute economic crisis, such as the ones that began in 1997
and 2008, throwing world markets into disarray and creating tremendous misery. However,
the ascendance of the global capitalist economy has not been uncontested in the political
sphere. Left-wing leaders and political parties have achieved power and influence in parts
of Latin America (e.g. Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela) and
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  119
Europe (Podemos, the Spanish political party). Movements such as Occupy Wall Street and
the Green Party have been important in the US over the last decade or so, while massive
street protests have broken out with increased frequency in Brazil, Greece, France, and
other places. The same period has seen the rise of powerful reactionary movements, which
constitute nationalist or fundamentalist backlashes to global integration; such movements
tend to devolve into xenophobia, racism, and the scapegoating of immigrants, rather than
constitute direct critiques of global capitalism. In Hungary, Poland, and the United States,
this has resulted in dramatic political realignments.
Through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and global trade regimes,
Europe and the US have maintained their worldwide power and influence (see Harvey
2007). Based in economic rather than directly political and military means, this form of
post-colonial domination isn’t identical to that of colonialism, and the contemporary sys-
tem is not totalizing. However, the key point is that political decolonization did not end co-
lonialism and that similar relations of power are maintained today by new methods. These
forms of economic domination are at play not only in agriculture and heavy industry, but
also in the culture industries. Most multi-national corporations that dominate media and
entertainment are based in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Such corporations now
exert enormous control over the music of the world (Bernstein et al. 2007), dominating
a field where smaller national record labels once wielded far more influence (Wallis and
Malm 1984).10

Major Concepts in Post-colonial Thought

Post-colonial theory predates the literature on globalization by almost a decade, but eth-
nomusicologists started to respond to both theories at roughly the same time (and often
without distinguishing between them).11 Many post-colonial theorists, including Gayatri
Spivak and Homi Bhabha, write in an extremely difficult style. Some do so intentionally,
arguing that ordinary English is too compromised by its status as a tool of the colonizer
to be employed in a straightforward manner. For them, only the radical defamiliariza-
tion of language can succeed as a strategy for conveying counterhegemonic, anticolonial
ideas. In this view, the very syntactic structure of the linguistic utterance betrays a gram-
mar of conquest, a cultural logic of causality that is occidentalist (Western-centric) and
­imperialist—what Homi Bhabha (1992) terms the “sententious.” All of these scholars theo-
rize the post-­colonial condition as one of anxious confinement, a state of confounding half-
life in which the self is stymied and silenced, its very cohesion placed in perpetual doubt.
The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) could be considered as either the first post-­
colonial thinker or a crucial ancestor to the movement. In either case, it is hard to im-
agine the intellectual landscape of post-colonial studies without his influence.12 Born into
a ­m iddle-class black family on the island of Martinique in the French Caribbean, Fanon
received academic training in Lyon, France, where he attended lectures by the philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.13 He supported the Algerian War against the French (1954–1962)
and, as a psychiatrist, tried to address the psychic effects of the war, particularly the use of
torture, on both black Algerian soldiers and their white French torturers. In Black Skin,
White Masks (1952), which was based on his dissertation and rooted in psychoanalytic in-
terpretation, and A Dying Colonialism (1967), which discusses the Algerian War against the
French, he showed how colonialism created social, political, and psychological harm. In
The Wretched of the Earth ([1963] 2004), he argued that colonialism is inherently unjust and
that, because violence was the only language the colonizers understood, violent rebellion
was the only way to move beyond colonialism. However, he also saw that such actions
often perpetuated the injustices of colonialism, leaving the reader, and many subsequent
120  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
revolutionaries, with an acute understanding of colonialism’s wrongs but little sense of how
to move beyond colonial and post-colonial tragedy in a successful manner.
The major post-colonial thinkers have not been from European metropolitan back-
grounds, though many received academic training in European metropoles and come from
upper-class families. This seems to be one of the primary differences between post-­colonial
studies and globalization studies: post-colonial scholars tend to be from post-colonial
countries or, occasionally, as in the case of Paul Gilroy (1987, 1995, 2007), from diasporic
communities within the colonial power itself.14 In contrast, globalization scholars tend
to be from Europe or North America. Another important difference is that post-colonial
thinkers usually hail from the discipline of literary studies, while globalization scholars are
usually from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, political science, economics,
and sociology. The ideas of modernity and progress are so celebrated in the European and
American academies that it can be difficult for thinkers from colonizer backgrounds to truly
question the colonial experience. People who grow up in colonial, post-colonial, or mar-
ginalized racial contexts, however, have no such luxury. The Palestinian scholar Edward
Said (1935–2003) was trained in literature at Princeton and Harvard, and became a profes-
sor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His two
major works, Orientalism (1978) and the collection of essays Culture and Imperialism (1993),
mark the beginnings of post-colonial critique.
When considering Orientalism, it is important to realize that Americans and Europeans
mean different things when they use the term “Oriental.” For most Americans, “Oriental”
refers to East Asian cultures, primarily China, Japan, and Korea. In Europe, “the Orient”
refers to what North Americans call “the Middle East” or, to use a current academic phrase,
the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Even today, Oriental Studies programs
in Europe take the MENA countries as their focus. Since Said was initially educated in
England, his book’s title refers to the MENA countries and not East Asia, although some of
the stereotypes he discusses apply to both regions.
In Orientalism, Said argues that European scholarly work about the MENA countries
is based in romantic and imperial stereotypes of the Orient as exotic and mysterious, and
that such writings tell us more about the West’s view of itself than about any cultural,
political, ideological, or religious realities in the MENA countries themselves. Analyzing
hundreds of years of intellectual history, Orientalism uses post-structuralist theory to discuss
the influence of literary images of the Middle East on both colonizers and colonized. (On
post-structuralism, see Sugarman [this volume].) That these phantasmagoric stereotypes
also inform Americans’ views of the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam is highly significant
given the US’s post-World War II political and military activity in the MENA region. As a
public intellectual, Said came into conflict with various (mainly American) scholars, most
famously the historian Bernard Lewis (see Said 1981, 1997; Said and Grabar 1982; Lewis
1982, 1993). Said argued that the views that many American scholars hold of the MENA
countries, Arabs, and Islam were orientalist, and therefore their diagnoses of perceived Mid-
dle Eastern social pathologies underestimated the role of Western neo-colonial aggression.
According to Said, European scholars understood Europe and the Middle East in terms
of binary oppositions that characterize Europeans as masculine, advanced or modern, scien-
tific or rational, secular, and strong; in contrast, they characterized people from the Orient
as feminine, backwards or traditional, irrational, religious, and weak. Said argues that, as a
result of Euro-American economic, military, and political power, MENA peoples internal-
ized this view, though often without being consciously aware that they had done so. This
is an important idea in post-colonial studies: colonized people, even people in countries
that had been but are no longer colonized, have often internalized the colonizer’s racism,
colonial perspectives, and Euro-American triumphalism. While Said himself appears not to
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  121
have had much interest in ethnomusicology (his writings on music [e.g. 1991] are entirely
concerned with the Western art tradition), his ideas have been extremely influential on our
discipline.
The most significant feminist thinker in post-colonial studies is the Indian scholar Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942). She received her PhD in comparative literature from Cornell
University, where she studied with literary critic and theorist Paul de Man. Later, she met
philosopher Jacques Derrida while she was in the process of writing the introduction to
her translation of his book Of Grammatology ([1967] 1976), and French post-structuralism
has been important to her thought.15 Spivak’s best known short work is the essay “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), which looks at British colonial and post-colonial responses
to suttee, the Hindu funerary practice in which a widow would immolate herself on the
funeral pyre of her late husband. Spivak’s answer to the essay’s titular question seems to
be “no,” particularly when one reads the article’s concluding personal anecdote. In the
essay, she writes movingly about a young woman (a relative) who hanged herself in 1926.
Spivak explains that the young woman had been involved in the struggle against British
colonialism and was given an assassination assignment by her superiors in the movement.
She decided she couldn’t bring herself to carry out the assassination and chose to kill her-
self instead. She knew that, as a woman, her suicide would not be interpreted as a political
statement against the British, but as a response to some aspect of her relationships to the
men in her life (father, brothers, and potential or actual lovers). The young woman waited
until she was menstruating to hang herself because doing so would make clear that her su-
icide was not the result of an unwanted pregnancy, and Spivak concludes the narrative by
describing her family members’ discussion of the young woman’s death. Contrary to her
wishes, they speculated that her suicide must have been motivated by unrequited love or a
fear of dishonoring her father. Though she had “spoken” quite eloquently by waiting to kill
herself until she was menstruating, even her family members had assumed that her speech
had not been political. Spivak reminds us that the young woman came from a privileged,
upper-caste background and was not herself subaltern, but that even her speech was forgot-
ten and willfully reinterpreted in order to minimize her agency. The implication is that the
truly subaltern cannot speak, and if they were able to do so, society would neither listen nor
understand.
Among Spivak’s most important concepts is “strategic essentialism” (1996). To say that a
given representation of a social group is “essentialist” is to say that that representation depicts
the group as having fixed characteristics and sharp boundaries, ones that exist independently
of history and culture. The term is almost always used in a pejorative sense, and critiques
of essentialism are central to post-structuralism. In a complex, dialectical argument, Spivak
criticizes essentialist, affirmative construction of identity categories such as “woman” or
“third world,” but she argues that such categories can be provisionally mobilized in polit-
ical struggle as rallying points for coalitions fighting for social justice.16 Thus, in Spivak’s
thinking, French, post-structuralist anti-essentialism ultimately shares space with an activist
tradition of struggle bequeathed by Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers. Related ideas
are developed in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present
(1999), the title of which is a reference to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1781 Critique of
Pure Reason. Here, Spivak argues that European thinkers like Kant and H ­ egel viewed non-­
Europeans (when they viewed them at all, which was seldom) as less than human, illustrat-
ing the utter failure of Western humanism that her interventions had long sought to expose.
Her radical skepticism helped pave the way for a reconsideration of E ­ urocentric narratives
of unilinear progress toward a singular modernity (e.g. Goankar 1999).
In spite of her centrality to post-colonial studies, Spivak is uncomfortable with being
pigeonholed as a post-colonial intellectual. In the Critique, she discusses her concerns with
122  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
essentialist readings of post-colonial theory and refuses to completely accept the label
“post-colonial” to describe her work, arguing instead that her ideas are too subtle and
complex to be so conveniently labeled. (Indeed, she would probably feel that any brief
summary of her ideas is woefully inadequate, including this one.) Certainly all the thinkers
discussed in this section are complex and draw on numerous intellectual sources, not just
post-structuralists like Derrida but also scholars associated with psychoanalysis, Marxism,
phenomenology, and critical studies of nation, gender, and race.
Like Said, who was one of his most important influences, the Indian scholar Homi Bhabha
(b. 1949) also received his credentials in the West—in this case, from Oxford, where he studied
literature. Bhabha’s scholarship shows how the colonized can challenge the colonizer, both di-
rectly and indirectly, and emphasizes that the colonial encounter entails a two-way exchange,
though the two never meet on equal ground. He doesn’t argue that such encounters are easy,
nor that it is easy for outsiders to detect the challenges that colonized peoples present to their
colonizers. But in allowing for the possibility of challenge and exchange, Bhabha acknowledges
that the colonized have and can express agency, desires, perspectives, and expectations.
A central idea in Bhabha’s work is the notion of the “Third Space,” an expression that is
usually capitalized (Bhabha [1988] 2006). Understood as a zone of linguistic encounter, the
term refers to a domain opened up by the impossibility of perfect communication between
two or more interlocutors. The Third Space is a zone of possibilities; interlocutors can avail
themselves of this space in many ways, turning conversation to their advantage by capitaliz-
ing on others’ incomplete understanding of their words. The dynamics of the Third Space
are particularly useful for disenfranchised peoples, who can use devices like code-switching
and double-voiced utterances to make political criticisms without arousing the ire of those
in power ([1988] 2006). We are reminded here of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia
(1982), the idea that any given text offers a multiplicity of differently inflected voices (see
Meizel and Daughtry, this volume). Closely related to the notion of the Third Space is
Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity ([1994] 2004). Before Bhabha, the term hybridity was
often used in a casual, politically neutral sense to refer to the combination of tropes or ideas
from two or more cultures in a single text or tradition. For Bhabha and the scholars allied
with him, this notion operates quite differently. As cultural studies scholar Ien Ang explains,

For postcolonial cultural theorists [including Bhabha] … hybridity has an explicitly

political purchase. They see the hybrid as a critical force that undermines or subverts,
from inside out, dominant formations through the interstitial insinuation of the ‘differ-
ent,’ the ‘other,’ or the marginalized into the very fabric of the dominant.
(2001: 198)

Hybridity is therefore not merely a mixture of cultures (though it is that), but it also has
“interrogative effects” (Ang 2001: 198). that upset the hierarchical relations between colo-
nizer and colonized. Relating his politicized notion of hybridity to his formulation of the
Third Space, Bhabha writes that,

It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves
and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space,’ we may elude the pol-
itics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves.
([1988] 2006: 157)

Bhabha’s ideas have been highly influential, particularly his notion of hybridity as a site of
agency for the colonized subject, which is a prevalent theme in post-colonial studies, glo-
balization scholarship, and ethnomusicology.
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  123
The post-colonial condition is extraordinarily complex. Scholars must therefore be care-
ful neither to minimize the horrors of colonialism nor to romanticize the colonized by ig-
noring the complicity of local elites in colonialism or neglecting the tangled internal power
relations among the diverse groups in areas that were colonized. Further, it is important to
emphasize that the real-world histories of colonization and post-colonialism vary signifi-
cantly from region to region and country to country. For example, most of Central and
South America was colonized by the Spanish or Portuguese. Many of the wars in this re-
gion against the European colonial powers were fought in the early or mid-1800s, and, as a
result, the colonies here broke away from their colonizers much earlier than those in Africa
and Asia. Although Central and South American countries are clearly post-colonial in that
they were once colonized and are now mostly not, scholars today less frequently include the
Americas in discussions of post-coloniality. Since the 1960s, critically engaged scholarship
has sought to acknowledge the diversity of experiences had by women, non-­cisgender peo-
ple, the disabled, the poor, the rural, racial or religious minorities, and members of other
marginalized groups. Hence, assuming that there is one post-colonial experience is as prob-
lematic as assuming that there is one experience of being gendered female, one experience
of disability, or one experience of racialization.
Those who research post-colonial peoples must avoid the essentialist trap of homogenizing
the experiences of the colonized and ignoring the unique ways in which European domina-
tion has been challenged and resisted in different regions and historical periods. Moreover,
the experience of colonization for indigenous minorities in post-colonial n ­ ation-states has
often been quite distinct from the experiences of the rest of the population. This has led
to an emerging field of indigenous studies (see, for example, Andersen and O’Brien 2017),
which has focused on the cultures and experiences of “Fourth World” peoples, a category
that also includes indigenous minorities in rich countries like the US, Canada, Australia,
Finland, Sweden, and Japan. Emphasizing the distinctive ways in which indigenous peoples
address European notions of progress, Beverley Diamond and her colleagues point out that
“Indigenous modernities often differ from the ‘developmentalist’ narratives of ‘the West’
and emphasize the fragmentation, deterritorialization, and struggles for reclamation that
are parts of indigenous experience in most parts of the world” (2012: 2). If the literature on
post-colonialism and indigeneity has developed new perspectives on politics and culture
and raised important questions, the work on globalization has advanced a related set of
challenges.

Globalization and Colonialism

As the significance of geographical distance and boundaries of all sorts continues to wane,
scholars struggle to make sense of an increasingly interconnected globe with ubiquitous
international brands, a media-saturated environment of relentless sensory bombardment,
new cultural fusions, and pervasive social disruption. In this daunting context, music plays
a central role. New media platforms invariably have musical applications, which often be-
come their most important features. Ethnomusicologists have taken a variety of positions
on how their discipline fits into the new global order and, as a result, have reconsidered the
relationship between music and its social base, the nature of global media industries, and the
role of media in everyday life (Stokes 2004).
Arjun Appadurai (1990) has famously asserted that contemporary cultural anthropolo-
gists need to understand translocal sociocultural forces, such as the mass media and global
immigration, and address them in their research. Advancements in communications and
transportation technologies, he argues, have made the rapid dissemination of culture a
characteristic feature of the contemporary world. Speaking directly to this issue, his widely
124  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
cited article “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990) identifies
five “-scapes” that are relatively autonomous from one another: “(a) ethnoscapes; (b) media­
scapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes” (6–7). These -scapes map,
respectively, the global distribution of ethnic populations, media texts, technologies, eco-
nomic investments, and ideologies. More than simply drawing attention to the translocal
dynamics of culture, Appadurai advocates a radical rethinking of the conventional cate-
gories of center and periphery, suggesting that they are multiple, relational, shifting, and
situationally determined. The world he presents is unruly and unmoored, but also one of
unrealized possibilities. In his 1996 book Modernity at Large, Appadurai develops this idea by
arguing that to understand even the most seemingly pragmatic dimensions of globalization,
such as demographics and economics, one must take into account elements of human ex-
perience that had, in the past, been relegated to expressive culture. For example, discussing
(voluntary) immigration in the globalized world, he writes that:

[o]rdinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their
everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and
mediation…. More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility
that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were
born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social,
national, and global life.
(5–6)

The most influential aspects of Appadurai’s work have been the concept of the mediascape
and the idea that, under contemporary social conditions, cultural forms can flow freely
around the globe. The ethnomusicologist René T. A. Lysloff characterizes Appadurai’s
view in this way: “[Globalization] is a movement so complex in its inter-relationships, and
so massive in its membership of individuals and groups, that we can only visualize it as the
topography of constantly shifting conceptual landscapes” (2016: 485). Like many in our
field, Lysloff finds this cartographic view helpful as a starting point for his work, which is
centered on music in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, but he ultimately concludes that it is unsatis-
factory for dealing with the musical practices of situated, individual artists (about which,
more below).
Subsequent theorists in anthropology have attempted to bring some order to ­Appadurai’s
vertiginous depictions. For example, in contrast to Appadurai’s typology of -scapes,
the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1992) proposes an analytic scheme for understanding
­g lobalization that identifies four “frameworks of flow”: everyday “forms of life,” the
state, the market, and social movements. For Hannerz, “forms of life” exist in the realm
of ­face-to-face interactions, while “the state” channels official discourse through insti-
tutions, such as public schools and government-owned media. The market framework
includes everything that transpires in the world of commerce and commodities, and is
dictated by economic forces; social movements refers to grassroots organizations that
transcend local collectivities. These frameworks channel the flow of culture, attest to the
presence of stable patterns within the seeming chaos of globalization, and can be opened
to empirical investigation.
Appadurai’s manifesto of cultural globalization was liberating for scholars who felt con-
strained by ethnography’s emphasis on the local (e.g. Clifford 1997), but it was frustrating
for others, who argued that it underestimated the ways in which economic forces decisively
shape society and culture. For example, emphasizing the continuity between the period of
direct European colonialism and present-day neoliberal capitalism, many Marxist thinkers
have questioned the idea that there is anything really new about globalization. In this vein,
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  125
Timothy Taylor, who represents a thoughtful middle position on this topic, writes that
“the globe is not interconnected for the first time in our era of globalization, but inter-
connected in new ways, though with old ideologies (about authenticity, as well as various
forms of racism and xenophobia) remaining remarkably resilient” (2017: 5). This issue also
plays out in considerations of the recent past. Western scholars often question the utility
of differentiating the so-called “late capitalism” of the 1980s and 1990s from twenty-first
century neoliberal capitalism, since both types of capitalism result from the same macro-
economic forces of financial deregulation, corporate consolidation, and the increased cost
efficiencies that come from automation and the exploitation of new sources of cheap l­abor
(Harvey 2007; for more on the notions of late and neoliberal capitalism, see Manuel, this
volume). While it is arguable that the last four decades have not held major social and
economic changes for the developed world, they have been transformative in developing
countries, radically reshaping the urban landscape in places like Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta,
Shanghai, and Hong Kong (see, for example, Mathews 2011). Megamalls, global fast-food
franchises, and skyscrapers rose up where there were once shantytowns and slums; digital
technologies like smartphones, providers of mere convenience in rich countries, became
game changers for those who would otherwise not have access to telephones, bank ac-
counts, or the Internet; and life opportunities were fundamentally altered for millions of
people, including the very poor.17
While the literature on globalization is divided between, on the one hand, those who
follow Appadurai and celebrate its hybridizing possibilities, democratizing potential, and
encouragement of grassroots creativity, and, on the other, those who regard it as wholly
synonymous with neoliberal capitalism and Euro-American imperialism, these perspectives
are not totally dissimilar. Both interpretations of globalization share a concern with struc-
ture and agency, and both seek to understand the possibilities for social actors to negotiate
unequal power relations. Both approaches view the global-local encounter as an asymmet-
rical exchange. What separates them is their understanding of the nature of that exchange,
as the former places a great deal more value on what the subordinate party gains.18
Whether or not countries have a history of colonization, or indeed were colonizers them-
selves, many people around the world feel like they are on the receiving end of globaliza-
tion, which is often described as the invasion of an American (or occasionally ­European)
style of business and popular culture. It is, however, dangerous to conflate colonialism
and globalization, which are two very different historical processes. Indeed, to equate the
European colonialism that dominated the planet before World War II with contemporary
globalization is to commit academic malpractice. Unlike the political domination of the
period of direct European colonialism, which was imposed through obvious and brutal
means, the contemporary globalization of culture is coercive in more subtle ways. Further,
one must recognize the difference between the global flow of cultural forms themselves and
the coercive economic forces that pave the way for them. Describing such forces, cultural
sociologist John Tomlinson has observed that,

[t]he context of consumer culture is the structural context of urban, industrial capitalist
modernity, and this is not something any individual ‘buys.’ It is not even something
which it is plausible to think of a society fully ‘opting for’ in the sense of taking con-
sidered communal decisions about: short-term economic considerations will generally
force the hand of Third World governments towards programmes of ‘modernisation.’
(1991: 133–34)

In other words, one must distinguish between, on the one hand, the globalization of culture,
and, on the other, the means through which coercive relations of economic dependency are
126  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
maintained. Acknowledging the different historical processes at work and understanding
the unique forms of power that each entails are essential for any nuanced analysis.
In recent years, ethnomusicologists have taken up the challenge of historicizing their
fieldsites and understanding how those sites were shaped by a long series of often coercive
encounters with cultural others. For example, Julia Byl’s remarkable study of music among
the Toba Batak ethnic group of Sumatra reveals a convoluted history of cross-cultural
encounters dating back to ancient times (2014). Her book stands as one of the few eth-
nomusicological monographs of a vernacular (non-court-based) music culture with such
an expansive geo-temporal scope. Likewise, Aurality (2014), Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s
analysis of nineteenth-century Colombian “sound-worlds” (see also Meizel and Daughtry,
this volume), is another exemplary work of historical ethnomusicology in a fraught, col-
onized setting. Amanda Weidman (2006) details the tangled colonial and post-colonial
history of the music that became the South Indian classical tradition, while Max Katz’s 2017
­Lineage of Loss: Counter-narratives of North Indian Music centers on a gharana (musical lineage)
that did not conform to the ideological and ethno-religious priorities of a nationalizing,
post-colonial Indian state, and therefore faded from view, while other gharanas achieved
international prominence. Sumarsam’s pathbreaking publications (1995, 2013, 2014) trace
the colonial and post-colonial history of Javanese gamelan, a subject that had long been
elided by presentist ethnomusicological accounts. His important research supports the view
that the celebrated gamelan traditions of Central Java were not autochthonous, but rather a
product of a long history of exchanges with peripheral regions of Java, which are now con-
sidered by the Central Javanese to be musically unsophisticated and uncouth. Sumarsam’s
work also reveals the pivotal influence of Dutch colonialism and Western scholarship on the
development of gamelan traditions.
Timothy Taylor remains one of the most astute writers on music from a historical ma-
terialist perspective. He has traced the saga of Western musical appropriations from the
early modern period to the media-saturated present era (2007), and, in recent works, in-
vestigated current musical practices under the regime of global neoliberal capitalism (2016,
2017)—what Gilroy has called the onset of “commercial planetarization” (2007: 274). Veit
­Erlmann combines post-colonial and globalization theories in a subtle critique of the ten-
dency within ethnomusicology to regard the “local” as a site of authentic resistance. “Re-
mapping the global village,” he writes,

… does not only mean that we have to persist in our attempts to problematize the
politics of ethnicity, nationalism and Western cultural hegemony. We also need to get
a better understanding of the ways in which counterforces—the politics and culture of
local communities and movements—are derivative of the very discourses they seek to
interrogate.
(1998: 20)

These ideas are developed in Erlmann’s Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination (1999),
where he details the complex history of transatlantic interactions that gave rise to the mu-
sic genres of contemporary South Africa. By contrast, other ethnomusicologists have re-
searched affect-laden, often sorrowful musics of former imperial powers, such as Turkey
(Gill 2017) and Portugal (Gray 2013). In sum, a salutary effect of ethnomusicology’s en-
counter with post-colonial and globalization studies has been that our ethnographies are
now more apt to be haunted by the specter of history. That is to say, they contain the
awareness that all observable musical practice results from concrete, often violent histories
of unequal exchange. The ethnomusicology of post-coloniality and globalization has its
own history, a topic to which we now turn.
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  127
Ethnomusicology, Technology, the Post-colonial Condition,
and Globalization
If the new scholarship on post-colonialism and globalization encouraged ethnomusicolo-
gists to historicize the musics and cultures they study, it also motivated them to consider
the technological and commercial aspects of music production. Their first forays into these
areas were largely condemnatory. Ethnomusicologists had long been suspicious of the mass
media and market forces, and much of their work was inspired by Marx’s ideas about the
capitalist exploitation of labor and the Frankfurt School’s Marxist critique of the culture
industry. The withering denunciation of popular music produced by Frankfurt School
theorist Theodor Adorno, which combined Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism with
unadulterated Eurocentric elitism, was particularly influential here. (On the Frankfurt
School, see Manuel [this volume].)19 Many of the early works in the ethnomusicology
of globalization focused on the “commercial pseudo-genre” (Krüger Bridge 2018: 11) of
“world music.” While this term had been used in college classrooms since the 1960s (Nettl
2010: 34), the 1980s and 1990s saw the music industry adopt this expression as a category
for marketing non-Western musics to audiences in the US and Europe.20 Exploring this
topic, studies by scholars such as Steven Feld (1988) and Timothy Taylor (1997) revealed
how artists and labels from the rich world curate, commodify, and exploit non-­Western
musics and musicians in ways analogous to other practices of post-colonial economic
domination; here, the performer’s labor is enlisted in the capitalist production of globally
circulating sonic commodities. Other studies showed how first-world artists use digital
sampling (Feld 1996, 2000; Guy 2002) and copyright law (Meintjes 1990) to dispossess
musical properties from their indigenous owners, while record labels potentially alienate
non-Western performers from their art through practices such as promotion, studio pro-
duction, and packaging, to render them more attractive to affluent Western consumers
(Whitmore 2016). In this context, Andrew McGraw’s work illustrates how the consumer
preferences of foreign listeners can strike those from the musicians’ country of origin as
quaint, puzzling, or even off-putting (2016).
While early studies were successful in identifying exploitative music industry practices,
this work was not without its difficulties. For example, the initial wave of ethnomusicolog-
ical critics of world music rarely acknowledged their own position as first-world scholars
operating within systems of neo-colonial cultural exchange—a position that today would
likely be seen as untenable. In addition, early ethnomusicological critiques tended to over-
look the subversive and unsettling possibilities that “world music” has had when deployed
by subaltern actors (White 2012). Exploring this dynamic, a recent article by Lysloff shows
the differing ways in which Sapto Raharjo and Venzha Christiawan, two composers from
Jogjakarta, Indonesia, have made use of this category. For them, Lysloff writes,

… world music has become what might be called worlding music. Sapto, on the one
hand, brought contemporary gamelan music to the world while Venzha, on the other,
continues to bring the world of new media arts to Jogja (and Indonesia). Through the
efforts of artists like Sapto and Venzha, Jogjakarta is becoming a major center for con-
temporary international arts...
(2016: 503)

Finally, the analogies between music and the natural resources plundered by colonizers are
problematic. Music is a renewable resource. It cannot be “stolen” without first being made
into a commodity. Nonetheless, despite the difficulties that exist in the older ethnomusi-
cological literature, the painful topic of cultural appropriation by Western music producers
128  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
remains all too salient today, as illustrated by a recent collection of essays on the hipster-­
imperialist label Sublime Frequencies (Veal and Kim 2016).
If the 1990s scholarship on world music was largely critical, more contemporary studies
of popular musics in the global south have revealed how market forces can both unleash
and inhibit grassroots creativity (Krüger Bridge 2018; see also Ramnarine 2003 and Sharp
2014).21 Ethnomusicologists have drawn on the theories of global flows and frameworks of
flow to produce grounded ethnographic studies of circulating musical artifacts, their cre-
ators, distributors, and end users. These studies show how technological advances, which
are generally the result of market forces, can lead to creative innovation, particularly when
artists customize technology to achieve aesthetically relevant ends (Greene and Porcello
2005). Technology can even be used to make music sound more “traditional” (Bilby 1995;
Meintjes 2003; Wallach 2005b).
Globalization theory has helped ethnomusicologists reimagine not only the tools of mu-
sic making, but also its scale. Studies exploring this topic reveal that the ascendance of glob-
ally circulating musical forms does not render local spaces or local cultures irrelevant, and
they also demonstrate the many varieties of exchange relations that exist in the global mu-
sical economy. My (Wallach’s) work has shown how Indonesian artists and producers use
flows of technology, capital, and music to forge new hybrid musical compositions (Wallach
2005b, 2008, 2011). These new hybrids then circulate throughout the nation and help to
define generational identity, in turn, giving rise to newer amalgamations.22 The impact of
global flows could be perceived at the grassroots level, where popular music was performed,
listened to, or played in the background in a variety of cultural spaces, from street corners to
university campuses to public buses. In the mid-1990s, global mass media outlets like MTV
had a dramatic influence on Indonesian mediascapes (Harnish 2005; Luvaas 2013). This
had a range of unforeseen consequences, including the re-politicization of a segment of
Indonesian middle-class youth, who were inspired by American groups like Public E ­ nemy
and Rage Against the Machine (see Wallach 2005a). Two decades later, domestic bands
like Navicula and Seringai perfected their own combinations of global rock influences and
intervened in local and national politics, challenging environmental destruction, political
corruption, and religious extremism (see Moore 2013).
Related processes can be found in Gavin Steingo’s work on the South African popular
music genre kwaito. In Kwaito’s Promise (2016), Steingo visits a Soweto township neighbor-
hood, upscale cafes, downhome barbecue joints, and shebeens (informal drinking establish-
ments)—all nodes in a vast network of circulation within greater Johannesburg that hooks
into global circuits of music production and distribution. Steingo shows how these circuits
allow kwaito to reach DJs and fans all over Africa and the world. In a rich analysis, Steingo
observes the constraints and “affordances” of digital, multi-track technology on kwaito
production and shows how many of kwaito’s creative practices are governed by the rules of
gift exchange and mutual obligation characteristic of township life, rather than by the logic
of calculated capitalist transactions. For example, computer files are freely passed around
township communities, with different musicians adding their own instrumental and vocal
tracks to the work in progress. As in the Indonesian context, globalization perpetuates
rather than erases local practices.

Mobile Musics and the Sounds of Encounter

When musical sounds globalize, they tend to do so in discrete packets, and empirical
r­ esearch has established the importance of genres in musical globalization. Music does
not globalize as pure sound, these studies show, but as sounds bundled with images and
meanings. In this context, genre is perhaps the most important “metacultural construct”
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  129
(Urban 2001; Wallach 2008) for organizing the flow of musical sound (see also ­Beaster-Jones,
this volume).23 One of the first edited books to discuss the importance of genre in the glo-
balization of music was Lise Waxer’s Situating Salsa (2002). Waxer’s volume identifies the
cultural issues at the center of salsa’s status as a genre: it is a Puerto Rican music with roots
in Cuba, one that is best understood not as an inventory of formal musical traits, but rather
as an evolving discourse about the very existence and boundaries of the genre itself. In her
introduction, Waxer offers a useful taxonomy for mapping the scale of a genre’s circula-
tion: local (confined to an area smaller than the nation), national (within a nation-state),
transnational (within a multinational region, such as Latin America), and global (across the
world, transcontinental).24 In subsequent chapters, the contributors to Situating Salsa discuss
the music’s evolution and expansion as it developed at these various levels, and the book
shows how salsa increased its reach beyond the transnational space of Latin America and
its North American diaspora to include London and Japan, thus emerging as a genuinely
global genre.25
Scholarly investigations into the global dimensions of music genres have examined a
wide range of musics, including heavy metal (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011; ­Clinton
and Wallach 2016), jazz (Atkins 2001, 2003; Feld 2012), punk (Dunn 2016; Greene 2016),
reggae (Sterling 2010), and reggaetón (Rivera et al. 2009). The global audiences for
­nation-identified genres such as J-Pop ( Japanese popular music; Mori 2014), K-Pop (Korean
popular music; Marinescu 2014), and Bollywood (Indian film music; Gopal and Moorti
2008) have also been explored. The genre that is most commonly investigated in terms of
globalization is hip-hop, which emerged in African American and Puerto Rican neighbor-
hoods in New York City in the 1970s and went on to revolutionize music on a global scale
(e.g. Mitchell 2001; Perullo and Fenn 2003; Condry 2006; Charry 2012; McDonald 2013;
Helbig 2014; Miszczynski and Helbig 2017). This musical style has been adapted as a voice
of protest by marginalized youth from Winnipeg to Auckland, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Moscow,
and beyond. As Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig explain in their collection of essays
on hip-hop in Eastern Europe, “In a post-socialist society marred by violence, police cor-
ruption, poverty, and instability, hip hop offered not only a language to voice these expe-
riences, but also a sense of strength that such realities could, in some way, be transcended”
(2017: 2). Hip-hop has also radically transformed the sound and production techniques of
other popular musics across the world. Simultaneously an “underground” and a “main-
stream” genre, it has left few corners of the globe untouched.
Hip-hop’s near-universal appeal is unusual. Most popular music genres flourish in some
places but not others, and understanding why a given genre takes root in particular con-
texts is an important topic. In most cases, pre-existing cultural affinities link audiences
with specific globalized popular music styles. For example, the chapter by Kei Kawano and
Shuhei Hosokawa in Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (2011) argues
that metal’s appeal in Japan is based on the music’s warrior ethos and the Japanese view that
metal emphasizes kata (disciplined pattern), classicism, intellectualism, and stoicism (themes
prevalent in Japanese culture), as well as Japan’s long-standing enthusiasm for Western clas-
sical music.26 The book’s chapters on metal in Latin America (Avelar 2011) and Southeast
Asia (Wallach 2011) illustrate how the music’s defiance against unjust authority, ethos of
creative self-reliance, and gregarious sociality resonate with youthful audiences that feel
disenfranchised by the forces of modernity, industrialization, and political upheaval. Such
cultural affinities are behind the success or failure of imported cultural forms the world
over, yet they tend to be overlooked in deterministic, top-down theories of globalization.
Ethnomusicological studies of underground music scenes have corroborated findings by
scholars in other fields, which show that scene involvement is motivated by factors from
every level of social scale, from narrowly local concerns, to national politics, to transnational
130  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
cultural trends (see, for example, Condry 2006; Baulch 2007; Olson 2017). Not only do
genres in post-colonial countries develop along unique trajectories, they sometimes play
conspicuous roles in local politics, in some cases with serious consequences. On the 1980s
punk scene in Lima, Peru, anthropologist Shane Greene writes:

Faced with a war over Peru’s past and future… Lima’s punk revolution really began
as an act to denounce violence and express a position for life. Positioned ambiguously
in relation to the revolutionary proposals of the Marxist subversives, anarchistically
antagonistic to the state but therefore also in opposition to the Maoists’ central party
mandates, the subtes [underground scenesters] ended the decade at substantial risk of
political death.
(2016: 35)

According to Greene, the transgressive, spectacular punk rock movement in Lima provided
youth with an alternative, on the one hand, to the revolutionary dogma of the Shining
Path guerillas (and their ardent university-student sympathizers) and, on the other, to the
ham-fisted, totalitarian Peruvian state. The process by which punk music and culture first
reached Peru is an example of what I (Wallach 2014) have called “indieglobalization,”
the worldwide circulation of cultural artifacts via informal networks of enthusiasts moti-
vated more by cultural values and aesthetics than by profits. The ethnomusicology of genre
(indie)globalization is still developing, as new and unforeseen formations emerge, from
Finnish folk metal (Marjenin 2014) to the regional Indonesian popular music dangdut koplo
(Weintraub 2013). Technologically aided musical experimentations will continue to meet
the need of emergent communities to cohere around shared values and aesthetics.
Of course, it isn’t only genres and recordings that flow across national borders. The
­contemporary form of globalization has also led to unprecedented movements of peoples,
and ethnomusicologists have explored this topic in myriad ways. Su Zheng, for example, has
written about musical developments in the Chinese American community that range from
traditional opera to ethnic fusion genres (2010), and Deborah Wong’s 2004 book Speak it
Louder focuses in part on Asian American immigrant performers and communities throughout
the US, including Cambodian Americans in South Philadelphia and V ­ ietnamese ­A mericans
in Southern California. Other ethnomusicologists have made exemplary performers the
main focus of their work. Sarah Morelli (2016) has described how the dance virtuoso Pandit
Chitresh Das established a distinctive school of kathak dance in the San ­Francisco Bay Area,
far from its North Indian ancestral homeland, while Daniel Reed’s aforementioned study
(2016) recounts the circuitous paths of four dancers from Côte d­ ’Ivoire living in diasporic
communities in the United States. James Revell Carr (2014) has taken a different tack; his
landmark ethnographic and historical study of Hawaiian music, colonialism, and maritime
commerce explores how songs themselves travel along with people.
The latest generation of ethnomusicologists is unencumbered by a static, overly unified
vision of culture, and their work reveals new dynamics in the politics of music and every-
day life. Stephanie Jackson (2016) investigates music and ritual in the “double diaspora” of
Indo-Guyanese immigrants of Tamil descent living in Queens, New York. Oliver Y. Shao
(2016) examines the musical life of Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp, where the mostly
Somali inhabitants are highly restricted in their movements, have virtually no ability to
seek livelihoods, and are vulnerable to extortion and exploitation at the hands of camp
personnel. He writes:

During my research, my background as a trained ethnomusicologist with a focus

on ­A frican musics made me attentive to the social resources that Kakuma’s refugees
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  131
deployed in a humanitarian system in which they were often treated as dependent vic-
tims requiring social and material assistance from external actors, or objects of threat
requiring surveillance and control. I learned that Kakuma’s residents continually sought
to advance their positions in life as they used their music, dance, and rituals to create
social meaning, constitute social spaces, claim their rights, and forge senses of belong-
ing, as part of, and in excess to, their subjection to humanitarian and state-­induced
structural inequality.
(109)

Shao’s work makes clear the ever-present reality of surveillance and control that exists in all
fieldsites (even seemingly benign ones), as well as the will to make music that characterizes
so many of even the most aggrieved.
Critics of ethnomusicology claim that the epistemological crisis catalyzed by post-­
colonial theory and globalization has not been taken seriously enough in our discipline. For
example, music scholar Andy Nercessian (2002) implores ethnomusicologists to re-examine
their basic assumptions regarding musical meaning and value, arguing that globalization
renders all musics fundamentally “polysemic” and unmoored from singular authoritative
interpretations. He insists that ethnomusicologists no longer need to privilege the “emic”
because no one currently devalues the musics they study in favor of Western art music.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Most music departments in North America are still
dominated by performers and scholars of Western art music, and that tradition still has the
most prestige and visibility in the Western academy. Perspectives like those of Nercessian
result from a view of globalization that overlooks its uneven and unjust character, and fails
to acknowledge the persistence of colonial thinking in the contemporary world. Like glo-
balization itself, the development of a critical ethnomusicology is an uneven and incomplete
project, but one of the most encouraging developments in the field is the resurgence of
interest, particularly among students and younger faculty, in the notion of “decolonizing”
the discipline (e.g. Lovesey 2017; for an older example, see Roseman 2000). At the time
of this writing, it is too soon to tell what will come of these initiatives, but it is clear that
ethnomusicologists can no longer sidestep the roles played by power, history, media, and
mobility in the musics they research.

Conclusions
Once a comfortably colonial discipline, ethnomusicology has had to contend with serious
challenges to its legitimacy, both its focus on small-scale social groups and its colonial forms
of knowledge production. Developing nuanced understandings of global flows, ethnomu-
sicologists have addressed the former far more effectively than the latter. It is possible to
view ethnomusicology’s intense, fruitful, often fraught engagements with theories of post-­
colonialism and globalization as responses to developments in the Western academy, but it
is perhaps more appropriate to link them to a growing attentiveness to world geopolitical
realignments.27 If the critique of Western knowledge production has not led in North
America to the mass hiring of ethnomusicologists from the global south, it has at least led to
increased awareness of the situatedness of all knowledge.28 And if the literature on globali-
zation has highlighted the fragile provisionality of the local, it has, paradoxically, revealed
as well the considerable value of classic ethnomusicological fieldwork in illuminating lived
experience within contemporary mediascapes.
Ethnomusicologists have drawn on post-colonial theory to understand the unequal power
relationships that exist between research participants and scholars, but it is equally important
to understand the ways in which post-colonial dynamics play out in the classroom and other
132  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
sites within the academy. Recently, we had the opportunity to co-teach an ethnomusicology
graduate seminar with students from Africa and Asia: three from Kenya, two from China, and
one each from the Philippines, South Korea, and Tunisia. (Besides the two of us, there was
also one other American in the class.) In the course, we assigned recent publications in ethno-
musicology, mostly ethnographies, primarily written by scholars based in the United States.
The students noticed certain recurrent shortcomings in these writings. Authors consistently
ignored organized religion and spiritual matters more generally, the students said. They felt
that the ethnographers exhibited a profound discomfort with emotion, self-revelation (usu-
ally showing too little of themselves, at times displaying too much), and embodied, sensory
experience. And they argued that the ethnographers were unwilling to define any sort of
personal relationship with the musics they were researching, an approach that some American
readers might find scholarly and dispassionate, but many of the students found high-handed
and arrogant. To them, it evinced a strange reluctance on the ethnographers’ part to engage
on a human level with the people, places, and musics about whom they were writing—a fail-
ure that one international student referred to as an unwillingness to “get dirty.”
This led us to consider what a truly decolonized ethnomusicology might resemble. Cer-
tainly it must consist of more than first-world scholars’ endless hand-wringing about the
doomed politics of representation and must include scholarly voices from varied points along
the insider-outsider continuum. If ethnomusicologists from the mainstream are receptive
to voices from the margins, the ubiquity of unbalanced power dynamics and the scarcity of
relations of fair and equal exchange in the globalized, post-colonial world need not impede
productive scholarly dialogue, any more than they have inhibited musical innovation.

Notes
1 The authors would like to thank the editors for their helpful and thorough feedback on this chapter
and Katherine Meizel for reading suggestions. We would also like to thank our graduate students
from the 2016–2017 academic year. The following discussion makes no claim to be a comprehensive
review of the scholarship on post-colonialism and globalization in ethnomusicology; instead, we
hope to present a small but representative sampling of the wealth of recent writings available in this
area. For further discussion of the impact of the crisis of representation on ethnomusicology and a
brief review of the history of anthropology and the early history of ethnomusicology, see Berger and
Stone (Introduction, this volume, especially n1 and n15).
2 Scholars in other fields, such as feminism, have also struggled with Marxist theories of class dom-
ination. On feminist research into gender and sexuality in ethnomusicology, see Koskoff (2014),
­Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.2.
3 For an overview of the many definitions of the word “post-coloniality,” see Slemon (2006: 51–52).
4 The term “modernity” was traditionally used in the humanities and social sciences to refer to a set
of major social transformations that began to emerge in Western Europe after the Middle Ages,
including the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, the development of the scientific method, and
new forms of empire. (For more on the notion of modernity, see Manuel [this volume].) It is worth
noting here that contemporary anthropologists have critiqued the idea that modernity takes a sin-
gle form or that it began in Western Europe and moved to the rest of the planet, and a substantial
body of scholarship exists on the diverse forms that modernity takes around the world (see Goankar
1999). Clifford Geertz has written that, for developing countries, “modernity turned out to be
less a fixed destination than a vast and inconstant field of warring possibilities, possibilities neither
simultaneously reachable nor systematically connected…” (1995: 138). Del Negro (2004: 51–56)
provides a useful overview of the alternative modernities literature. On the eighteenth-century
European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, see Sugarman (this volume, n9).
5 In this chapter, we focus on countries that experienced European colonization, as post-colonial studies
usually does (see, for example, Smith 1975; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2006; and Pedersen 2015).
However, colonial (and therefore post-colonial) histories have shaped other modern nation-states,
such as Taiwan and Korea, which were colonized by Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. For a thoughtful and poignant post-colonial study of Korean and Japanese literature in the
shadow of Japanese imperialism, see Kwon (2015).
 Post-colonialism and Globalization  133
6 On cultural evolutionism in nineteenth-century comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology,
see Berger and Stone (Introduction, n15, this volume).
7 On globalization and race, see Mahon (this volume).
8 Though it is written from a European perspective, Pederson (2015) provides a thorough history of
European imperialism in the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the end of
colonialism. On the relationship between World War II and decolonization, see Smith (1975).
9 For an overview of the controversy surrounding Mugabe’s land redistribution, see Shaw (2003).
10 It is worth noting that, although the music multinationals did not operate in Burma/Myanmar in the
early 2000s, the public there still overwhelmingly demanded to hear popular music, including pop,
hip-hop, and heavy metal (MacLachlan 2011).
11 Not everyone in the field has found this development to be unproblematic. For example, Ellen ­Koskoff
(2014: 70–72, 174–9) presents a trenchant feminist critique of the ethnomusicological embrace of
post-colonial and globalization approaches, arguing that such perspectives were often developed at
the expense of other critical frameworks.
12 Fanon has also had a major influence on theories of race (see Mahon, this volume).
13 To our knowledge, Fanon did not refer to himself as a phenomenologist, but because of his interest
in experience, contact with Merleau-Ponty, and relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, his work is often
counted as part of that tradition by scholars today (see Berger, this volume).
14 On Gilroy, race, and cultural studies, see Mahon (this volume).
15 It is worth noting that Spivak understood that Derrida, an Algerian Jew in the French academy, was
himself a post-colonial subject. See Derrida ([1996] 1998) for a discussion of his own post-colonial
predicament.
16 In an interview with Australian scholar Nikos Papastergiadis, Spivak explained the inherent tensions
within strategic essentialism by referencing two figures from Greek mythology. Associating the stra-
tegic use of essentialism with Narcissus and the critique of essentialism with Echo, she states that, in
the kind of political work she is advocating:
We are shuttling between Narcissus and Echo: fixating upon the pre-fixed image, a pre-fixed stag-
ing, saying to other women within the culture that is how we should be identified. On the other
hand, the construction of ourselves as counter-echo to Western dominance, we cannot in fact
be confined to behaving as we have been defined. Where there is a moment of slippage, there is
also a robust aporetic [paradoxical] position, rather than being either the self-righteous continuist
narcissism in the name of identity, or the message of despair of nothing but Echo.
(1998: 54)
On the relationship between Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism and Judith Butler’s idea of “strate-
gic provisionality” (1991), see Sugarman (this volume).
17 We do not want to give the impression that the slums’ former inhabitants become the new occupants
of high-rise developments. The far more common pattern is for slum-dwellers to be displaced by real
estate projects in the metropolitan core out to an ever-widening peripheral slum sprawl, where they
are joined by millions of rural migrants from the impoverished countryside. The dismal result of
this globalization-accelerated process in developing countries is “a shanty-town world encircling the
fortified enclaves of the urban rich” (Davis 2004: 35).
18 In an interview, Arjun Appadurai (2004) posits a third, mediating alternative between the two poles:
Now, the third [alternative] is somewhere between these two, in the dialectic between the two.
There is the dimension of globalization as an outside, distant, fast-moving, abstract and scary process,
and there is the experience of globalization as a vehicle for the expansion of local horizons, aspira-
tions, expectations, possibilities—if you like, the utopian side. Between these two there is a dialectic
in which the local gets produced. … There is a kind of encounter between these things which is
sometimes very comfortable and civil and democratic and so on, and at other times it is harsh, as we
see especially in the global sites where some kind of warfare has become a feature of everyday life.
(119)
The vast majority of the literature we survey in this chapter seeks this third alternative of which
Appadurai speaks. We would suggest, however, that this middle ground is far more elusive than the
above quote implies.
19 No one doubts that Adorno was a harsh critic of popular culture, and assessments of his ideas by
contemporary music scholars vary widely. Some writers argue that his denunciation of popular music
reflects a thoroughgoing and fundamentally problematic elitism (e.g. Tagg 1998; Taylor 2016: 7–10).
Others, like Peter Manuel, are more sympathetic. While acknowledging these critiques, Manuel’s
chapter in this volume maintains that Adorno’s denunciation of popular music should be understood
134  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton
in the context of his critical appraisal of Western art music and suggests how some of his ideas can be
judiciously applied to non-Western music cultures. See Zuidervaart (2015) for a useful bibliography
of contemporary Adorno scholarship. —Harris M. Berger
20 Early studies also occasionally use the term “world beat,” a genre label that fell out of fashion in the
1990s.
21 In an extraordinary historical work, American Studies scholar Michael Denning (2015) argues that
the advent of electrical recording in the mid-1920s created ideal conditions for the flourishing of
commercial vernacular musics across the colonial world. These musics—including highlife, marabi,
kroncong, tarab, and numerous others—fueled the formation of national cultures and the drive to-
wards decolonization.
22 Though inspired by Bhabha, my (Wallach’s) use of the notion of hybridity (2008: 257–59) does not
follow his formulation closely and is derived from Ang’s application of his ideas (2001).
23 Genre is not always the preferred term in these studies, but it is used quite frequently. In general, the
word genre is understood in ethnomusicological work on globalization to refer to a set of musical
discourses that index one or more social formations. For example, the term “heavy metal” refers to
a music genre that indexes the music scenes of heavy metal musicians and fans. In a somewhat tauto-
logical fashion, people in these social formations are often seen as exhibiting traits (such as aggression
or rebelliousness) associated with this music. For the ethnomusicology of globalization, what is most
significant about these recursive dynamics is that they can be explored ethnographically (see Holt
2007 and Beaster-Jones, this volume).
24 On social scale in ethnomusicology, see also Slobin ([1993] 2000) and Berger and Stone (Introduction,
this volume).
25 Another example of the globalization of salsa: during my (Wallach’s) Indonesian fieldwork in 1999
and 2000, Jakarta had a night club called Salsa that featured salsa music and dancing, as well as a dance
instructor from Cuba.
26 It’s worth noting that Western art music is extremely popular in East Asia, particularly South Korea
and Japan. It may be tempting to assume that this is another example of Western ideas being pushed
by globalization, but the fact that this music seems to be stagnant or perhaps even declining in Europe
and North America makes such an explanation overly simple and unconvincing. On the impact of
Western art music in East Asia, see Everett and Lau (2004); on the music’s global impact, see Yang
(2014).
27 These realignments are perhaps best summed up by Fareed Zakaria’s famous quote, “This will not be
a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else” (2008).
28 Post-colonial scholars such as Sumarsam (1995, 2013, 2014), Kofi Agawu (2003), and George Worlasi
Kwasi Dor (2014) have made groundbreaking contributions to ethnomusicology, but their numbers
are few. For an exemplary collaborative venture in ethnomusicology across the post-colonial divide,
see Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Solomon (2012). On Agawu’s notion of groove in African music, see
Rahaim (this volume).

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6 Performance Studies
and Critical Improvisation
Studies in Ethnomusicology
Understanding Music and Culture through
Situated Practice
Ellen Waterman

Performance studies and critical improvisation studies (CIS) are distinct, interdisciplinary
fields that share a common focus on situated practice as their object of study. Despite their
many differences, it makes sense to consider these fields together in this chapter, as both
help us to understand the intricacies, mediations, and effects of musical practices—all of
which are central concerns for ethnomusicology. This emphasis on situated practice moves
our focus away from music as text and from musical performance as the skilled interpre-
tation of the text. Ethnomusicologist Alejandro Madrid has described this as a “shift away
from asking about the meaning of sound in culture and society into asking about the social
and cultural uses of that sound” (2009: np, my emphasis). Further, as performance studies
scholar Tracy Davis argues (2008), the notion of performance draws attention to the agency
of audiences as well as musicians (and other actors). Performance also situates sound within
multi-sensory contexts (Hahn 2007). Davis defines the “performative turn” as the recog-
nition that “individual behavior derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and
is manifest as observable behavior, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective” (1).
Significantly, she situates the performative turn in relation to other intellectual movements
since the 1970s, including the “‘linguistic turn’ (emphasizing language’s role in construct-
ing perception)” and the “‘cultural turn’ (tracking the everyday meanings of culture, and
culture’s formative effect on identities)” (1). We might also posit an emergent “improvisa-
tive turn” (emphasizing the contingent, negotiated, and relational aspects of individual and
collective behavior).
Performance studies and the branch of CIS that deals with music share a commitment to
embodied and experiential knowledge produced through situated practice.1 Further, these
fields operate at the junction of, on the one hand, ethnographic, historical, and theoretical
work, and, on the other hand, artistic creation. The claim of performance theorist Richard
Schechner that “the relationship between studying performance and doing performance
is integral” (2003: 1) could also be made of CIS. Many participants in both fields are en-
gaged in practice-based research methods, and my approach in this chapter is guided by
my interdisciplinary background as an experimental flutist-vocalist and scholar. Creative
activity, however, is only one arena for studying situated practice. Scholars also understand
both improvisation and performance to be quotidian and pervasive within social life. Jazz
musicians improvise, but so do people navigating a crowded sidewalk. Actors perform roles
on stage or screen, but so do we all. For example, I write this paragraph performing my role
as scholar, but later, in my starring role as mother, I will nag my daughter to do her home-
work before going off to play a gig. This conception of the “presentation of self ” (Goffman
1959, discussed below) has been followed by theories of the performative nature of the
subject, which some scholars see as a more nuanced and dialogical theory, one that more
142  Ellen Waterman
fully recognizes the affordances and constraints through which identity is performed.2 As
­ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong suggests, “moving from self to subjectivity creates dis-
cursive environments in which authenticity must give way to position and identification”
(2008: 83). My performances as scholar or mother or musician are shaped by my position-
ality in terms of socioeconomics, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. My
subjectivity is not unitary; on the contrary, it is entangled with all the other animate and
inanimate factors in the environment in which I operate, and this co-creative relationship
is captured in the dynamic flux of everyday improvisation.3
It is important to note that, as organized fields, performance studies and CIS have
quite different histories. Performance studies developed in the 1960s and 1970s with
roots in theatre, anthropology, communication studies, and folklore. It coalesced slowly
over time in different locations, with its various branches pursuing distinct agendas, and
it only began to become institutionalized starting in the late 1970s. In the academy, for
example, performance studies developed robust programs at New York University (at the
nexus of theatre and cultural anthropology) and Northwestern University (at the nexus
of communication studies, ethnography, and oral interpretation). Since the 1990s, the
field has expanded rapidly through its society, Performance Studies International, and
journals such as TDR (The Drama Review) and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. In
recent years, the field has become truly international with the establishment of academic
programs across the globe. Critical improvisation studies began in the early twenty-first
century with initial efforts at field building by scholar-practitioners in music and dance
at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the design
of an interdisciplinary and international research project on Improvisation, Commu-
nity, and Social Practice (ICASP) at the University of Guelph in Canada. This project
was formalized and extended in 2013 as the International Institute for Critical Studies
in Improvisation (IICSI), with six university partners in Canada and the US.4 CIS is
still emergent and not yet fully entrenched in the academy. At the time of this writ-
ing, however, the first graduate program in CIS has been approved at the University of
Guelph, where the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation
was founded in 2004. In just two decades, CIS has established a foothold as an interdis-
ciplinary area of study. Indeed, despite the institutionalization of performance studies
and CIS as fields, many participants consider themselves to be interdisciplinary (or even
post-disciplinary), situating their work in the lines that cut across, or inhabit the margins
between, disciplines.
In this chapter, I will tease out significant ideas from each field that have been of use to
ethnomusicologists and suggest further avenues of inquiry. Of course, ethnomusicologists
have always paid close attention to musical performance, including improvisation. My focus
in this chapter is on selected key influences and major works in performance studies and
CIS as institutionalized academic fields.5 In the first section, I discuss the older and more
established field of performance studies, tracing some of its many roots and interdiscipli-
nary traditions, and highlighting the work of ethnomusicologists who have engaged with
performance theory. In the second, shorter, section, I discuss CIS, with particular attention
to the generative role of music in the field. I conclude by bringing performance studies and
CIS together in a discussion of future directions for ethnomusicology.

Performance Studies
There are many possible ways to trace the intellectual roots of what may now be con-
sidered disciplinary performance studies. In this section, I begin by briefly highlighting
 Performance and Improvisation  143
the contributions of five selected precursors: J. L. Austin (1911–1960), Roman Jakobson
­(1896–1982), Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), Erving Goffman (1922–1982), and Milton
Singer (1912–1994).6
Some of the earliest work that influenced performance studies occurred in linguistics
as part of an expansion of the field from the investigation of structures of language to the
analysis of speech acts (Searle 1969). There is room to mention just two key ideas here:
performative language and multi-functionality. The notion of performative language was
originally developed by philosopher J. L. Austin ([1962] 1995). Modifying a construction
that Michel Foucault used to describe a similar function of discourse (Foucault [1969] 1972:
49 quoted in Sugarman, this volume), one may define performative language as language
that produces the thing it names.7 For example, in a marriage ceremony, the declaration “I
do” (accept you as my husband/wife) enacts the condition of marriage. Such performative
language depends on a felicitous context (e.g. that the wedding is taking place in real life,
not in a fictional context) and an authoritative speaker (e.g. only a licensed authority such
as a religious leader, judge, or justice of the peace may officiate at a marriage).8 Austin’s
performative was the seed for one of performance studies’ most influential theories, per-
formativity, which was developed by Judith Butler (b. 1956) in the 1990s. Butler’s use of
the term shifts the force of performative language speech acts and their social context to
discourse and power relations themselves (see also Foucault [1969] 1972). This conception
of performativity has been taken up by many ethnomusicologists and will be discussed sep-
arately below. If the notion of performative language illustrated the ability of language to
constitute social relations, Roman Jakobson looked at the nature of the linguistic encoun-
ter itself. Following the psychologist Karl Bühler ([1934] 1990), Jakobson described both
language and communication as “multi-functional,” by which he meant that in situated
interaction, speaking always involves six inter-related dimensions that encompass various
degrees of expression and affect (1960). All six functions operate simultaneously, but in any
given situation some may be foregrounded and others backgrounded. Jakobson’s theory
invites us to pay attention not only to the referential meaning of language, but also to the
materiality of sounds and their emergence in performance.9 Jakobson was highly influential
in the forms of performance studies developed in linguistic anthropology and folklore (see
Text Box 6.1). Where the structural linguists treated language as an abstract, formal system
of rules largely divorced from social context, Jakobson showed that language structure
couldn’t be understood apart from the phenomena of social interaction, saw poetics as a
fundamental feature of language (rather than a rarefied domain employed only by artists),
and illustrated the richness of language in performance. (See Beaster-Jones [this volume] for
a more detailed discussion of Austin and Jakobson.)
The performative turn in the study of language was considerably amplified in theories
of behavior by anthropologists and sociologists. Trained in biology and anthropology but
invested in psychology, two of Gregory Bateson’s contributions to performance studies are
the concepts of metacommunication and framing. Metacommunication is second-order
communication—signs or other communicative acts that are “about” other signs or com-
municative acts and serve to inflect their meaning. For example, I tell you that you’re in big
trouble for eating the last piece of chocolate cake, but I wink to show you that I’m not really
serious. Bateson introduced the term “frame” to describe what helps us to interpret such
signals within a given context (see also Goffman 1974). In “A Theory of Play and F ­ antasy”
([1954] 2000), Bateson gives the example of animals play fighting. Here, the playful nips
are not simple acts of aggression. Situated within the play frame, they are signals of fight-
ing, clearly understood by the animals as non-serious and may even indicate affection, and
­Bateson examines the idea of metacommunication and framing in human behaviors that
144  Ellen Waterman
range from games to rituals, threats, and histrionics.10 Think of what frames musical activ-
ity as a rehearsal, a concert, a religious ritual, or a kitchen party: this might include casual
or formal behavior, the presence or absence of an audience, and the type of venue, among
many other factors. The frame can also affect the meaning content of the behavior. For
example, when indigenous songs were “salvaged” by anthropologists in the early twentieth
century as recordings and archived for posterity, they were violently separated from the im-
portant cultural frames that indicate when, where, and by whom they should be performed
and heard (Robinson 2017).
It is not only language and communication that constitute performance. The idea that we
are each constantly performing a number of social roles is encapsulated in sociologist Erving
Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Drawing on the language of
theatre to describe everyday encounters, Goffman urges us to pay close attention to the sur-
faces of social interaction: to gesture, tone of voice, dress, props, and behavior that indicate
social roles, which are played with varying degrees of self-consciousness. The important
point here is that even the most pragmatic behavior is communicative (in the sense that we
concern ourselves with how the fact that we are doing something is understood by others)
and that everyday behavior is performative of identity. Goffman further showed that all per-
formance is socialized—that is, that it is both constrained by social expectations and open to
interpretation and misrepresentation. Philip Auslander’s work on musical personae (2006)
offers a contemporary perspective on the Goffmanian performance of social roles. He ar-
gues that when musicians play music, they simultaneously perform the role of “musician,”
an idea that is particularly clear in the celebrity culture of popular music but that holds true
across other genres as well. If Goffman’s work on the “presentation of self ” oriented schol-
arly attention toward everyday conduct, the idea of “cultural performance,” developed by
the anthropologist Milton Singer, drew attention to organized programs of activity, such
as theatre, music, and dance, as well as festivals and religious and social rites (1959). Singer
encouraged scholars to study these framed performances as situations where people come
together to negotiate key issues in their culture; in this sense, such performances constitute
a form of what the anthropologist and folklorist Richard Bauman (1989) called “cultural
reflexivity” (i.e. culture about culture) and are a key part of the social world. In sum, the
roots of performance studies lie in theories of language, communication, and behavior that
point to the ubiquity of performance in everyday life and extend ideas from theatre to ana-
lyze situated activity in both the quotidian realm and the performing arts.

Ethnomusicology and Performance Studies

Since the 1980s, ethnomusicologists have frequently engaged with the field of performance
studies. For example, Norma McLeod and Marcia Herndon (1980) co-edited an important
early anthology, The Ethnography of Musical Performance, that drew upon performance the-
orists such as Goffman, Dell Hymes, Richard Schechner, and Victor Turner, while Ruth
Stone and Steven Feld both had relationships with the work of Bauman, who taught in the
Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University from 1986 to 2008.
Why Suyá Sing, Anthony Seeger’s influential ethnography of indigenous music in Mato
Grosso, Brazil, made use of Turner’s theory of liminality, discussed below, as well as other
ideas from performance theory (1987). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ethnomusicol-
ogist Michelle Kisliuk pursued graduate work in the Department of Performance Studies
at New York University (NYU), and Harris M. Berger’s publications on heavy metal mu-
sic, which first appeared in the mid-1990s, drew extensively on performance folkloristics.
More recently, Kisliuk, along with ethnomusicologists such as Deborah Wong (2004),
Tomie Hahn (2007), and Henry Spiller (2010), have used Butler’s theory of performativity
 Performance and Improvisation  145
to explore the complex intersections between performance and identity. My own work
(e.g. Smith and Waterman 2013) draws on Butler and is inspired by other performance
theorists engaged with feminist and queer theories, such as Sue-­Ellen Case (1990; Case
and Reinelt 1991), Jill Dolan (1993), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Parker and Sedgwick
1995b). In postcolonial analyses of music, Alejandro Madrid (2015) and Thomas Hilder
(2012) have both employed performance theorist Diana Taylor’s work ([2003] 2007, 1997).
Conversely, ethnomusicology has had a direct impact on disciplinary performance studies,
providing faculty members for major programs in that field, including Shayna Silverstein
at Northwestern University, who has written on Syrian dance musics (2016), and Deborah
Kapchan at New York University, whose influential work examines Moroccan Gnawa
trance and ritual (2007) and cutting-edge ideas on performance and sound (2017). Clearly,
performance studies is a multivalent field that has much to offer ethnomusicology.
If performance, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett claimed in a 2001 interview, is an
“organizing idea to think about almost anything,” how exactly might this concept be
used in music research, and how might we understand the relationship between perfor-
mance studies and ethnomusicology? In this section, I will explore these questions by
focusing on three relationships between performance and ethnography, a methodology
that, while contested (Hammersley 2006; Ingold 2017), remains important to both fields:
the ethnography of performance (the interpretation of cultural performance based on in-
tensive participant observation), performance ethnography (the theatrical representation
of discoveries made through fieldwork, often as a form of critical and collaborative per-
formance pedagogy; see Denzin 2003: 16), and performative ethnography (a self-reflexive
approach to ethnography that considers the researcher’s own body and bodily memory as
a resource; see Haanstad 2014: 97).

Ethnography of Performance: Liminality, Ritual, and Social Drama

Some of the most influential concepts in performance studies stem from the remarkable col-
laboration between cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) and theatre scholar
Richard Schechner (b. 1934). In 1979, Schechner offered the first academic course in per-
formance theory and, in 1980, was instrumental in transforming the Drama Department at
New York University into the first Department of Performance Studies.11 Schechner and
Turner’s long collaboration resulted in the complementary books The Anthropology of Per-
formance (Turner 1986) and Between Theatre and Anthropology (Schechner 1985). Central to
Turner’s work was the analysis of ritual, and his research on the Ndembu people of central
Africa (1967) led to an organizational and processual model of ritual in relation to everyday
life. He theorized rituals as “social dramas” (1969), a process of working out roles and rela-
tionships that went through fixed stages but with an outcome that could not be known in
advance and that was never final. Instead of being separate from everyday life, such ritual
performances are border activities, sites of negotiation, with the potential to disrupt the status
quo, if only temporarily. Building on the ideas of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep ([1908]
1960), Turner employs the term liminal (from the Latin limen, meaning threshold or margin)
to describe such states of transition; his term liminal persona applies to a person in just such a
“betwixt and between state” (1964). Schechner, in turn, found correlations between Turner’s
model of ritual and the process he himself identified in theatre, with its stages of creation, re-
hearsal/workshopping, and performance (99 ff ). For him, ritual and theatre are both framed
experiences set off from everyday time and space, and each has the capacity to suspend or
even transform the social relationships and experiences of its participants. Building on this
work, Schechner developed an “infinity” model (2003: 67) that showed the unending “mu-
tual positive feedback relationship of social dramas and aesthetic performances” (68).
146  Ellen Waterman

Text Box 6.1  Performance Studies in Folklore

Equally concerned with the ethnography of performance is the branch of perfor-

mance studies that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the meeting place of folklore
studies (which is also known as folkloristics) and linguistic anthropology. Growing
out of the work of Américo Paredes ([1958] 1970), Roman Jakobson (1960), and Del
Hymes (1962), scholars like Dan Ben-Amos (1971), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
(1975), Richard Bauman ([1977] 1984), and Roger Abrahams (1977) sought to make a
fundamental shift in folklore studies by taking performance, rather than texts, as their
object of study. (On the role of Parades in the history of folklore, see Limón (2007);
on the role of Jakobson and Hymes in the history of linguistics and also on the cri-
tique of textualism in music, see Beaster-Jones, this volume.) The approach that these
scholars developed—which was synthesized in two important edited collections,
Paredes and Bauman (1972) and Ben-Amos and Goldstein ([1975] 2013)—represented
a sea change in folklore studies. In previous generations, most scholars in the disci-
pline had understood fieldwork as a means of collecting bodies of narrative or song,
which could then be subject to analysis largely independent of situated context of use
or embodied performance. The new folklorists inverted this relationship, viewing the
text as something that enabled performance and taking performance itself as the focus
of interpretation. Doing so allowed them to show how folklore emerges from the di-
alogic interactions of audience and performer, is shaped by both situated context and
large-scale power relations, and is fundamentally dynamic and emergent. Particularly
significant was Bauman’s Verbal Art as Performance, which understood performance as
a potentiality in any form of interaction where the speaker takes “responsibility to an
audience for a display of communicative competence” (Bauman [1977] 1984: 11) and
showed how the performance of expressive culture was bound to the genre systems
and other cultural features of a speech community.
In the 1980s, inquiry in performance folkloristics developed in many directions.
Building on the early work of scholars like Dennis Tedlock ([1972] 1999) and Alan
Dundes ([1964] 1980), scholars in folklore and an area of linguistic anthropology
known as ethnopoetics drew new attention to the sonic and kinesic components
of verbal art. For example, the folklorist Elizabeth C. Fine examined the role that
gesture plays in folklore performance (1984), while linguistic anthropologists like
Joel Sherzer (1982) attended to performative features like prosody and pitch contour,
and analyzed the culturally and linguistically specific ways in which poetic speech is
structured. Another strain of work explored the complex interplay between everyday
talk and the affectively heightened genres of verbal art, such as narrative and song
(Titon 1988). And growing out of the seminal work of Milman Parry and Alfred
Lord (Lord [1960] 2000), a vast body of writings developed on the improvisation of
verbal art through oral formulae (see Foley 1985). A rich review of the performance
literature from this period in linguistic anthropology and folklore can be found in
Bauman and Briggs (1990). Performance folkloristics continued to grow in the 1990s
and 2000s, with researchers examining an ever-wider range of issues, from gender
and public display (Kapchan 1996; Del Negro 2005), to popular music (Berger 1999),
wayfinding practices (Gabbert 2007), sports (Lindquist 2006), and the performative
dimensions of material culture (Everett 2002; LaDousa 2007). In the contemporary
discipline, scholars like Simon Bronner (2012) and the contributors to a special issue
of Cultural Analysis have explored the intersection of performance theory and practice
 Performance and Improvisation  147

theory (Buccitelli and Schimitt 2016). While textual analysis still exists within folk-
lore studies, the fundamental reorientation that performance theory initiated has
been widely absorbed into the field, and it is safe to say that the majority of work in
contemporary folklore studies is informed, either explicitly or implicitly, by perfor-
mance theory.
It is worth noting that there are significant connections between performance
­approaches in folklore studies and ethnomusicology, with scholars such as Deborah
Kapchan, Jeff Todd Titon, and myself developing our work at the intersection of
these fields. With her academic home in the Institutes of Folklore and Ethnomusi-
cology at Indiana University, Ruth Stone’s ethnographies of the music of the Kpelle
ethnic group in Liberia ([1982] 2010; 1988) were also informed by performance
folkloristics. —Harris M. Berger

The confluence of theatre and anthropology has undoubted appeal, particularly for eth-
nomusicologists studying clearly demarcated, ritual performances, such as festivals and sta-
dium concerts. Its focus on process and organization highlights not only the actions of
performers but also those of audiences and organizers, and its emphasis on transition and
transformation captures the affective dimension of situated practice. What ethnomusicol-
ogists brought to this strain of performance studies was attention to the role of sound and
music in such processes. Anthony Seeger (1987) drew on the notion of liminality in his
analysis of the Suyá Mouse Ceremony, through which a boy is introduced into the “male
collective activity of the village” (117). In these events, it is not only the boy who plays a
liminal role, Seeger explains, but “the entire male population of the village,” and singing is
at the “heart of the liminal matter” of the ritual (117). Here, singing is the means by which
the boy’s new status is established and the men’s status as men is confirmed. In exploring
these practices, Seeger developed a “musical anthropology” (in contrast to Alan Merriam’s
1964 Anthropology of Music) that didn’t merely place music in social context, but understood
the social as a form of organization that could be best understood in musical terms.12 The
attention to performance as a liminal space of possibility corresponds to the affective di-
mension of many kinds of musical performances. We have all been caught up and trans-
ported by musical performance, rapt in the experience of spontaneous fellow-feeling that
Turner called communitas (1982). And we have all experienced the return to “normal life”
when the concert or the festival ends. (See Rahaim [this volume] on the place of Turner,
Schechner, and ritual theory in the literature on participation.)
If the Suyá employ music in the liminal space of rituals to achieve a transformation of
social identity, the environmental music dramas of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer
(b. 1933) highlight the use of music in the liminal phase of ritual for the purpose of psy-
chological transformation. In my ethnography of one such work (Waterman 1997), the
concepts of social drama and liminality mapped rather neatly onto Schafer’s own penchant
for ritual structures.13 The epilogue to his massive twelve-part Patria series of environmen-
tal music dramas, called And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, has been performed annually since
1989. Each August, participants camp in the woods for ten days and perform a daily series of
rituals involving music, storytelling, dance, and drama that culminate in a pageant, during
which a number of the principle characters undergo transformation. (For example, in one
ritual, a white stag character is transformed into a young man.) Built on myth and Jungian
archetypes, performance in this work is meant to be efficacious. At the level of the ritual’s
mythic narrative, ritual performances reunite the alienated hero and heroine, and order
148  Ellen Waterman
is restored to a chaotic world. The rituals are also meant to be transformative at the per-
sonal level. Participants who make the annual pilgrimage from their largely urban homes
across Canada to live and work together in Ontario’s Haliburton Forest seek a transformed
relationship to both nature and art. Schafer has written eloquently about his belief in the
transformative potential of performing hierophantic music in non-traditional spaces and
over extended periods of time:

We will not try to change things here; we will let them change us. And if what we
produce together is no longer art, it will be no great loss; for the urge for this new
freedom did not come from the inner coil of art, but from the necessity to find a new
relationship, between ourselves and the wide cosmos.
(1991: 97–98)

In the Wolf Project, as it is known to participants, ritual performance occupies a liminal

space between the aesthetic performance of music making and everyday activities, such as
canoeing, making camp fires, cooking, and digging latrines. The participants are a mix
of professionals and amateurs, and range in age from small children to, until recently, the
elderly composer himself; they take on the roles of both performers and audience mem-
bers, artists, and crew. Through this dance of everyday and ritual performance, And Wolf
Shall Inherit the Moon illustrates one of Schechner’s most influential concepts—the idea of
performance as “restored behavior,” which he defines as the “habits, rituals, and routines
of life” that can be “rearranged or reconstructed… [and are thus] independent of the causal
systems (personal, social, political, technological, etc.) that brought them into existence”
(2003: 28). Performers in the Wolf Project exhibit restored behavior in two ways: on the
one hand, they recreate everyday activities and social relations (including artistic activities
such as rehearsal) in the quasi-wilderness context of the piece; on the other, they occupy
roles within “clan” units, both as musicians and as characters in the drama. In each case,
they are “recombining bits of previously behaved behaviors” in ways that are framed and
thus “heightened” (28). Precisely because it is “marked, framed, and separate” (28), restored
behavior is, Schechner argues, amenable to rehearsal, transmission, and transformation.
Further, it operates by codes that must be interpreted by other participants and observers.
Thus, when I woke up in my tent in the cold pre-dawn to play the “aubade” (a genre of
morning music) across a misty lake on my flute, it was not merely an aesthetic action but, as
everyone in the project understood, a signal to begin a sequence of morning rituals involv-
ing silence, movement, and food.14
Invoking my dual role as participant and ethnographer in the Wolf Project brings me to
another point about liminality: as ethnomusicologists, we too are often in “betwixt and
between” states. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull argues that field experience could itself
be considered as a “liminal condition” ([1961] 1990: 76), one in which the ethnographer oc-
cupies the margin between subjective and objective experience. Dan Bendrups (2000) goes
further to posit liminality itself as an ethical stance to be taken by the ethnomusicologist.
Writing in the context of studying Latin American popular music in Australia, he argues
that fieldwork should be conducted from a liminal perspective that is both intercultural and
intersubjective. (I will return to this idea in my discussions below of Dwight Conquergood
and performative ethnography.)
Dunja Njaradi has critiqued Turner and Schechner’s model of social drama and/as ­aesthetic
performance, noting that conceiving of rituals from different cultural contexts in terms of
Western drama is a colonizing move that flattens difference (2013: 25). Indeed, I  have
identified just such colonial aspects in Schafer’s ritual music drama, with its ­eclectic appro-
priation of world mythologies, especially the symbols and stories of Indigenous peoples in
 Performance and Improvisation  149
Canada (Waterman 2001). In later writings, Schechner was careful to qualify his “infinity”
model of social drama and performance to state that “each social drama, each aesthetic
drama (or other kind of performance), [should] be understood in its specific cultural and
historical circumstances” (2003: 68); even so, performance is clearly far too slippery and
complex to fit neatly within a single organizational model.15
Without specifically using Turner’s and Schechner’s terminology, some ethnomusicol-
ogists have deployed the idea of the margin as the main site of their ethnographic investi-
gations. A notable example of this approach is the edited volume Transnational Encounters:
Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Madrid 2011). In the book’s introduction,
Madrid notes that borders “define political struggles” and emphasize “difference,” not only
at their physical sites, but through the embodied practices with which they are associated. In
singing, performing, dancing, and political activities, bodies not only cross but are crossed
by borders; their “very act of embodying culture performs the borderlands themselves” (9).
Borders perform multiple roles: Madrid notes that, over time, the concept of the US/­Mexico
border has shifted “from area of contention to separating line to welcoming portal and to
cultural buffer” (2). Ultimately, he argues, the border is “racialized to contain the Other” (3).
The concept of liminality, then, has become a broader (border) term to express the fl ­ uidity
of identity and the power struggles inherent in its construction.
As the previous examples show, ethnography and performance are often co-constitutive.
In a brilliant essay on the keyword “performance,” Kapchan succinctly maps this effect:

Both [performance and ethnography] are framed activities concerned with giving
meaning to experience. … Performance, like ethnography, is palpable, arising in worlds
of sense and symbol. Ethnography, like performance, is intersubjective, depending on
an audience, a community or group to which it is responsible, however heterogeneous
the participants may be. In its concern with a self-critical methodology that takes ac-
count of its effects in the world, ethnography is first and foremost performative—aware
of itself as a living script in which meaning is emergent.
(1995: 483–84)

The affinity between ethnography and performance has been richly developed in the work
of Dwight Conquergood (1949–2004), who was one of the founding members of the De-
partment of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

Performance Ethnography and the Ethics of Engaged Ethnographic Praxis

Begun in 1984, Northwestern’s department was the second such unit to be developed,
and its focus differed substantially from the one at New York University. Growing out of
the confluence of communication studies, theatre, and oral interpretation, ­Northwestern’s
approach to performance studies has long been identified with the practice of perfor-
mance ethnography: staging performances based on ethnographic field materials. It is
not surprising then, that Conquergood’s work emphasizes the importance of embodied
performance over text, not only as a matter of intellectual preference but as an ethics of
engaged ethnographic praxis. For him, performance should be considered in part as “a
tactics of intervention, an alternative space of struggle” (2002: 152). Conquergood’s field-
work took place in diverse settings around the world, and his output includes academic
writing, documentary films, and his own performances of oral narratives collected from
the field ([1998] 2013: 58). His work has much to offer ethnomusicology, particularly
at this moment when activist scholarship and the ethics of applied ethnomusicology are
gaining increasing attention.
150  Ellen Waterman
Building on the work of Paul Rabinow and others, Conquergood’s understanding of eth-
nographic praxis as performance is part of his sustained critique of positivistic approaches
in the social sciences and their emphasis on empirical observation and verifiability over
interpretation ([1986] 2013: 16–7). Much influenced by Turner’s idea of culture as social
drama, Conquergood instead posits a “performance paradigm that prevents the reification
of culture into variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulated” ([1986] 2013: 17). In
his 1986 essay “Performing Cultures: Ethnography, Epistemology, and Ethics,” Conquer-
good invokes an idea from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), that the productive
relationship between fieldworker and informant is predicated on their mutual willingness
to pretend that they belong to “the same cultural universe” (21).16 Geertz characterizes this
not as falseness but as “anthropological irony” (1968: 152), a stance that, in Conquergood’s
reading of Geertz, helps the anthropologist to avoid “the assumption of easy identifica-
tion with the Other” (Conquergood ([1986] 2013: 21). This performative view appeals to
Conquergood because it highlights the interdependence of ethnographer and informant as
“co-actors, mutually engaged collaborators in a fragile fiction” (21).
Conquergood’s early work used Geertz to attack positivism and theorize the collab-
orative nature of fieldwork, but in the later part of his career, he forwarded this project
by critiquing Geertz. In an argument laid out in “Beyond the Text” ([1998] 2013) and
amplified in the much cited “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research”
(2002), Conquergood critiques Geertz’s fieldwork-as-reading model, famously articulated
in the claim that “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles,
which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly
belong” (Geertz 1973: 452 qtd. in Conquergood [1998] 2013: 51). Reducing culture to
texts not only privileges those who have access to literacy, Conquergood argues, but fails to
acknowledge the use of texts as tools of domination in contexts ranging from legal systems
to colonial administration, policing, and industry. If we want to understand the experience
of subordinated people, we must attend to their embodied performances of resistance in
everyday life—ones that are not easily reduced to the status of text. This idea is much influ-
enced by Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the agency of subordinated groups, the “makeshift
creativity” that is a product of living on the margins of society (1984: xiv, 29 qtd. in Con-
quergood [1995] 2013: 27). For Conquergood, the stakes here are very real: he insists that,

the state of emergency under which many people live demands that we pay attention
to messages that are coded and encrypted; to indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic
modes of communication where subversive meanings and utopian yearnings can be
sheltered and shielded from surveillance.
(2002: 148)

Conquergood created staged performances based on his ethnographic fieldwork with

Hmong and Lau refugees in Chicago. For him, such performances were both epistemolog-
ical, a “way of deeply sensing the other,” and a form of advocacy, which he understood to
be a natural extension of the role of the ethnographer ([1985] 2013: 68). A full discussion
of the tensions between participation and appropriation in performing another’s culture is
beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can observe that performances of this kind resonate
strongly with the discipline of ethnomusicology. Beginning with Mantle Hood’s notion of
“bi-musicality” (1960), ethnomusicologists have often performed the music of the cultures
they study. Indeed, playing in various “world music” ensembles is part of many ethno-
musicologists’ training (T. Solis 2004). Performance ethnography, however, goes beyond
acquiring cultural knowledge and expertise; it is a form of embodied knowing. As the
sociologist Norman Denzin (2003: 6) explains, “performance approaches to knowing insist
 Performance and Improvisation  151
on immediacy and involvement. They consist of partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent
understandings.” Advancing themes such as this in the language of the Russian linguist
Mikhail Bakhtin (1981; see also Meizel and Daughtry, this volume), Conquergood sums
this position up with the term “dialogical performance” ([1985] 2013: 70).
Like many others, I have found these ideas to resonate with my own work. As a scholar-­
practitioner, many of my most penetrating insights about experimental and creative improvised
musics have come from my participation in those performance practices, a deep immersion that
includes my graduate training and my career as a professional musician. As an ­ethnomusicologist,
I am committed to Conquergood’s ideal of dialogical performance, whose aim is to “bring
self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another” ([1985]
2013: 75). In writing about questions of subjectivity in intercultural improvisation, I described
­improvisation as a kind of dialogism-in-action.

Certainly, I have experienced the sensation of existential (ex)change in the heat of

improvisation, when the sonic gestures of another player provoke an unexpected reac-
tion in my body. Vibrations absorbed by receptive ears are translated through nerves,
fingers, mouth, and breath. New timbres and sonic effects emerge in response; my
vocabulary of expression is enriched and my playing is forever changed.
(2016: 286)

Like many ethnomusicologists, I believe that embodied musicking is itself a form of knowl-
edge production. I understand my creative improvisation to be a form of performance
ethnography, one that is performed in musical dialogue rather than through the interpre-
tation of oral narrative. In a secondary act of interpretation, such as in the passage quoted
above, I employ performative writing to evoke the “immediacy and particularity” of the
musical exchange (Kisliuk 2000: 29). Improvising with my research participants is a recip-
rocal exchange that demands openness and respect, but it is not always easy or comfortable,
since it involves human egos and the negotiation of difference. The knowledge produced
through that musical exchange is both situated and contingent: it is dialogical in Bakhtin’s
sense of the word, as the constant interaction of meanings, each of which may condition
the others in the moment of utterance (1981: 462). Indeed, Conquergood’s emphases on
“process, change, improvisation, and struggle” ([1998] 2013: 56) situate both ethnography
and performance as performative. This move from performance to the performative requires
unpacking.
For Conquergood, creating staged productions from ethnographic field materials ­a llows
us to understand performance as a socio-political act that requires a radical new c­ onception
of ethnography. Here, he follows German anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s call for a turn
“from informative to performative ethnography” (1990: 3), and he describes this turn as an
­ethnography of “the ears and heart that reimagines p­ articipant-observation as ­co-performative
witnessing” (Conquergood 2002: 149). In this context, participant o ­ bservation is a key
­ethnographic methodology whereby researchers participate in the ­language, customs,
and expressive practices of a group, usually for a considerable period of time. Famously
­championed and developed by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (e.g. 1922),
­participant-observation fieldwork methods were an important corrective to ­armchair an-
thropology and ethnomusicology.17 Co-performative witnessing goes further. It breaks down
the hierarchy between researcher and research participant, and understands ­ethnographic
research as, itself, a kind of performance that articulates what performance studies scholar
Soyini Madison calls “soundscapes of power” (2007: 827).
Recently, the concept of co-performative witnessing has been taken up by ­Deborah Wong
(2017), who views Conquergood as a major influence on her work (personal communication).
152  Ellen Waterman
Wong is a long-time member of the Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability, and her
political activism has come to overlap with her ethnomusicological research. In a fascinating
essay on one “soundscape of power,” Wong discusses an incident of fatal police brutality that
was captured by the audio belt-recorders worn by police officers in Riverside to monitor
their interactions with the public. In the essay, Wong exposes both the potential and the
limits of co-performative witnessing, as she attempts to advocate for a victim of police bru-
tality through a performative act of listening. Police officers are supposed to turn on their
audio belt-recorders when dealing with suspects and to submit the timestamped recordings
at the end of their shifts. The recordings are only transcribed if they are required as evidence.
Asking critical questions about the fatal incident, Wong treats the police department’s prac-
tices of transcription as a kind of performance and explores the way the representation of
events is mediated by the original lo-fi recording and the chaotic circumstances (running,
shouting, fighting) in which it was made. She also interrogates her own acts of listening to
the tapes and reading the transcripts: “As with all evidence of trauma, we are instantly part
of a dynamic loop of witness and voyeurism, participants in spectacularized acts of look-
ing … and hearing” (272). Citing Diana Taylor’s work on the problem of being “caught
in the spectacle,” Wong maintains that those who witness injustice have a responsibility to
share their knowledge (Taylor 1997: 25 qtd in Wong 2017: 272). Further, she connects this
responsibility to Conquergood’s argument that “performance studies offers its ‘most radical
intervention’ by unsettling and collapsing the text versus performance distinction as a false
divide that nonetheless gets played out as ‘epistemic violence’” (Conquergood 2002: 148,
151 qtd. in Wong 2017: 273). For Wong, then, performative ethnography (the product of
co-performative witnessing) is a self-reflexive and critical process.18 To understand how eth-
nomusicologists have taken up performative ethnography, however, we need to take a closer
look at theories of performativity.

Performative Ethnography and Critical Theories of Subjectivity

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of J. L. Austin (Derrida [1972] 1982), Judith Butler’s
notion of performativity has become central for theoretical work on the way discourse pro-
duces particular forms of subjectivity, such as gender identities or racial identities. Recall
Austin’s idea, discussed above, of performative speech utterances that enact the condition
they name. Derrida critiqued Austin’s dismissal of unhappy performatives, those “hollow”
or “void” (Austin [1962] 1995: 22) speech acts that occur in fictional contexts such as
­theatre. When uttered by an actor in a play, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” does
not enact a legal marriage. Looking more closely at this, Derrida pointed out that a speech
act’s “general iterability” (1982: 325)—the fact that each citation of a linguistic sign contains
an alteration of meaning that is only possible because it is also already r­ ecognizable—is
­precisely what invests that act with power. We only understand the performative pro-
nouncement of marriage in the play because the formula is repeatedly used in “real” life,
and the meaning of speech acts accrue through their repetition, rehearsal, and citation
within a given social context. Butler built on Derrida’s analysis to argue that gender and sex
have no existence outside their performance in everyday embodied practices (1990, 1993).
We perform gender, for example, through countless, often unconscious, performative acts
of speech, gesture, and physical adornment, which work to reinforce (or alternatively to
transgress) social norms. Such acts are fundamentally embedded in discourse and achieve
their business by “citing” previous performances of gender subjectivity. Crucially, this is
citation with no original; gender is not a biological fact but a social construct.
It is important to note that Butlerian performativity is not a theory of individual agency;
gender is not simply something we freely choose to perform. For example, I may choose to
 Performance and Improvisation  153
perform “masculinity” through my clothes and behavior, but my performance of mascu-
linity will not save me from a patriarchal system that pays women less than men for work of
equal value. Butler’s conception of performativity highlights the potential for transformation
inherent within imperfect or resistant citation; she describes the performance of gender as
“a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (2004: 1). If identity is fluid and
potentially transgressive, Butler cautions, it is also constrained by, and subject to reprisal
from, the social codes through which it is constituted (Butler and McMullen 2016). Such
reprisals can be deadly serious, as seen, for example, in state violence against queer and
transgender people. Butler has developed the concept of performativity in other contexts,
notably, hate speech (1997), and she has married her theoretical work with activist projects
around gender, sexuality, race, and class issues. In sum, Butlerian performativity is a pow-
erful conceptual tool for the critical theorization of subjectivity. (For a further discussion of
Butler, see Sugarman, [this volume].)
Performativity has been particularly influential in feminist and queer performance stud-
ies, where its critical force has been extended and nuanced (Parker and Sedgwick 1995a).
One important example is found in the writings of José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013), whose
work is much influenced by German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s “principle of hope”
(1988, 1995). In Cruising Utopia (2009), Muñoz argues that “queerness is a horizon” (32)—a
­potential subjectivity, and thus a mode of possibility, that is not yet achieved precisely be-
cause it currently exists under violent conditions of social constraint.19 In his analysis of the
Los Angeles punk scene (both from his own experience and as represented through artist
Kevin McCarty’s pictures of punk venues), Muñoz theorizes the power of performance
for audiences. What queer punk youth find on the literal stages of punk performance has
everything to do with recognition, belonging, and a sense of potentiality, which Muñoz,
building on the work of Jill Dolan (2002, 2005), characterized as utopian p­ erformativity (99).
For Muñoz, “the real force of performance is its ability to generate a modality of knowing
and recognition among audiences and groups that facilitates modes of belonging, especially
­m inoritarian belonging” (99). This conception of performativity is clearly more agential
than Butler’s and points to the yearning for social and political efficacy that underwrites
much performative ethnography.
At this point, it is important to emphasize that the notion of performativity has a us-
age in performance studies beyond the critical theories of subjectivity described above.
Richard Schechner devotes a chapter to this key word in his influential book Performance
Studies (2003), tracing the genealogy of this idea from its roots in speech act theory to its
development by scholars in the intellectual movements known as post-structuralism and
post-modernism. (On post-structuralism and performativity, see Sugarman [this volume];
on post-modernism, see Manuel [this volume].) Schechner claims that, “performativity is
everywhere—in daily behavior, in the professions, on the internet and media, in the arts,
and in language” (110). In this sense, the word “performative” is both a noun and an adjec-
tive, and Schechner develops his ideas about this term as part of his larger argument that the
Internet age has brought about a collapse of difference between “theatre” and “real life.”
He locates examples of performativity in reality television shows (112), the use of computer
simulation in military training (122), and the rise of performance art (137). He agrees with
Butler that identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are socially constructed,
but he understands performativity simply to mean any action, event, or thing that behaves
“like a performance” (110). Arguably, Schechner’s broad conception of performativity robs
it of some of its critical force.
Ethnomusicologists committed to performative ethnography adopt a definition of per-
formativity that owes more to the critical praxis outlined (in different ways) by Conquer-
good and Butler than it does to Schechner. For example, the values of reciprocity, critical
154  Ellen Waterman
reflexivity, and social activism are apparent in the work of Kisliuk (2008), Hahn (2007), and
Wong (2008). Performative ethnography puts a new emphasis on the sharing of experience
between ethnographers and the people with whom they work, and entails a deep immer-
sion in the expressive practices being analyzed. Since the doing produces the knowing,
performative ethnography is itself a reflexive and critical praxis. As a result, it may blur
the boundaries between (and hierarchy of ) researcher/research participant (Kisliuk 2008).
It takes seriously the embodied experience gained through practice (for fieldworker and
research participant alike) and treats performance itself as knowledge producing. By paying
close attention to the particularities of situated performances of music and dance, and pre-
senting richly detailed descriptions in ethnographic writing, it seeks to “show” rather than
“tell” (Wong 2008: 85). Performative ethnography often engages with autoethnography,
the ethnographic method of using experiences from one’s own life as ethnographic data
(Reed-Danahay 1997), and places a premium on critical reflexivity (Wong 2008). In doing
so, it moves away from Turnbull’s conception of fieldwork as a liminal and transformative
practice ([1961] 1990); instead, it emphasizes states of disorientation/reorientation in field-
work (Wong 2008: 87; Hahn 2007) and points toward a rejection of the idea of a unitary
self in favor of more contingent notions of subjectivity. Further, it is a “politicized practice”
through which ethnographers seek to reveal the relationship between performance and
power (Wong 2008: 87). Finally, performative ethnography focuses critical attention on the
media in which ethnographic work is communicated (e.g. writing or film), treating ethno-
graphic representation as an expressive translation practice, which Kisliuk understands as a
“meta-performance” (2008: 193).20
Kisliuk, Hahn, and Wong have all made significant contributions to performative
­ethnography in ethnomusicology. For three decades, Michelle Kisliuk (1988, 1998, 2000)
has been working to integrate ethnomusicology and performance studies by combining
“narrative ethnography” with detailed attention to specific performances and making
­important connections between aesthetic and social practice and broader theoretical and
political issues (1998: 13). Her book Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of
Performance (1998) includes narrative description, musical transcription, and astute analysis.
It also includes some of her poetry that emerged from her field experiences. Kisliuk priv-
ileges situated performance and stories of individual people as a counterpoise to previous
systematic and totalizing studies of Central African forest people, which represented them
as “hermetic and quintessential” (12). For Kisliuk, a “fully performative ethnography”
must contain at least three braided conversations: (1) ongoing conversations between the
researcher and her participants; (2) the researcher’s “conversations” with the “experiences
and materials” of performance; and (3) the ethnography, which she conceives as a “meta-
conversation” among the ethnographer, the reader, and the materials and ideas discussed
(2000: 29). Such conversations, Kisliuk points out, always take place in a context of histor-
ically situated and shifting power dynamics (29).
Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (2007) ex-
plores how the nihon buyo dance genre is passed from one generation of dancers to the next
through embodied knowledge that is transmitted, in part, through direct physical contact
with the teacher. Hahn’s voice and body are “ever-present” in the text (18), which takes
an intersensory approach to performance: we see, feel, and listen to Hahn learning nihon
buyo, which is amplified by an accompanying DVD that presents examples of visual, tactile,
and oral transmission. Like Kisliuk, Hahn’s ethnographic writing is filled with performa-
tive interventions, including “orientation” passages that provide sensory thought experi-
ments for the reader. The first orientation, for example, explores the question “How do we
write the body into text?” by asking the reader to imagine “taking a drink of water from a
glass as a performance” (19). More than an exercise in methodology, these orientations draw
 Performance and Improvisation  155
upon and extend the ideas developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a classic analysis
of colonialism that acknowledges the power dynamics inherent in European encounters
with cultural others (Hahn 2007: 18).21 Hahn’s performative “orientations” are designed to
dis-orient and to “sensually outfit” the reader (17), who thus becomes another kind of per-
former in engaging with the text. As a bi-racial scholar-practitioner, Hahn engages directly
with embodied experience (her own, that of other nihon buyo dancers, and those of her
readers) as “sensual orientations and lived experiences of transmission” (13).
We have already explored Deborah Wong’s recent articulation of the role of the re-
searcher as witness, and her commitment to an activist form of performative ethnography
runs throughout her writings. In Speak It Louder, her much-cited book on Asian American
musical performance (2004), the performativity/performance dyad moves beyond its episte-
mological concern with being something and explores the more explicitly activist question of
how saying something can be doing something (to paraphrase Parker and Sedgwick 1995a: 16;
on the relationship between performance and performativity, see Spiller 2014). Wong ex-
plains that her research on Japanese American taiko drumming stemmed from her visceral
reaction to seeing it performed and her subsequent immersion in learning it. “Hearing taiko
made me want to be able to do it,” she writes, “… made me want to be strong and loud like
those Asian American musicians I so admired” (2004: 195). Wong has deeply explored the
dynamics of migration, generation, material culture, collectivity, and subjectivity in North
­A merican taiko, working out from her own immersion in the practice and her relationships
with the taiko community in Southern California to critical, historical, and ethnographic
research (2004, 2016, 2019). In work closely allied to the critical scholarship on race (see
Mahon, this volume), Wong explores the ways in which contemporary taiko performance
articulates new ways of being Japanese American and Asian American. Of course, situated
performances of music don’t have the power to transform a society’s race relations, and
Wong cautions against locating a “simpleminded politics of empowerment” in performance
(2004: 6). Performative ethnography, she argues, must focus not only on what performance
does but on “the all too real fissures that can be created through performance, when making
and unmaking [of social relations, such as those of race/ethnicity] meet” (6).
Performance studies is a diverse field that offers abundant possibilities for immersive,
­creative, and analytical work on situated practice. Related themes are present in the field
of critical improvisation studies (CIS). As Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble have observed
(2015), both share a common concern for questions of “liveness, responsibility, i­ntermediality,
­collaboration and community, critical listening, risk-taking, and experimentation” (5). Across
its widely interdisciplinary spectrum of inquiry, CIS is invested in discovering both what
improvisation “is” and what it “does” in the world. In the following section, I provide a brief
overview of CIS and discuss the contributions of ethnomusicologists there, with particular
attention to improvisation as social theory.

Critical Improvisation Studies

Begun in the early twenty-first century, CIS is an emergent field of inquiry that has, nev-
ertheless, already had a significant impact on interdisciplinary scholarship.22 As a scholar-
practitioner, I found it tremendously exciting to have been involved in the birth of a new
field, one in which theories and methods are still being explored and developed. Perhaps
because it is still so new, defining CIS is quite difficult. For Heble, who directs the Inter-
national Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), the field is impelled by an
ethical and social impetus that was profoundly inspired by experimental forms of impro-
vised music that began in North America and Europe in the 1960s. These include free jazz
and free improvisation—forms of musical practice that encourage individual voices to speak
156  Ellen Waterman
(and be listened to) within a relatively non-hierarchical, democratic group dynamic. An
­A fro-diasporic ­music that has been highly influential, free jazz developed in tandem with the
American Civil Rights movement.23 Heble emphasizes how this music was entangled with
African ­A merican struggles for “equality” and “self-representation” (2000: 6). Extrapolat-
ing from this example, he and other CIS scholars have argued that certain forms of musical
improvisation offer productive models for envisioning a more egalitarian society (6). A key
word for Heble is “dissonance,” and he is especially interested in “cultural practices that are
out of tune with orthodox habits of coherence and judgment—[that occasion] a disturbance
to naturalized orders of knowledge production” (9). Dissonance, here, expresses Heble’s (and
others’) utopian belief that improvisation has the potential to produce social change.
From the beginning, scholarship and aesthetic practice have been closely linked in CIS.
For example, Heble’s conception of the field was partly formed by his decades of experience
as an improvising pianist and as the artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival. He observed
that musicians with different styles and backgrounds, often with no common language and
meeting for the first time at a sound check, could nevertheless make extraordinary music
together because of their sensitive ability to listen and respond in the moment. For Heble,
improvisation is above all a social practice, and this has direct implications for the work
of IICSI. Under his direction, the Institute has sought to create “positive social change
through the confluence of improvisational arts, innovative scholarship, and collaborative
action” (Heble n.d.).
George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut have argued that although CIS benefitted from the
early leadership of musician-scholars, improvisation is a fundamental part of social life and
should be more broadly conceptualized (2016b: 1–2). Ideas from the field are as applica-
ble to emergency management (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2007) and organization science
(Weick 1998; Barrett, 2012) as they are to music. On this view, CIS “seeks to examine
improvisation’s effects, interrogate its discourses, interpret narratives and histories related
to it, discover implications of those narratives and histories, and uncover its ontologies”
(2016b: 3). Writ broadly, CIS sees improvisation in expressive culture as symbolic of a
social world that is, itself, inherently improvisational (13). A fascinating example of this is
Sara Ramshaw’s (2013) analysis of improvisation in the law. She argues that there are many
unknown and unpredictable elements in the courtroom. The law is not absolute but subject
to argument, negotiation, and interpretation. Courtroom lawyers are adversaries whose
actions and responses are not entirely predictable, and performing as a lawyer requires
good improvisation skills. Lawyers must think on their feet, listen actively, and respond
in the moment. Judges, too, must navigate among precedent, arguments, defendants, and
aggrieved parties in applying the law in specific circumstances. Working with improvising
musicians, Ramshaw has even developed an improvisational game called Hydra, inspired by
John Zorn’s game piece Cobra (1984), to teach law students how to become better impro-
visers (Ramshaw et al. 2017).24
It is fair to say that music is to CIS what theatre and oral narrative are to performance
studies—an initial impetus that has excited attention and activity in many arenas. Schol-
ars working on music and CIS are located in diverse fields, including performance studies
(Caines 2016), literature (Heble 2002; Fischlin and Heble 2004a; Siddall 2016; Wallace
2012), philosophy (Peters 2009; Nicholls 2012; E. Lewis 2019), psychology (Sawyer 2003,
2011), computer science (Dean 2003), social aesthetics (Born, Lewis, and Straw 2017), and
human rights (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 2013). It is not only the disciplinary roots of CIS
that are diverse; approaches found within the field are varied as well. For example, while
a substantial body of work in CIS aligns with Heble and sees improvisation as a model for
ethics or politics, this perspective is not universal, and scholars have a range of positions on
this topic. The level of focus varies as well, with some scholars examining the specificity
 Performance and Improvisation  157
of situated aesthetic practices and others developing broad ideas about the ubiquity of im-
provisation across individuals, systems, and institutions. Given the sheer breadth of work
that takes place within CIS, my approach in this section has, by necessity, been selective.25

Ethnomusicology, Music, and Critical Improvisation Studies

Since the field’s inception, many of the scholars who have been involved in CIS have come
from ethnomusicology or closely allied disciplines,26 and a number of these have concerned
themselves with theorizing the social aesthetics (artistic processes analyzed as and through
social relations) of Afro-diasporic and/or intercultural improvisation. For example, trom-
bonist, composer, computer music innovator, and scholar George Lewis has critiqued the
general erasure of race from discourses of experimental music ([1996] 2004; 2004). He pro-
vides a stunning corrective to this tendency in his definitive ethnography of the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (2008), which is discussed further below. Lew-
is’s foundational contributions to CIS include his insistence on analyses that examine the
interaction of multiple forms of identity and a nuanced understanding of the performative
nature of improvisation. (On the notion of intersectionality, see Mahon [this volume], and
Sugarman [this volume].)
Another important work in this area is Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something, a fine-grained
semiotic analysis of jazz music in 1990s New York. Monson compares the embodied
practice of improvisation to the everyday act of conversation, and she emphasizes that in
both situations, improvised interactions may involve affinity (e.g. when two people in a
conversation finish each other’s sentences) as well as contest (e.g. “negotiations or strug-
gles for control of musical space”; Monson 1996: 80). (On Monson’s use of semiotics, see
­Beaster-Jones, this volume.) Discourse theory and practice theory are employed in her book
Freedom Sounds (2007), an analysis of the role of jazz in the history of the US civil rights
movement. Importantly, Monson insists that “the music ‘itself ’ is not external to a social
and political account but rather a central player in the dialogue between art and meaning”
(2007: 25). Approaching related ideas from a different fieldsite, Jason Stanyek’s influential
theorization of intercultural improvisation (2004), discussed below, is worked through the
complex valences of ethnicity and nationalism in Brazilian music (2011). Deborah Wong’s
work is relevant to CIS as well, and she devotes a chapter of Speak It Louder to the social
aesthetics of Asian American improvisation (2004). She has also analyzed masculinity in the
context of taiko improvisation (2016), drawing in part on her own experience as a player
and articulating the development of taiko with the transmission of jazz in post-World War
II Japan. One thing that all these studies have in common is a commitment to grounding
theory in ethnographic or historical research.
A scholar-practitioner working at the meeting point of ethnomusicology and CIS, David
Borgo’s highly original conception of improvisation examines situated practices as systems
(2005, 2016a, 2016b). Taking an ecological approach, Borgo regards systems as “wholes
made up of wholes” (2005: 10), by which he means that all of the parts that make up a
­system are “not only interconnected [with one another] but [also that the system in its
entirety is] able to maintain its own internal structure and to evolve over time” (10). His
book Sync or Swarm (2005), a study of experimental solo, ensemble, and human/machine
improvisation, explores the embrace of uncertainty in both musical improvisation and a
range of late twentieth-century science disciplines, including cognitive science, physics,
and biology. Discussing these connections, Borgo cites mathematician John L. Casti (1994),
who describes the emergence of “the Science of Surprise” (Borgo 2005: 1)—theories of
chaos and complexity whereby “researchers aim to model spontaneous, self-generating
order” and maintain that “irreducibility, irreversibility, and unpredictability are essential
158  Ellen Waterman
rather than aberrant behavior in the world” (3). Drawing a comparison to such theories,
Borgo ­analyses ensemble improvisation in terms of both the coordination of the musicians’
intentions and energies, which he characterizes as “sync,” and the swarm-like quality that
emerges when individual parts are moving in different directions but still form a musical
whole with a collective purpose (9). His work contributes to the intellectual movement of
systems approaches in music studies and rethinks the nature of subjectivity in terms of dis-
tributed agency among musicians, instruments, technology, and space.
Other ethnomusicologists in CIS have focused on issues of gender, sexuality, and embod-
iment. Hahn has explored processes of bodily “orientation and disorientation” in forms of
improvisation that involve both technology (Bahn and Hahn 2003) and physical movement
(Hahn et al. 2016). Drawing on French feminist theory (Cixous and Clement 1985; Irigaray
1996), the violent erotics of philosopher George Bataille (1962, 1987), and BDSM theory
(McKendrick 1999), I outline a feminist ethics of improvisation by examining the extreme
performance practice of violist and performance artist Charlotte Hug (Waterman 2009).
Hug subjects herself and her viola to harsh environments for extended periods of time (e.g.
in a glacier cave and in a torture chamber) in order to explore the complex relationships
among instrument, player, space, and place. I discern a complicated intersubjective quality
to Hug’s work that resonates with feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s dictum “I love to
you,” a phrase she uses to describe an ethics of intimacy based on respect for difference and
reciprocal listening (1996). In another project, Julie Dawn Smith and I (2013) conducted an
ethnography of George Lewis’s “Dream Team,” a quartet that included Lewis on t­ rombone
along with pianist Marilyn Crispell, koto player Miya Masaoka, and drummer Hamid
Drake. Smith and I juxtapose the feminist psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva with
concepts from Butler to analyze the building of a “listening trust” in this reflexively con-
stituted, gender-balanced, and multi-racial ensemble. For example, in my close reading of a
performance by the quartet, I use Butler’s ideas to explore both discursive and material in-
stances of performativity in the group’s musical interactions. Part of my project was to trace
the limits of performativity in improvisation and ask, “When is saying something not doing
something?”27 Finally, it is important to note here that the ethnographic work of A ­ merican
Studies scholar Sherrie Tucker is both well known to ethnomusicologists and crucial to
CIS. In both Swing Shift (2000), her oral history of female jazz musicians during World
War II, and her subsequent book on the social dynamics of the Hollywood Canteen (2014),
Tucker unpacks the history and politics of gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century
jazz and posits innovative ideas about improvisation and subjectivity.
The strain of CIS within music studies has attracted a significant number of scholar-­
practitioners, researchers whose lives as artists deeply inform their thinking about improvi-
sation. For example, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (2002, 2016) has made important contributions to
CIS, and most of the ethnomusicologists discussed above are performers as well as ­scholars.
Perhaps the most famous scholar-practitioner in the field is accordionist and ­electronic
music pioneer Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), and the influence of her work (2005, 2010,
2016) on CIS can hardly be overstated. Through her lifelong cross-genre practice of
­improvisation, her adventurous relationship to technology, and her influential philosophy
of “Deep ­Listening,” she modeled the ethics of inclusion and co-creation to which many
CIS scholars aspire.28 One of her most important contributions will serve as an example of
CIS’s profound commitment to applied research.
In 2009, Oliveros brought a number of other CIS scholars into a project she had been
developing called AUMI (adaptive use musical instrument), an app/instrument for people
with disabilities, including those with very limited voluntary mobility. The researchers
that she approached included people with disabilities (e.g. students, musicians, dancers,
and artists), computer programmers, occupational therapists, and music therapists. AUMI
 Performance and Improvisation  159
is a sampler that exploits the built-in motion capture capability of the cameras on laptop
computers and handheld devices. Even the slightest movement on the part of the user can
trigger music sounds and samples. The AUMI project is based on the principle that music
should be available to, and adapt to, all users, and, for that reason, it is improvisation-based
and free to download. Collaborating with a team of colleagues at the University of Kansas,
Sherrie Tucker holds a weekly drop-in AUMI jam session at a local library. Participants
improvise and record their performances in an inter-ability ensemble context. 29 As Tucker
states, working across abilities usefully puts pressure on the social aspirations of CIS because
it questions “the unevenly palpable boundaries of the utopian ‘we’ with room for all (except
for the unnoticed others who didn’t get in)” (Tucker et al. 2016: 182). AUMI articulates CIS
with disability studies, technology, and participant action research in performative, social,
and therapeutic contexts, and the project has grown into an international consortium of
researchers across several institutions (Oliveros et al. 2011; Tucker et al. 2016; Finch et al.
2016; on disability studies in ethnomusicology, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).
While the work of scholar-practitioners, applied researchers, and practice-based inquiry is
an important part of CIS, the dominant strain of the field, one might argue, is concerned
with exploring the relevance of improvisation for social theory.

Improvisation and/as Social Theory

The idea that improvisation is a generative model for theorizing the social is by no means
new. In his sweeping ideological critique, Noise: The Political Economy of Music ([1977] 1985),
French economist and social theorist Jacques Attali argues that music has always been a
harbinger of social change: in Western society, shifts in the process of musical production
presage shifts in society, and these are characterized by the opposing principles of noise
and order.30 His analysis of twentieth-century music focuses pessimistically on the idea of
“repetition,” by which he means the dominance of recording as the means of producing
and circulating music. Music here is symbolic of the conditions of late capitalism: it is a
commodity made in surplus quantities by a specialized few and “stockpiled” by consumers,
who are alienated from the means of production. In the book’s final chapter, “Compos-
ing,” Attali argues that the only hope for a society mired in repetition is to foster creative
practices that are not slaves to commercial gain and, instead, return music to “collective
play” (141). Significantly, Attali uses the example of African American free jazz, which he
sees as “the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation
inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture” (138). His examples include the
short-lived Jazz Composers’ Guild (founded in 1959) and the Association for the Advance-
ment of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in 1965)—organizations created by African
American artists to respond to the hegemony of club owners, record companies, and critics,
and their resistance to experimental developments in improvised music. 31 As we shall see,
the AACM has been particularly resonant for CIS.
Building on Attali’s ideas about the relationship between music and society, and drawing
inspiration from the musical practices of performers like Sun Ra, William Parker, ­Pauline
Oliveros, and René Lussier, Daniel Fischlin and Heble (2004b) make three significant claims
for musical improvisation. First, like Attali, they argue that certain kinds of ­experimental
musical improvisation serve as potent forms of cultural critique because of their resistance
to “co-optation and commodification” (2004b: 5). Such improvisation, they argue, has
a “dissonant relation to hegemony” (15). Second, improvisation’s potential for resistance
does not primarily come about because it is spontaneous behavior but rather because of
its dialogic qualities (9); thus, for example, many forms of Afro-diasporic improvisation
express the inter-generational trauma of slavery in terms of rebellion, resilience, and hope
160  Ellen Waterman
(Eidsheim and Wong 2016; Lewis [1996] 2004; Lipsitz 2015). An important touchstone for
this argument is the idea that improvisation is a performance of the self—a ­performance
that is actually audible in the music, born of one’s experience and ideas, a “process of
finding one’s own sound” (Lewis 2004: 5). Third, precisely because improvisation brings
the past to bear on the immediate present to imagine a new kind of future, it is a genera-
tive principle for “thinking alternatives” (musical, social, communitarian, and theoretical),
ones that oppose conventional ideas that “circumscribe the limits of human potentiality”
­(Fischlin and Heble 2004b: 10).
Building on this work, Fischlin, Heble, and George Lipsitz (2013) have analyzed case
studies of Afro-diasporic improvisation and its historical connection to human rights activ-
ism to extend the argument that musical improvisation can model an ethics of ­co-creation.32
They argue that improvising equips people to activate “their agency publicly and in relation
to others … . [Moreover,] improvisers have to be aware of the needs of others. They must
recognize problems rapidly and invent solutions immediately” (2013: xv). Fischlin, Heble,
and Lipsitz generate social theory by observing the microsocial details of improvisation, in
which musicians must listen actively and respond in the moment, an intersubjective mode
that requires both risk taking and trust building. Here, improvisation is understood as both
a methodology and an ethics; by becoming empathetic listeners who recognize and respect
difference, we can create more equitable modes of sociality. “Securing rights of all sorts,”
they argue, “requires people to hone their capacities to act in the world, capacities that flow
from improvisation” (xi). This frankly utopian strand of CIS is inspired by powerful histor-
ical examples, the AACM chief among them.
Founded over fifty years ago in Chicago’s then racially segregated South Side, and still
going strong, the AACM has made important contributions to experimental and improvised
music. Members include such venerable artists as Muhal Richard Abrams, A ­ nthony ­Braxton,
Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry ­Threadgill.
Known for its “radical collective democracy” (G. Lewis 2004: 7), the AACM rejected the
commercially and stylistically bounded term “jazz” in favor of the term “Great Black ­Music,”
thus simultaneously marking out a politics of race and refusing to be limited to any particular
genre category. As Jackson and Abrams wrote in 1973, the AACM was more than a musical
collective. It was founded to demonstrate how “the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can
come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom” (72,
qtd in Lewis 2004: 9).33 In his comprehensive history and ethnography, A Power Stronger than
Itself: The AACM and Experimental Music (2008), George Lewis (himself a lifelong member of
the group) articulates the creative contributions of the AACM with their institutional organ-
ization and activism in the wake of the Black Power movement. “[T]he AACM,” he argues,
“provides a successful example of collective working-class self-help and s­elf-determination;
encouragement of difference in viewpoint, aesthetics, ideology, spirituality, and methodol-
ogies; and the promulgation of new cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships be-
tween artists” (2008: x–xi). One practical example of the AACM’s social innovation is its free
music school, where members volunteer their expertise to teach young musicians. AACM
members have been lauded internationally, from the flamboyant and eclectic Art Ensemble of
Chicago, which grew out of the AACM and turned Parisian jazz on its head in 1969, to path-
breaking flutist/composer/bandleader Nicole Mitchell, who enjoys the distinction of having
been the AACM’s first woman president (2009–2010).34 Devoting meticulous attention to
the creative and social contributions of the AACM and setting them within a broader analysis
of the politics of race, Lewis’s book provides an important corrective to the historical masking
of African Americans in the narrative of American musical experimentalism (see also Lewis
[1996] 2004 and 2004). It also demonstrates the complex ways in which the aesthetic and the
social are co-constituted in improvised music.
 Performance and Improvisation  161
The idea of improvisation as social theory has also been developed in the context of
intercultural encounter. Jason Stanyek (2004) examines this topic in his discussion of
the late 1940s Pan-Africanist musical collaborations between African American trum-
peter, composer, and bandleader Dizzy Gillespie and Afro-Cuban conguero and composer
Chano Pozo. Widely influential in culture and politics, Pan-Africanism is an intellectual
movement that posits elements of solidarity among all people of African descent (see
­Esedebe 1994). Like the authors discussed above, Stanyek focuses on musical ­co-creation
but within an intercultural methodology distinguished by two elements: “1) their [the
musicians’] ability to juxtapose different histories without sacrificing identity and 2) their
reflexive use of notions of cultural difference as a basis for collaboration” (2004: 89).
For Stanyek, the face-to-face contact of intercultural improvisation distinguishes it from
cultural borrowing or hybrid musicking; more important than “evocations of Africa” in
Pan-African jazz, he argues, is the musicians’ ability to “communicate and create in spite
of extreme differences,” such as those of musical style, language, history, and culture (91).
The heterogeneity of intercultural improvisation, he argues, models new ways of bridging
difference, of “engaging with those things that separate us” (118) to arrive at a consensus,
however temporary and contingent.
But is the result of such engagement necessarily consensus, and is consensus always the
most desirable musical or social outcome? In my interviews with the intercultural trio Safa
(Amir Koushkani, tar [a long-necked lute]; François Houle, clarinet; and Sal Ferreras, per-
cussion), I found a deep contradiction between the musicians’ fervent expressions of unity
(something they experience on a musical and spiritual level) and their individual accounts
of what makes their music tick (Waterman 2016). For example, in a performance of the
­Persian tasnif (song) “Whisper of Love,” Ferreras laid down a groove on the udu (clay pot
drum) with strong accents and ghosted beats. In a feedback interview, ­Koushkani described
the rhythm as additive, which is typical in Persian music, while Ferreras insisted that his
Latin, syncopated duple feel was crucial to the piece. The musicians attributed these dif-
ferences in interpretation to their individual autonomy within the group, described by
Ferreras as a “triangulated translation game” (302), and this corresponds with Stanyek’s
analysis of heterogeneity as a positive attribute of intercultural improvisation. A focus group
of audience members, however, interpreted the performance as an example of recogni-
tion, the technique of multiculturalism famously described by philosopher Charles Taylor
(1994). Taylor argues that only when a pluralistic society properly acknowledges the par-
ticular needs of minority groups can such citizens feel a genuine sense of belonging. The
problem with recognition, however, is that it is a gift bestowed by the powerful on the
subaltern, and it comes with assimilationist strings attached (see, for example, Coulthard
2007; ­K amboureli 2009). These audience members heard the Iranian-born Koushkani as
intriguingly exotic, leading them on an imaginary excursion to Persia. They also approved
of his falling back to make space for Houle to improvise, a standard ensemble technique
but one that they perceived as evidence of suitable humility on the part of an immigrant
to Canada. In the context of controversial Canadian multicultural policies that seek to
manage and contain difference, the assumptions behind this interpretation are more than
a little disturbing. Additional work is needed in CIS on the crucial role of listening—by
audiences as well as performers and critics—in improvisation. Furthermore, we need to pay
close attention to instances of improvisation that are “unsuccessful,” such as those in which
communication breaks down. How, for example, are we to understand those moments of
improvisation, aesthetic or social, that involve violence? What would the social aesthetics of
deliberate and strategic dissensus look and sound like? Scholars like Gillian Siddall (2016),
Danielle ­Goldman (2010), and Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson (2016) have begun to
explore these questions, but further research is required. This is not to critique the project
162  Ellen Waterman
of theorizing the social through the close examination of improvised music in situated cul-
tural and historical context, but rather to call for a more complete analysis. Anthropologist
Georgina Born has suggested one such approach.
In recent theoretical works, Born (2012, 2017) has delineated four planes of social
mediation in music: (1) the microsocial elements of performance and practice; (2) m ­ usic’s
power to enact imagined communities (affinity groups based on “musical and other
identifications”); (3) music’s ability to refract wider social relations (such as nation, class,
race, religion, gender, and sexuality); and (4) the relationship between music and the
“broader institutional forces” through which it is produced, reproduced, and transformed
(e.g. ­m arkets, ­patronage, and cultural institutions) (2017: 43). Of course, any number of
­ethnomusicological and sociological studies of music have focused on one or more of these
planes. Born’s view, however, is that too much attention has been paid to the ­m icrosocial
plane when, instead, we need to consider music as a constellation or assemblage: “an
­a ggregation of sonic, visual, d­ iscursive, social, corporeal, technological, and temporal
mediations” (44).35 Designing empirical studies that move through and across these four
planes, she suggests, will bring the social and material aspects of musical analysis to-
gether (44). Importantly, Born highlights the role of power here, insisting that a thorough
­account of the negotiation of difference in pluralistic societies, with the possibility of
dissensus instead of consensus, is integral to analysis (46).
Born turns this critical perspective on her autoethnographic account of the Feminist
Improvising Group (FIG), an iconic, experimental, all-women ensemble founded in
London in 1977. FIG included important figures in free improvisation, such as vocalist
Maggie Nichols and pianist Irène Schweizer. Born herself played cello and bass guitar
in the group. Analyzing the ensemble’s work, she describes an anarchic and playful
performance practice informed by feminist politics, one that subversively riffed on the
ordinary domestic activities expected of women at the time (2017: 53). As Born points
out, FIG’s musicking refracted the complexities of gender and sexuality politics in the
UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their experiences performing in an overwhelm-
ingly male musical environment, and the institutional prejudice they encountered as a
result (e.g. a hostile reception by music critics). Far from painting a picture of solidarity,
however, Born confesses that,

the uncomfortable (antiessentialist) truth is that even when all performers were women,
and all were informed by feminist and, often, lesbian feminist politics, the creation of
hierarchical, competitive, or exclusionary musical socialities in performance could still
occur and could sometimes even be pronounced.
(54)

FIG’s “first plane” microsocialities of performance consciously refracted “third plane”

social relations of gender and sexuality. This refraction, however, was “doubled” by the
members’ own subjection to gendered social relations, both as women and as musicians
and improvisers (54). Born describes their affective reach (third plane) as “a fuzzy operation
under the sign of the feminisms and lesbianisms of the time,” while critics were bemused
and antagonized by their “ambiguous, possibly feigned ‘incompetencies’” (55). Like most
improvising ensembles of this period, they survived by getting small public grants and gigs
(fourth plane) (55). FIG might seem to fit Attali’s contemporaneous ideal of returning music
to “collective play” ([1977] 1985: 141). Born, however, is highly critical of Attali’s “reduc-
tive” approach to social analysis because it attributes too much symbolic weight to particu-
lar musical activities (2017: 44–45). Her analysis is a fascinating counterpoint to the more
utopian strands of CIS, but it is, I think, congruent with Heble’s interest in dissonance.
 Performance and Improvisation  163
Improvisation, like performance more generally, is complex behavior, not amenable to neat
categorization, and this is precisely why it is good to think with. CIS provides novel ways
to theorize the aesthetic and the social as co-constitutive and dynamical.

***
Engaged in a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars from the fields of performance
studies and critical improvisation studies, ethnomusicologists have developed diverse theo-
ries and methodologies to study situated practice. From the analysis of social aesthetics, to
the development of applied and practice-based research, and the integration of performance
and ethnographic research as creative praxis and ethics, this dialogue has yielded important
insights into the nature of music and social life. Ethnomusicologists have made significant
contributions to the wider interdisciplinary discourse here, including focused studies of
music and sound, advances in performative ethnography, and theories of intersubjectivity
and embodiment.
As ethnomusicologists become increasingly invested in issues of social justice, what I
have termed the “utopian” dimensions of some strands of performance studies and CIS offer
compelling entry points for research and coalition work with marginalized communities
and for inquiry into under-explored areas, such as disability and the gender and sexuality
spectra. We need to look hopefully at the horizon of possibilities and keep a sharp critical
eye open for fissures and fractures in our analyses. There is also much scope for the use of
theory from performance studies and CIS in ethnographies of musical institutions, such
as festivals and community, religious, and educational organizations. Here, I think of the
way that situated practices within institutional frameworks might articulate with the per-
formative and improvisatory functions of those very institutions, as they draw and redraw
boundaries of exclusion. What might these bodies of theory have to offer to the project of
decolonizing musical institutions? Ethnomusicologists certainly have much to contribute
to CIS by applying theories from that field to a more diverse range of musical and sonic
contexts than has hitherto been the case. And because many, perhaps most, ethnomusicol-
ogists are also dedicated musicians, the further development of practice-based research is a
natural extension of theory—a complement, not a corrective. Finally, working out from the
position that situated practices are always social practices, we might consider ways in which
they are also environmental practices. One of the most exciting areas of inquiry here is the
articulation of ecological theories (e.g. Ingold 2007; Haraway 2016; Morton 2016, 2018)
with performance studies and CIS. What would the analysis of the entanglement of human
and more-than-human factors within a given musical ecosystem tell us about the roles that
music can play in helping us to live in “response-ability” on a damaged planet (Haraway
2016: 2)?36 Taking up these challenges, ethnomusicologists will continue to be leaders in
performance studies and CIS of music and sound.

Notes
1 The themes of embodiment and social practice are critical to a wide range of currents in contempo-
rary social thought. On embodiment, see Text Box 1.1. On social practice and practice theory, see
Text Box 2.1.
2 Contemporary readings of Goffman vary. Like Waterman, many scholars see a substantial difference
between, on the one hand, Goffman’s notion of the performance of the self and, on the other, work
on the performative nature of the subject in the tradition of Judith Butler (1990, 1993); such scholars
often read Butlerian performativity as an advance over the older approach. However, other scholars,
like Philip Auslander (2003: 19, n11), have argued that there are important continuities between these
perspectives, and Goffman’s work remains foundational for much of the sociological research on face-
to-face social interaction. —Harris M. Berger
164  Ellen Waterman
3 The move from (objective, descriptive) ethnographies of musical performance to (reflexive, inter-
pretive, and sometimes activist) performative ethnography is one consequence of this shift in our
understanding of embodied and experiential knowledge that I discuss below. See Qureshi (1987) for
a fine-grained empirical model for analyzing musical performance. On Qureshi, see also Manuel (this
volume).
4 UCHRI was organized by George E. Lewis, Adriene Jenik, and Susan Leigh Foster at the University
of California, Irvine. An important precursor to UCHRI was a 1999 conference named “Improvis-
ing Across Borders: An Inter-Disciplinary Symposium on Improvised Music Traditions,” which was
organized by Dana Reason, Michael Dessen, and Jason Robinson at the University of California, San
Diego (Lewis and Piekut 2016b: xi-xiii). ICASP was centered at the University of Guelph, but its
organizers worked closely with partners at McGill University and the University of British Columbia.
IICSI continues to be centered at the University of Guelph.
5 Ethnomusicologists have always written about performance, and performing music is integral to
music studies in the North American academy; however, the performative turn has taken some time
to seep through music studies as a whole. Recent work in the UK, centered at the Research Centre
for Musical Performance as Creative Practice at the University of Cambridge, has inaugurated a new
wave of musical performance studies across the various music sub-disciplines. To date, this research
has more often focused on detailed empirical studies of how musical performance operates (i.e. on
players and listeners) than on its social or cultural effects. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill,
however, make direct connections to the discipline of performance studies in their edited volume
Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance (2013), which also includes contributions from across music
studies, including ethnomusicology (e.g. the chapters by David Borgo and Ingrid Monson). As the
editors observe, “the wonder is not that music and performance studies come together in this book,
but that they ever needed to be brought together” (2).
6 I am indebted to Harris Berger, himself inspired by Richard Bauman ([1977] 1984), for his careful ar-
ticulation of this set of precursors to performance studies. For excellent introductions to performance
studies, see Carlson ([1996] 2017), Schechner (2003), and Hamera and Madison (2006).
7 Austin’s work was central for a movement within analytic philosophy called “ordinary language
philosophy,” which seeks to understand how language operates in social life. On ordinary language
philosophy and the broader transdisciplinary trends that connect it with performance studies, see Text
Box 1.2.
8 In the introduction to their edited volume Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995a) productively queer this example to show that performative language is
far more complex than Austin’s formulation suggests. For example, they show how witnesses (the
audience) are interpellated into the ritual:
It is the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage; the silence of witness
(we don’t speak now, we forever hold our peace) that permits it; the bare, negative, potent but
undiscretionary speech act of our physical presence—maybe even especially the presence of people
whom the institution of marriage defines itself by excluding—that ratifies and recruits the legit-
imacy of its privilege.
(10–11)

9 Harris M. Berger (1997) takes up the idea of multi-functionality in work on time perception in heavy
metal drumming. Building on Jakobson’s idea as well as those of Edmund Husserl ([1929] 1964),
Berger suggests that time perception is a kind of social practice and that different modes of temporal
perception serve differing purposes for the participants in a performance event. (See also Berger’s
chapter on phenomenology in ethnomusicology in this volume.)
10 On the significance of Bateson’s notion of framing for linguistics and semiotic, see Beaster-Jones (this
volume).
11 Turner taught at a number of institutions in the US. The Department of Performance Studies was
considerably developed under the leadership of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who was chair from
1981 to 1992.
12 Colin Turnbull similarly identifies liminality “as the process of transformation at work” in the rituals
of the Mbuti forest people in Central Africa ([1961] 1990: 79).
13 See also Waterman (1998a, 1998b, 1998c).
14 On Schafer’s role in sound studies, see Meizel and Daughtry (this volume).
15 The relationship between theory and data in social research has been a central concern to a wide
range of scholars. On the dialectic of theory and data in ethnographic work, see Berger and Stone
(Introduction, this volume).
 Performance and Improvisation  165
16 On Geertz and ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume). On Geertz, in-
terpretive anthropology, and gender, see Sugarman (this volume).
17 On participant-observation in ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume).
18 Related to Wong’s work is Nina Eidsheim’s notion of “performative listening” (2009). See Meizel and
Daughtry (this volume) for a discussion of Eidsheim.
19 For a further discussion of Muñoz, see Sugarman (this volume).
20 Sound studies scholars share this concern for exploring new media in ethnographic representation.
See Meizel and Daughtry (this volume).
21 For a fuller discussion of Said, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
22 The terms “Critical Improvisation Studies” and “Critical Studies in Improvisation” have both been
widely used and are synonymous. In this chapter, I use the succinct designation CIS to refer to the field.
23 Begun in the late 1950s and 1960s, free jazz abandoned the conventions of harmony and form pre-
viously dominant in the genre in favor of an open approach to improvisation. The term is closely
associated with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1961 double quartet album Free Jazz. The expression
“free improvisation” was used by UK and continental European improvisers in the 1960s to refer to a
non-idiomatic form of improvisation that determinedly avoided referencing previous styles or genres.
An oft-cited source of information about free improvisation is guitarist Derek Bailey’s book Improvisa-
tion: Its Nature and Practice in Music ([1980] 1993). Bailey claims that improvisation is the “most widely
practiced” and “least acknowledged and understood of musical practices” (ix). This tension between
claims made for specific forms of improvisation and claims about improvisation’s pervasiveness is
characteristic of the early development of CIS.
24 A game piece is essentially a framework for improvisation in which players make musical choices
according to a given set of rules that are often signaled by a conductor using hand gestures, cards, and
hats. For example, Zorn has created musical game pieces by adapting the rules of sports such as hockey
and lacrosse. Cobra is arguably his most famous and oft-performed game piece.
25 The Improvisation Studies Reader, edited by Rebecca Caines and Heble (2015), and the two-volume
Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, edited by Lewis and Piekut (2016a), offer a wide va-
riety of perspectives for the reader who wishes to delve deeply into CIS. See also the open-source,
peer-reviewed journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation.
26 A discussion of all of the ethnomusicological research on improvised music is beyond the scope of
this short section, which focuses exclusively on the field of CIS. With the exception of the pioneering
work of Ernst Ferand (1938), the serious study of improvisation per se in ethnomusicology came in the
1970s, relatively late in the field’s development (Nettl 2016). In addition to his own important studies
of improvisation in the classical Persian genre radif (1972; [1987] 1992), Bruno Nettl has spearheaded
two landmark collections on improvisation across diverse cultures and genres, In the Course of Perfor-
mance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation (Nettl and Russell 1998) and Musical Improvisation:
Art, Education, and Society (Solis and Nettl 2009). See also Bakan et al (2008), Berliner (1994), Farhat
(1990), Feld (2012), Jairazbhoy (1971), Kaufmann (1968, 1976), Marcus (2007), Nzewi (1991), Muller
and Benjamin (2011), Nooshin (2003, 2015), Racy (2000), Shannon (2006), Touma (1971), and Wade
(1984). Since 2010, scholarship on improvisation in ethnomusicology has been greatly energized by
the leadership of young scholars, including Mark Laver (2015), Siv Lie (2017), Mark Lomanno (2012),
and Alex Rodriguez (2016), as well as seasoned jazz scholar Scott Currie (2017), who were all instru-
mental in founding the Improvisation Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology (see Improvisation
and Ethnomusicology, n.d.). I am indebted to Mark Laver, who did much work to assemble a sum-
mary of research on this topic for the Improvisation Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. See
Nettl (2016) for an excellent overview of the ethnomusicological study of improvisation.
  It is worth noting as well that space has only allowed me to discuss a small selection of the substan-
tial CIS scholarship on music. For example, an important body of writings in this area exists in French
and German (see Lewis and Piekut, 2016b). Scholars within CIS have likewise engaged the topic of
music pedagogy. Relevant works include, Heble and Laver (2016), Heble et al (2011), and a special
issue of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation edited by Heble and
Waterman (2007). Finally, I will note that the world of jazz studies is vast, and the only scholars I have
addressed in this area are those from within CIS (e.g. G. Lewis, E. Lewis, Heble, Monson, Stanyek,
and Tucker). A significant ethnomusicological study on this topic is Paul Berliner’s magisterial Think-
ing in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994).
27 For a novel extension of the idea of “the performative,” see McMullen’s (2016) essay on “the
improvisative.”
28 Deep Listening is a philosophy and practice of active global and focal listening developed by Oliveros
over many decades. For more information on her work, see the Deep Listening Institute website
(Deep Listening n.d.).
166  Ellen Waterman
29 See AUMI-KU InterArts (n.d.). Tucker has also collaborated with Jesse Stewart, a percussionist, im-
proviser, and composer, who has run similar projects with AUMI in Ottawa, Canada (Stewart et al
2017).
30 This notion is related to what scholars often refer to as “homology theory,” which suggests that a
group’s social structure is parallel with or analogous to the musical structures that it employs. See
Manuel (this volume, n10). —Harris M. Berger
31 Although Attali doesn’t discuss punk music and DIY (Do It Yourself ) culture, he was, of course,
writing during the birth of these movements, which are another key example of musical and social
rebellion. Although his theory is both ideological and extremely general, his analysis is at least partly
prescient, considering the radical reconfiguration of the recording industry that came later and the
advent of Internet music publishing.
32 Here, they are in company with African American literary and cultural theorists of performance, such
as bell hooks (1995), Robin D. G. Kelley (2002), and Fred Moten (2003).
33 As George Lewis points out, important writings on improvisation and the social have emerged from
AACM members (e.g. Braxton 1985; Smith 1974).
34 For an account of the AACM’s international impact, see E. Lewis (2017); for a discussion of Afro-­futurism
and radical gender politics in Nicole Mitchell’s music, see McNeilly and Smith (2016).
35 Born’s theory of musical assemblages draws in part on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s theory of
assemblages (1980), which geographer Martin Müller has succinctly described as “a mode of ordering
heterogeneous entities so that they work together for a certain time” (2015: 28).
36 See Sugarman (this volume) for a related discussion of ways that ethnomusicology might develop
through engagements with ecological scholarship and other bodies of theory that seek to rethink the
notion of the human.

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7 Decentering Music
Sound Studies and Voice Studies
in Ethnomusicology
Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry

Ethnomusicologists have been concerned with the broad category of voice and the even
more capacious category of sound since the early days of the discipline. To take a ­single
example, Alan Merriam (e.g. 1962, 1977) regularly acknowledged the insufficiency of the
terms “singing” or “music” when applied to fieldsites where vocal practices moved smoothly
along a spectrum from everyday speech to melodious chanting, and where material objects
that looked and sounded to his ear like musical instruments were used for non-musical
­purposes by sonic actors who themselves were often attuned to nonhuman soundscapes (e.g.
“ocarinas” used as “signalling device[s]” by hunters situated within the animal and environ-
mental sounds of the hunt). In other words, ethnomusicology has long recognized the ways
in which sound and voice trouble narrow understandings of music, serving ­simultaneously
as the ontological foundation and the taxonomic excess of ­musical praxis. More recently, and
with increasing frequency, ethnomusicologists have begun undertaking ­serious, sustained
investigations that refuse to privilege the musical over the non-musical (e.g. Feld [1982]
2012; Fox 2004; Ochoa Gautier 2014; Wong 2017) and that actively participate in broader
interdisciplinary conversations about the cultural histories, social dynamics, and corporeal
effects of vocal expressions and audible vibrations (e.g. S­ eeger 1987; Weidman 2006; Meizel
2011; Schwartz 2015). In no small measure, we argue, contemporary e­ thnomusicology can
be characterized by its tendency to decenter music in favor of the more expansive terrains
of sound and voice.
Teasing out the relations among these three interdigitated concepts, one can say that
­anything experienced as “music” involves sound—or, at the very least, is assigned a r­elationship
to sound. However, precisely which sounds are interpreted as music depends on interpretive
frameworks that have both cultural and individual dimensions. Indeed, it would not be an
empty tautology to say that “music” is best defined as “that which is listened to as music,” so
long as “listening” is understood to be not the passive reception of sounds by the ear but a
historically and culturally inflected act of individuals and collectives. Deborah Wong (2014)
has argued that focusing on sound rather than on the narrower notion of music can help eth-
nomusicologists avoid the bias, stemming from the Western conservatory, that frames music
as a sphere of aesthetic experience separated from the rest of social life. Adopting the frame-
work of sound effectively provincializes music, revealing it to be but one neighborhood in a
larger conceptual territory of vibration, resonance, mediation, and audition. David ­Novak
and Matt Sakakeeny have assessed the costs and benefits of this move, cautioning that “the
repositioning of ‘music’ within the domain of ‘sound,’” while generally clarifying, “has
sometimes minimized or obscured the vastly different histories of these terminological con-
cepts” (2015: 6). The relationship between “sound” and “music,” they argue, is a complicated
one, with each term bringing its own history of use, its own cluster of connotations, and its
own network of analogues in translation.
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  177
What then of “music” and “voice?” It would seem that the latter term, rather than
s­ wallowing up the former as sound purports to do, cuts through it, establishing a vector
that emphasizes music’s embodied and communicative capacities. To focus on voice is to
place singing in dialogue, as it were, with the full range of vocal practices, from the cough
to the whisper to the scream (LaBelle 2014). This move encourages music scholars to ex-
plore a broad range of vocal performances, including those (e.g. Qur’anic recitation) that
are understood by practitioners to exist outside of musical frameworks. At the same time,
­emphasis on voice in music necessarily comes at the expense of drawing attention away
from its non-vocal dimensions. Instead of provincializing music, then, the frame of voice
filters it, revealing the intensity of its ties to other modes of vocal utterance. Voice is at once
broader and narrower than music, rendering the relationship between the two terms inter-
estingly unstable.
What follows is a selective review of ethnomusicology’s discursive encounters with sound
studies and voice studies, burgeoning interdisciplines that join together scholars throughout
the humanities, social sciences, and, increasingly, sciences in pursuit of a deeper under-
standing of their respective objects. In the first half of this chapter, we survey ethnographic
and environmental approaches to the study of sound, sound-centric studies of media and
technology, and recent explorations of the relationship between sound and listening. The
second half assesses scholarship on voice in clinical and philosophical registers, explores
vocal embodiment and the perception of social and physiological difference,1 and examines
the politics of collective vocality and the use of voice as a metaphor for authorial agency.
Each half concludes with a brief case study drawn from our engagement with the rubrics of
sound (Daughtry) and voice (Meizel). The chapter closes with a brief set of remarks on the
implications that sound studies and voice studies hold for ethnomusicology, and vice versa.

Sound Studies: From Acoustemology to Precarity

“Sound Studies,” writes Jonathan Sterne, “is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the
human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2012a: 2,
emphasis in the original). Scholars who identify with sound studies enjoy a wide range of
interests, from acoustics to perception, from sound media to intersensoriality, from histories
of listening to critiques of sonic violence. Sound studies scholars grapple with the com-
plex dynamics of sonic acts and the equally complex interrelationships that bind sounds,
humans, and environments together. Though the study of sound has a centuries-long
history, sound studies only began to coalesce as a coherent field of inquiry in the early
2000s, with the publication of influential monographs and edited volumes by Bruce Smith
(1999), John Durham Peters (1999), Emily Thompson (2002), Jonathan Sterne (2003), Veit
­Erlmann (2004), Michael Bull and Les Back (2003), Mark Smith (2004), and others. With
time, scholarly societies began to reflect their memberships’ growing interest in sound:
the ­A merican Anthropological Association formed a Music and Sound Interest Group in
2009, the same year that the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) established its Sound
Studies Special Interest Group. The conference theme of the 2010 SEM conference was
“Sound Ecologies,” and its call for proposals encouraged “a keen interest in environments
and soundscapes” (Society for Ethnomusicology 2010). The American Studies Association
launched its Sound Studies Caucus in 2011, and in 2012 SEM and the American Musico-
logical Society held a joint pre-conference symposium on ecomusicology that reflected
a widespread engagement with sonic phenomena. That same year saw the publication of
the Sound Studies Reader, which was edited by Sterne, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound
Studies, ­edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, followed in 2012. The past decade
has also witnessed the establishment of academic journals in this area: The Journal of Sonic
178  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
Studies; Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Sound and Sound ­Experience are peer-reviewed vehicles, and the popular blog Sounding
Out!, founded in 2009, remains a vibrant site for informal sound-centered scholarship.

Sound Ethnography, Soundscapes, and Ecomusicology

The principal contributions that ethnomusicologists have made to the interdisciplinary con-
versation on sound involve a sensitivity to the dynamics of musical praxis, a commitment
to ethnographic methodologies, and attention to subjects outside of the Anglophone West.
Steven Feld’s landmark monograph Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in
Kaluli Expression (first published in 1982 and with revised editions in 1990 and 2012) exem-
plifies all three of these characteristics.2 Sound and Sentiment has been widely acknowledged
as a foundational text for sound studies, one that laid out many of the priorities for the field
that would emerge two decades later.3 Feld has stated that his interest in the ethnography of
sound came from his undergraduate work in the late 1960s with the anthropologist Colin
Turnbull (1924–1999). “It was in the process of thinking about the relationship between
his [Turnbull’s] recordings and his writings,” Feld explains, “that I realized how important
sound and sound recording was, particularly if you did research with people who live in
intensely rich aural environments” (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 461). Feld’s research among
the Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea’s Bosavi rainforest detailed how they connected
human expression with the sounds of birds, and how bird sounds helped to shape Kaluli
experience. His interest in the Kaluli’s sound-saturated mode of being-in-the-world led
him to coin the term acoustemology in the 1990s.4 Combining “acoustics” and “epistemol-
ogy,” this portmanteau reveals sound to be more than a simple by-product of nature and/or
culture; sound, for Feld, also encompasses the dynamic feedback that joins acts of sounding
to acts of listening, interpretation, and emplacement. In his most recent formulation of the
concept, Feld writes:

Acoustemology … question[s] sound as a way of knowing. It asks what is knowable, and

how it becomes known, through sounding and listening. Acoustemology begins with
acoustics to ask how the dynamism of sound’s physical energy indexes its social imme-
diacy. It asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to expe-
rience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations. Answers to such questions
do not specifically engage acoustics on the formal scientific plane that investigates the
physical components of sound’s materiality … Rather, acoustemology engages acous-
tics at the plane of the audible—akoustos—to inquire into sounding as simultaneously
social and material, an experiential nexus of sonic sensation.
(2017: 85)

An acoustemological approach to the study of sound provides “a new all-species way to talk
about the emplaced copresence and correlations of multiple sounds and sources” ([1982]
2012, xxvii) and about the ways in which sound and listening participate in the constitu-
tion of experiential worlds. This move has helped subsequent scholars effect a turn away
from deterministic histories of sound media 5 and toward the project of understanding the
structures, flows, and disjunctures of what Deborah Kapchan (2017: 2) has called “sound
­k nowledge—a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening.”
One of the distinctive features that sound studies and ethnomusicology share is a sus-
tained discourse on the value of recorded sound as a mode of scholarship in its own right,
rather than as an illustration or adjunct to the authoritative word.6 In ­ethnomusicology, the
best-known piece of “sound scholarship” is Feld’s Voices of the Rainforest, a series of extended
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  179
environmental recordings of Kaluli life that aired on (US) National Public Radio in 1984
and 1985, and was later released on compact disc (1991). Other influential works include
Barry Truax’s environmental compositions from the same period (e.g. Riverrun and other
tracks on Digital Soundscapes [1986])7 and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “soundwalks” and “com-
posed environments” (see Westerkamp n.d., 2002). More recently, sound artists such as
Francisco López (1998) and Christina Kubisch have created works that subtly map the vibra-
tional environment of particular spaces and emphasize the sonic agency of human and non-
human entities, from frogs to thunder to the thrumming of machines. Kubisch’s “Electrical
Walks” series (see Kubisch, n.d.) is particularly provocative in that she uses specially designed
headphones to allow participants to hear the otherwise inaudible field of electromagnetic
vibrations that are generated by the ubiquitous technologies of modernity (e.g. light fixtures,
ATM machines, computers, electric outlets). Sound works such as these do much more than
entertain: they generate questions, crystallize fields of inquiry, and illuminate relationships
between sounds, listeners, and the environments they inhabit.
All of these projects owe some debt to the work of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer
(b. 1933), who introduced the notion of soundscape to mean “any acoustic field of study”
(such as a composition, a radio program, or an acoustic environment) that allows one to
understand the sonic dimensions of a region or locale (1969, 1977, 1994). In 1969, Schafer
and his colleagues in the World Soundscape Project began recording a wide variety of en-
vironmental sounds, which, in turn, led to the development of the field of acoustic ecology.
The term “soundscape” itself has multiple meanings. “Like landscape,” as ethnomusicologist
David Samuels and his co-authors put it, soundscape “contains the contradictory forces of
the natural and the cultural, the fortuitous and the composed, the improvised and the delib-
erately produced. Similarly, as landscape is constituted by cultural histories, ideologies, and
practices of seeing, soundscape implicates listening as a cultural practice” (Samuels, M ­ eintjes,
Ochoa, and Porcello 2010: 330).8 In this sense, the “-scape” of landscape and soundscape
points both to the capture of an environmental scene and to the transformation of that scene
through its framing. In another sense, the -scape suffix implies fluidity and flow, such as the
movement of people, ideas, and capital that, according to anthropologist Arjun A ­ ppadurai,
characterizes the process of globalization (1990, 1996). Here, “soundscape” can be heard
to join ­Appadurai’s terms “ethnoscape,” “mediascape,” “technoscape,” “­ financescape,” and
“ideoscape,” adding a sensory, interspecies dimension to these otherwise synthetic and
­human-centered concepts. (On Appadurai’s theory of “-scapes,” see Wallach and Clinton
[this volume]. On Schafer and performance studies, see Waterman [this volume].)
The notion of the soundscape is a complex one that continues to evolve. In my (Daughtry’s)
2015 study of wartime sounds and audition, I critique the soundscape concept, pointing to
the paradoxical way in which its seeming inclusivity (i.e. soundscapes appear to involve all
of the sounds in a particular locale) is actually the product of a discrete act of audition by a
discrete  ­auditor (i.e. what I record, what is audible to me). All too often, this auditor goes
unmentioned and untheorized, as do the ideologies of sounding, listening, and emplacement
that necessarily undergird all soundscapes. With this in mind, it can be productive to think of
soundscapes as the products of three forces: auditory regimes (i.e. the habitus that structures the act
of listening in a given place),9 sonic campaigns (the structures and agendas that enable particular
sonic acts), and acoustic territories (the environments that help shape and are themselves shaped by
acts of sounding). These forces, in turn, need to be understood as interacting in complex ways
with the similarly dynamic forces that are linked to other sensory modalities. As I have argued:

To imagine human experience taking place at the intersection of auditory regimes,

sonic campaigns, and acoustic territories is to confront the immensely complicated
web of histories, actors, and influences that hides beneath the seemingly simple act of
180  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
listening to the sounds that surround us. But the situation is significantly more complex
than that. In the end, in order to move closer to an appreciation of the rich complex-
ity of human sensory experience, we would have to imagine these three frameworks
interacting in unpredictable ways with the scopic, tactile, olfactory, and other sensory
regimes, campaigns and territories that are in a constant state of efflorescence around
each one of us. We would have to make room for intersensorial hybridity, the merging
of regimes of sight and smell and hearing and touch and thermoception and proprio-
ception and the so-called “sixth sense” (see Howes 2009). And, to make matters even
more confounding, we would have to acknowledge the myriad iconoclastic acts of lis-
tening, sounding, looking, moving, emitting, smelling, and in other ways interacting
with the world that take place every day. The mind reels at the prospect of coming to
terms with our essential experiential richness and constant state of sensory excess.
(2015: 212)

Musical sound adds still more complexity to this situation. Although music is only one part
of a locale’s soundscape, attending closely to musical praxis can deepen our understanding of
the profound role that environmental sounds play in human lifeways. As Jean-Jacques N ­ attiez
(1999), Ted Levin (2006), and Megan Rancier (2014) have suggested, many indigenous mu-
sical traditions can be heard as archives of locally emplaced sounds, such as the presence of
a mosquito’s buzzing or the calls of seabirds in Inuit throat games, the mimetic reflection of
water in some modes of Tuvan throat singing, or the imitation of wolves in the music of the
Kazakh qyl-qobyz fiddle. Similarly, many of the sonic tropes of hip-hop beatboxers and the
practice of sampling in hip-hop music production can be heard as mimetic translations of
industrial soundscapes into human terms. As Daphne Carr (forthcoming) notes, the ubiquity
within hip-hop of the police siren—either in the form of a recorded sample or as approx-
imated by the voice (e.g. in the 1993 song “Sound of Da Police” by ­K RS-One: “Woop,
Woop! That’s the sound of da police! Woop, Woop! That’s the sound of the beast!”)—­
powerfully evokes the dystopian urban soundscape of African American alterity and the
complex of structural inequities and existential challenges that help to configure it.
This type of soundscape research is closely related to the burgeoning area of ecomu-
sicology, which began to develop in the first decade of the twenty-first century and, in
­ethnomusicology, coalesced with the founding in 2011 of the SEM’s Ecomusicology S­ pecial
Interest Group. Scholars in this area seek to understand the “intellectual and practical
­connections between the studies of music, culture, and nature (both the socially constructed
‘nature’ [i.e., ideas and ideologies about the environment] and the physical environment)”
(Ecomusicology: n.d.). Where older scholarship on music and the environment focused on
representations of place in music, the new ecomusicology uses music and sound to under-
stand the concrete links between a people’s social practices and the natural environments
from which they emerge. This approach is crystallized in Nancy Guy’s call for attention to
“environmental materiality, to the affective bonds [that connect the people in a locale] with
nonhuman elements (sentient or otherwise), … [and] to the perception and experience of
the physical environment” (2009: 219).
Much of the work done in ecomusicology takes activism as its focus. For example, Mark
Pedelty’s Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (2012) and A Song to Save the Salish
Sea: Musical Performance as Environmental Activism (2016) examine the role of ­music—in
particular, popular musics—in environmentalist movements. A performer himself, ­Pedelty
asks questions that are at the forefront of studies in sound and the environment: “How can
we make our music more sustainable? Or, to put it in more positive terms, how might our
music proactively promote sustainability? Can music be put to work?” (2012: 5).10 The
idea of sustainability has inspired a variety of preservation and management projects. More
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  181
than merely documenting soundscapes, these projects interpret the meaning of sound,
place, and the relationship between the two. In 2000, for example, the US National Park
Service founded the National Sounds Program (NSP). Their online archive presents re-
cordings of sounds and soundscapes from a number of US national parks (National Sounds
Program n.d.). Beyond merely collecting these sounds, the NSP also works to reduce the
noise in US parklands, making these spaces correspond with the expectations of quiet
and serenity that many urban dwellers have of rural spaces. Another example is historian
Emily Thompson’s online archive of the everyday sounds heard in New York City in the
1920s and 1930s (Thompson and Mahoy n.d.). Many of the sounds in the archive were
initially recorded by the city’s Noise Abatement Commission, which was established in
1929 to address a massive wave of noise complaints that had developed during the boom-
ing economy of jazz age New York. Digitizing these recordings, Thompson and her team
preserve sounds from the past (e.g. street cries, church bells), but they also reinterpret their
meanings, framing them as valuable historical texts, rather than environmental hazards.
The project reminds us that the significance of sound is as fluid and contingent as the
content of a soundscape itself.
Discussing the literature in this area, Jeff Todd Titon has observed two prevalent types
of ecomusicological work. The first type follows the model of ecocriticism in literature and
focuses on musical texts, especially the representations of nature in music found within
individual works by specific composers; the second type examines music’s impact on the
environment and focuses on the issue of sustainability. Titon critiques ecomusicology’s
failure to problematize the scientific-realist idea of nature as something externally “real and
endangered,” rather than understanding it as a concept that is “humanly and socially con-
structed” (2013: 15). Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2016) has launched a more foundational
critique, arguing that the vast bulk of the ecomusicological project ends up reinforcing
untenable dividing lines that separate man (understood as “the transcendental autonomous
individual,” Strathern 1988: 21, quoted in Ochoa Gautier 2016: 126), nature (understood as
a fully separate reserve of nonhuman entities), and culture, specifically its musical/sounding
element (understood as “the Good”; 126). Ochoa Gautier suggests that, rather than building
their engagement upon ecomusicology’s tripartite model of essentialized relations among
“nature, culture, and music,” sound scholars concerned with the environment need to
“drastically rethink the political implications of keeping the underlying ontology that such
a relation implies” (140).

Sound Studies Approaches to Media and Technology

If the ethnographic and ecocritical work discussed above can be seen to constitute ­promising
peripheries for sound studies, investigations of the history of sound technologies (and the
human “audile techniques” that enabled and were enabled by them; Sterne 2003) occupy
a territory closer to its hot center. Since the late nineteenth century, audio recordings
have served as a crucial site for the negotiation of human relationships to sound; over the
twentieth century, people around the world integrated recordings into their situated praxes
of listening to music, documenting events, memorializing the dead, imagining and reim-
agining the past, and managing the experience of time. Jonathan Sterne’s landmark 2003
monograph The Audible Past places the development of recording technologies into cultural
context by situating them within the longer history of ideas about sound and perception in
the West. The invention of sound recording was not merely a question of overcoming tech-
nical hurdles; rather, as Sterne writes, its emergence depended on cultural and economic
relations “that [allowed] a set of technologies to stand out as a unified thing with clearly
defined functions” (182).
182  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
In the earliest years of mechanical sound inscription, those functions were not immedi-
ately defined. Until recently, credit for the creation of recorded sound was typically assigned
to Thomas Edison. In 2008, however, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Labora-
tory in California, along with a group from Indiana University, found that “transcriptions”
made in the late 1850s and early 1860s by a device called a phonautograph—in which sound
waves had been inscribed on sheets of paper and made visible using smoke from an every-
day oil lamp—could be digitized and “played” with a newly created virtual stylus (Rosen
2008). The transcriptions had not been intended for playback but as an experiment in
“stenography” (the visual representation of speech). These early accidental recordings were
made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French typesetter, and predated Edison’s
tinfoil phonograph by nearly twenty years. They are now considered the earliest extant
recordings of the human voice. From this moment, and increasingly over time, recordings
became a site of both the voice’s discursive location in the body and its dislocation from the
body. As Miriama Young explains, the twentieth-century recording industry established a
“paradigm in which the music, the performer, and its material manifestation [the recording]
were inextricably bound” together (2016: 87); at the same time, Young argues, the new
record labels commoditized and even fetishized acousmatic sound (sounds that come from
unseen sources). In other words, in the context of this new music industry, the document
provided by a recording functioned as both an index for a specific sound source—a piano,
a body—and as a (mediated and mediating) source itself.
Every successive iteration of recording technology—the phonograph, the 8-track, the
cassette, the compact disc, the digital file—has changed the ways that people listen to m­ usic,
and these altered listening modes have, in turn, shaped the technologies that f­ollowed.
Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates this recursive relationship between re-
corded sound and its listeners, encouraging researchers to “ask after the changing formations
of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual charac-
teristics, and the institutional politics in which they were enmeshed” (2012b: 11). Tracing
such processes, Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound argues that technologies do not ­d irectly change
culture on their own; rather, it is the “relationship between the technology and its users that
determines the [cultural] impact of recording” (2010: 3). For example, the development of
digital music through the compact disc helped lead to the commercialization of hardware
and software that made music portable and shareable in new ways; listeners, in turn, found
more ways to move and share music, and further developments in digital formats improved
this process. And just as scholars from traditional music fields have argued that active listen-
ing shapes our understanding of sound and music, sound studies scholars have shown that
the mundane sounds that tend to be passively perceived in the background contribute to the
shape of technology-user relationships. For example, Imar deVries and Isabella van Elferen
have argued that the fragmentary music of cell-phone ringtones can operate as complex
sensory and mnemonic triggers for aspects of everyday life (2010). Like Proust’s famous
madeleine biscuit, which set off a flood of sensory memories for that author, the ringtone is
associated with other sensory facets of music culture, along with personal, relational mem-
ories attached to the sound.
Research devoted to mobile sound technologies such as cell phones and MP3 ­players
­examines the explosion of advancements in digital technology in the early twenty-first
­century and the corresponding advancement of sound into new spaces and places, including
in ­cyberspace. As Jason Stanyek and Sumanth Gopinath argue in their introduction to The
­Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2014), the history of mobile sound technologies is long
and ­multi-tentacular, as the trope of mobility applies to millennia of portable musical instru-
ments, musicians, and scores, as well as to the physics of sound itself. Stanyek and Gopinath
also demonstrate how the contemporary history of mobile sound is deeply imbricated with
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  183
technologies of surveillance and other sociotechnical realms that we don’t normally associate
with music or audition. Sound studies work on technologies (e.g. Bijsterveld and van Dijck
2009; Sterne 2012b) reveals the robustness and plasticity of the networks of inventors, institu-
tions, raw materials, labor pools, capital flows, and consumers that shape them.11 It is this plas-
ticity that allows a mathematical technique used in oil exploration (autocorrelation) to work in
the realm of pitch-correction (Auto-Tune) (Provenzano 2018). (On the role of mobile media
technology in the globalization of music, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].)
Recent scholarship has also deepened our understanding of music and sound in other forms
of digital media. Kiri Miller and William Cheng each address the embodied experiences of
video game playing—listening, watching, acting, interacting—and the salience of sound as
a constituent element of virtual space. Miller’s early work in this area (2009) investigated the
schizophonic character of music games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in which play-
ers perform the gestures of live musicianship interactively with previously recorded sound.
Her 2017 book Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media explores the multisensory
nature of dance games, such as Just Dance or Dance Central, which “transform sonic material
into visual and kinesthetic material, using processes that require the participation of dancing
­bodies” to generate “immersive multisensory experiences and intimate social connections”
(95). Cheng’s 2014 Sound Play encourages readers to consider the place of video game sounds
in experiences of agency, in ontologies of virtuality and reality, in game-world transgression,
and violence. Game audio, he writes, “shuttles players between real and virtual registers of
aural, visual, psychological, tactile, and aesthetic engagement” (13). This and other research
in digital sound cultivate an interest in the “posthuman,” a complex concept that includes
theories that extend subjectivity to nonhumans (e.g. Kohn 2013), studies of technologies that
help humans transcend the limits of their fleshy bodies (e.g. Hayles 1999), and philosophical
treatises on life after humanism (e.g. Wolfe 2009). Alexander Weheliye, for example, argued
in 2002 for the study of subjectivity in sonic contexts, as most work on subjectivity to date
had been ocularcentric (focused on the visual). In particular, he encouraged new attention
to black uses of posthuman, technologically produced musical sounds, particularly in R&B,
which he suggested are “not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity” (22).

Modes of Listening
One of the most energetic areas in sound studies involves an intense examination of listen-
ing experiences, proceeding either from the perspective of phenomenology (Ihde 1976; on
phenomenology and ethnomusicology, see Berger, this volume) or from a more general in-
terest in lived experience. If earlier music scholarship allowed listening to be subsumed into
the more abstract concept of “reception,” a growing number of recent scholars—including
Harris Berger (1999), Jean Luc Nancy (2007), Peter Szendy (2008), and Charles Hirschkind
(2009)—theorize listening as not just the mode of apprehending music and sound, but as an
ethical project, an act of poiesis, and even a mode of being-in-the-world. For example, film
scholar Michel Chion has explored the differing ways in which audience members attend
to sound and to the fusion of sound and image in film ([1994] 2012). Chion introduced the
concepts of causal listening, “listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause
(or source),” semantic listening, “that which refers to a code or a language to interpret a mes-
sage,” and reduced listening, which attends to the “sound object” and “focuses on the traits of
the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning” (48–50; see also Fleeger 2014).
Building on Chion’s work and that of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2015), Kapchan ar-
gues that the process of listening is “transductive.” In electrical engineering, a transducer is
a component that changes one form of energy into another form of energy. A microphone,
for example, transduces the acoustical energy from sound waves into electrical energy, which
184  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
is then sent to an amplifier or recorder. In her edited book Theorizing Sound Writing (2017),
Kapchan suggests that listening operates in similar ways, as sounds perceived in the envi-
ronment are transduced into other forms, such as thoughts, feelings, and actions. Recasting
Chion’s scheme of listening practices as “genres of listening,” which she compares to genres
of music, she argues that differing listening acts transduce sound in different ways, “orienting
the listener in particular affective directions.” To Chion’s list of listening modes, Kapchan adds
composer Pauline Oliveros’s notion of transformative “deep listening” (listening that initi-
ates trance or other intense experiences; see Oliveros 2005), and Kapchan explains how the
contributors to her book explore a wide range of listening processes, including “transitive and
intransitive listening,” “empathic listening,” “layered [or “palimpsestic”] listening,” “tactical
listening” (listening to effect change), and “listening as witness” (Kapchan 2017: 5).12
The act of listening, of course, is not strictly an affair of the ears. As music theorist Joseph
Straus observes, even the auditory process of hearing itself can be considered a multisensory
one, rather than a “one-to-one mapping of sense perceptions onto a single sensory organ
[the ear]” (2011: 167). Beginning with Anthony Seeger’s Why Suyá Sing (1987), ethnomusi-
cologists and, later, sound studies scholars have emphasized the extent to which the tactile,
kinesthetic, and even visual systems register sound. The experience of attending a musical
performance, for example, may include feeling vibrations, moving the body, and watching
the actions of the musicians. Even listening to a recording involves more than hearing, and,
as discussed above, recording technology itself initially came about through a desire for
the visual representation of sound. As Sterne argues, the interaction between auditory and
visual perception that has informed and often shaped sound recording and its listening prac-
tices creates a “kind of synesthesia” (2003: 50). Not usually referred to as an effect of sound
recording, the term “synesthesia” is typically applied to a complex cognitive phenomenon,
sometimes considered a neurological condition, in which two or more of an individual’s
senses are involuntarily linked, as when a person sees a particular color when they hear a
certain pitch or harmonic structure.13
Some studies (e.g. Neufeld et al. 2013) indicate that synesthesia may be more common in
autistic people. Straus has considered autistic ways of hearing within a framework he calls
“disablist hearing,” which rejects the ableist essentialization of hearing as a solely auditory/
cognitive process. For Straus, conventional music scholarship emphasizes “prodigious” and
“normal” hearing; that is, it expects and constructs particular types of extraordinary and
ordinary listeners to music, and in doing so, normalizes and reproduces these practices.
Straus argues against framing other kinds of hearing as medical defects that must be cured
or mitigated through music therapy. Rejecting medical models of disability, he supports
the notion from disability studies that both ability and disability are socially constructed.
In other words, if music education, performance, and production did not privilege “pro-
digious” or “normal” hearing, people who hear in other ways would not be considered
“disabled.” Developing his argument, Straus identifies a variety of forms of hearing beyond
the narrow confines of phonocentrism (the privileging of the experience of sound).
Straus’s “autistic hearing,” for example, includes the modes of sensory processing and
cognition experienced by people on the autism spectrum. Straus is careful to explain that
not all autistic listeners experience what he describes, and that non-autistic listeners may
also hear in this way. He writes:

an autistic listener is someone who attends to the discrete musical event in all of its
concrete detail (local coherence); who prefers the part to the whole; who is adept at
creating associative networks (often involving private or idiosyncratic meanings); and
who may have absolute pitch and a prodigious rote memory.
(2011: 165)
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  185
Along with Straus, media scholar Mara Mills (2015), d/Deaf artists such as percussionist
Evelyn Glennie (e.g. Riedelsheimer 2004; Glennie 2015), and sound artist Christine Sun
Kim (e.g. Kim 2015; Beete 2017) have amply demonstrated the vibrancy of d/Deaf modes
of hearing, tracking a range of engagements with sound among populations once consid-
ered incapable of sensing it. “Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear,” Glennie writes,
suggesting that the aural perception of sound is simply one “specialized form of touch”
and that the vibrations she feels through her hands and feet and body are a way of hearing
(2015). Kim likewise emphasizes that d/Deaf people are part of the world of sound, con-
tributing to it and impacted by it regardless of their level of aural perception (Beete 2017).
For Straus, the concept of “deaf hearing” underlines the importance of non-auditory senses
in the act of listening, particularly the visual, the tactile, and the kinesthetic. In contrast,
“blind hearing” is even more focused on the aural than normative hearing, and Straus ar-
gues that it highlights the widespread (though not universal) rejection of notation in music
transmission and learning among blind musicians. Musical time and space, he notes, may
work differently in non-normative perception, including mobility-inflected hearing, in
which an individual’s experience of gait or the movement of a wheelchair may impact an
internalized sense of flow and rupture (2011: 150–81). Further, Straus emphasizes that these
categories of hearing cannot be applied to all individuals’ experiences of sound. For exam-
ple, Deafness (as a cultural identity, which, in the literature, is glossed with a capital letter)
and deafness (as an auditory condition, glossed with a lowercase letter) produce different
backgrounds for hearing and encompass different levels or types of hearing, different ways
of interacting with sound. Following in the footsteps of Straus’s work, ethnomusicologists
have recently begun to engage with disability studies (e.g. Schwartz 2015; Bakan 2018;
Meizel forthcoming), which is emerging as a major area of interest.

The Sounds of Precarious Lives

Ethnomusicology’s engagement with disability studies, along with much of the current
scholarship we review in this chapter, reflects a growing attentiveness within the humanities
to the existential condition of precariousness, in the broad sense given to this term by Judith
Butler: “a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself ” (2004: 31). Of
course, all lives are precarious in the sense that they are interdependent and finite; however,
some people are more vulnerable than others, as they struggle to contend with threatening
economic, biopolitical, technological, and ecological forces that are unevenly distributed
throughout the world. These forces, we observe, are often manifest in sound. Explicating
timeless canonical works or placing non-Western peoples in an ethnographic present, tra-
ditional scholarship in musicology and ethnomusicology tended to neglect the presence of
precarity in human experience, but contemporary music scholars have begun to address it
directly (Rice 2014). From studies of music in the context of racial injustice and the Black
Lives Matter movement (e.g. Crawley 2016; Orejuela and Shonekan 2018), to work on the
politics of sound and music at the nexus of indigenous and colonial cultures (e.g. Karantonis
and Robinson 2011; Robinson and Martin 2016), to important critiques of the racialized
nature of the field of sound studies itself (Stadler 2015; Kheshti 2018), the subject of human
fragility and finitude has emphatically moved into the foreground.
Fragility and finitude are at the center of an emerging sound studies project from ethno-
musicologist Denise Gill, which explores experiences of sound and listening in sacred spaces
of death. In a 2017 essay, Gill examines the complex role sound plays in a Sunni Muslim
corpse washing ritual in Turkey. The sound of the mourner’s laments, the prayers intoned
by the female corpse washers, and the other sounds of the ritual practices create a localized,
gendered soundscape at the threshold of life and death. She suggests that “[p]osthumous
186  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
auralities—when translated and mediated linguistically—offer a sound path to understand-
ing the continuations and transformations of sense experience that occur in death.” Gill puts
this question to sound studies scholars:

While we know that hearing remains the last of the senses experienced in dying, scholars
of sound studies have yet to extend our exceptional inquiries on hearing, aurality, and
listening into posthumous auralities practiced by multiple communities throughout the
world. How might sound studies scholars attend to the multi-sensory perceptions and
auralities that extend beyond the grey where western epistemological structures end?
(2017)

A Case Study in Listening to the Sounds of War

The epistemological structures to which Gill refers are routinely destabilized in environments
where sound is implicated in projects of sustained violence. In recent years, sound’s capacity
to psychologically traumatize (Cusick 2006, 2008; Goodman 2012; Friedson ­forthcoming)
and physically wound (Taber et al. 2006; McKay 2013) has been the subject of increasing
attention from scholars, journalists, and artists (e.g. Hamdan n.d.). My (Daughtry’s) work on
the American-led war in Iraq (2003–2011) is a case in point. Conversations I had with Iraqi
civilians and American military service members led to the contention that in wartime, sound
is more than sound. This paradoxical formulation can be taken in two senses: first, for those
who have learned to listen to and extract tactical information from wartime sounds, they are
crucial tools in the enterprise of survival. This explains the extreme labors that wartime au-
ditors put into the act of listening and the extreme virtuosity of many of their listening acts.
Sound in wartime simply has a greater significance than it does at other times.

In an environment where to see is to risk being seen and therefore becoming a target,
combatants and bystanders alike strive to minimize their visual exposure, ducking
behind barriers or seeking refuge in bomb shelters or windowless staircases. In com-
bat, when one looks, one looks quickly, tactically—just long enough to determine the
location of a threat or target—before retreating back to the relative safety of not seeing
and being unseen. The sounds of combat, by contrast, are more readily, continuously
available. Flowing around corners, through windows and walls, their amplitude and
their terrible indexicality demand attention. Wartime violence thus enforces a “distri-
bution of the sensible” (Ranciere) in which the audible, in its ubiquity, can at times take
precedence over the visible, in its sporadicity. Sound travels farther than touch, faster
than odor, and in a more immersive fashion than the visible, which is subject to sight
lines and sunrises. Sound is the public modality through which armed violence is most efficiently
distributed: one person is penetrated by a bullet, no one sees it fly, but thousands may
flinch at its explosive report.
(2014: 25–26)

Sound is more than sound in a second sense as well: when audible vibrations are produced
by violent acts, aspects of the sound and the violent act fuse together to produce new sensory
objects that place new demands on those who are exposed to them. Some of these demands
are physiological, as when a weapon’s report produces tinnitus and hearing loss in nearby
auditors or when the supersonic blast wave from an improvised explosive device (IED) gen-
erates traumatic brain injury in survivors. (This wave slows down over time and becomes
the characteristic “boom” sound of the IED. In this sense, the trauma from blast waves
can be understood as a subspecies of “sound wound.”) Other demands blur the distinction
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  187
between the physiological and psychological. When the sound of a weapon is co-present
with the weapon’s projectile or destructive charge, for example, the state of acute vulnera-
bility that the latter creates necessarily affects one’s capacity to listen dispassionately to the
former. What does it mean to listen to a sound with a body whose bloodstream is coursing
with cortisol and adrenaline, the fight-or-flight chemicals that the body produces when it is
in peril? What is it like to listen to a sound knowing that any moment you might be called
upon to kill those who made the sound or be killed by them? What is it like to be exposed to
a sound that is the intimate by-product of the act of killing? What kind of fear, and ferocity,
and exhaustion accompanies such listening acts? In wartime, sound is more than sound. It is
simultaneously a vital source of information and a profound source of trauma. It is a sign and
a weapon, a signal and an attack, an index and manifestation of violence.
In another paradox of wartime listening, there were also times when sound was less
than sound. Virtually all of the Iraqi civilians and American military service members I
interviewed remarked that the sound of distant gunfire, which caused them to flinch or
at least take notice at the beginning of the conflict, ceased to draw their attention over
time. The ubiquity of these sounds pushed them outside of the sphere of consciousness,
into a conceptual zone my interlocutors and I named “the audible inaudible.” A surprising
amount of the constant sonic evidence of wartime violence and societal dysfunction, from
the soft popping sounds of distant gun battles to the loud drone of portable gas and diesel
generators, was filtered out by the populace. This filtration resulted in a stereotypical situ-
ation that took place whenever someone new to the combat zone was walking along with
someone who was more “battle-hardened.” At the onset of the sound of automatic weapon
fire in the distance, the new auditor would exclaim, “What was that?” To this, the longer-
term auditor would reply, “What was what? Oh that! That’s probably just the Mahdi Army
shooting at the Sunnis—who knows?” This attenuation of the sensible—which also occurs
in peacetime environments, as most urban dwellers can attest—has profound ethical rami-
fications for wartime auditors. To wit: if one is incapable of registering the fact that people
are being shot off in the distance, one’s ability to engage in ethical thinking (e.g. to help or
not to help, to mourn or not to mourn) is rendered defunct. To be clear, the filtering out of
distant gunfire was not a conscious choice of wartime auditors: the exigencies of life in the
battle zone forced entire populations to push the sounds of violence beyond the bounds of
consciousness. In this way, the “soundscape of war” contributes to the ethical degradation
of combatants, targets, and bystanders alike.
By attending to the distinctions between wartime sounds’ “undermined” and “over-
mined” characteristics—between their attenuated (sounds-less-than-sounds) and hyperag-
gressive (sounds-more-than-sounds) forms—we come to understand the degree to which
human auditors are not the sovereigns of their soundscapes but rather contingent and fragile
creatures enmeshed within them. One doesn’t have to succumb to a crude sonic determin-
ism to acknowledge the fact that people (and other creatures)14 are often at the mercy of
the sounds that surround and penetrate them. And one doesn’t have to anthropomorphize
sounds to acknowledge that they are capable of withdrawing beyond the circle of human
perception and thereby of creating their own conditions of inaudibility. These sounds-that-
are-more-or-less-than-sounds are equally unavailable to humans for interpretation, and
that fact sets an acoustemological limit for all of us.

Voice Studies: From Perception to Politics

Like sound studies, voice studies is a transdisciplinary field, involving the performing
arts, the humanities and social sciences, hard science, medicine, and technology. Its emer-
gence in the early twentieth century marks the latest chapter in a scholarly fascination
188  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
with vocality dating back at least to Aristotle. In the period since the late 1970s, a number
of important books and several journal special issues helped voice studies coalesce as a
recognizable ­r ubric in the humanities (Ihde 1976; Clément [1988] 1999; Silverman 1988;
­Appelbaum 1990; ­Poizat 1992; Koestenbaum 1993; Connor 2001; Cavarero 2005; Dolar
2006; ­Neumark,  Gibson, and Leeuwen 2010; Kreiman and Sidtis 2013; LaBelle 2014;
Thomaidis and M ­ acpherson 2015). This intellectual ferment, in turn, led to the establish-
ment of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, which published its inaugural issue in
2016, and, within the SEM, the Voice Studies Special Interest Group.15

Empirical and Philosophical Orientations

Attempting a definition of this highly variegated collection of scholars and projects, Nina
Eidsheim and I (Meizel) have developed an expansive definition of voice studies as involving
“work concerned with the material, sonorous, and sensory voice as it is made and imagined
in human life” (Eidsheim and Meizel, forthcoming). However, the definition of voice and the
connotative cloud surrounding that term vary considerably from one academic discipline to
the next. Given this dissensus, any piece of voice studies scholarship must necessarily involve
ontological claims about the nature of voice and vocality. In the case of most clinical studies
and much applied work designed for a readership of vocal practitioners, these claims are im-
plicit and uninterrogated: voice, we can deduce, is nothing more or less than the intentionally
created airborne sound produced by vibrations of human vocal folds (phonation), which is
amplified and timbrally filtered by the contours of the vocal tract (resonation). Work within
what might be called the “empirical” or “clinical” orientation within voice studies began in
a concerted fashion after the invention and refinement of the laryngoscope in the nineteenth
century allowed scientists to see phonation in action. In the late twentieth century, notable
advances in the study of vocal production included Johann Sundberg’s pioneering work on
vocal acoustics and the “singer’s formant” (e.g. Sundberg 1970, 1977) and Ingo Titze’s com-
prehensive investigations of the acoustic and physiological foundations of voice production
(e.g. Titze 1998), both of which have informed clinicians and singing coaches worldwide.
More broadly, a large community of laryngologists, neuroscientists, biomechanical engi-
neers, and speech pathologists continue to study the multifarious conditions that affect the
sound and timbre of their patients’ voices; these include various types of aphasia, polyps and
cancer on the vocal folds, spasmodic dysphonia, laryngitis, reactions to airborne pollution,
and acid reflux.16 Approaches to addressing these conditions range from the behavioral to
the pharmacological, the surgical, and even the digital. Focusing on individuals with severe
speech impairment, speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Jreige, Patel, and Bunnell 2009; Patel
2013; Mills, Bunnell, and Patel 2014) has been leading a team of engineers in the devel-
opment of a process for creating individualized synthetic voices. Patel’s team ascertains the
timbral characteristics of the impaired patient’s voice by recording any vocal sounds she can
make; a computer algorithm then blends these with a bank of phonemes recorded by an in-
ternational collection of volunteer “vocal donors.” This process allows individuals to speak in
computerized voices that have been constructed to their unique specifications. In yet another
fusion of voice studies and posthumanism, voice scientists are harvesting the collagen matrix
from pig larynxes to form the framework upon which stem cells can generate vocal fold tis-
sue to replace cancerous or damaged tissue that had been previously removed (Wrona et al.
2016). This process promises to restore vocal function to a large number of patients whose
vocal folds have been severely damaged by disease or accident. These and other clinical and
pedagogical projects share a goal of removing physiological, psychological, neurological, and
other obstacles to efficacious vocalizing, thereby expanding the population for whom vocal-
ity is a profound source of communication, artistic production, and subject formation.
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  189
At the other end of the spectrum, work within the humanities (and, to a lesser extent,
the social sciences) often takes the question “What is voice?” to be the central object of in-
vestigation, one that overshadows all other concerns.17 Is voice a thing or an event ­(Connor
2001)? A human or transspecies attribute? A logocentric manifestation of thought or a sy-
naesthetic “vibrational practice” (Eidsheim 2015)? A phenomenon essentially connected to
sound, or a potentially silent manifestation of identity (Dunn and Jones 1994)? A translation
or reflection of an effervescent mind or an always-already gendered, sexed, classed, and
racialized text in itself? Is voice irreducibly relational? Is an imagined voice a voice? Are all
sounds voices (Ihde 1976)? What is the relationship between voice and the body, voice and
cognition, voice and political agency? These and other ontological questions emanate from
what one might call the “philosophical orientation” within voice studies.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of widely read philosophers and theorists took up the
question of voice. Perhaps the best known among these is Roland Barthes (1915–1980),
whose work searched for what he called “the grain of the voice” (1977). The “grain,” he
wrote, is “the body in the voice as it sings … the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs”
(188). Developing this idea, Barthes argued that the grain of the voice draws forth not only
the embodiment of the singer but that of the listener as well. “If I perceive the ‘grain’…”
Barthes observed, “I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man
or woman singing…” (188, our emphasis). More recently, Brandon LaBelle has evoked
Barthes’s sensual understanding of the voice and the body, writing that,

the mouth is … wrapped up in the voice, and the voice in the mouth, so much so that
to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the
lips, and the throat; it is to feel the mouth as a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable,
as well as a texturing orifice that marks the voice with specificity, not only in terms of
accent or dialect, but also by the depth of expression so central to the body.
(2014: 1)

In contrast to this celebration of the carnality of the voice, the philosopher Jacques Derrida
(1930–2004) questioned the radical privileging of voice in philosophical studies of language
(1976). His questioning took the form of a critique of phonocentrism, which he defined as
an untenable belief in the “absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning
of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning” (12). Arguing that writing should not be
seen as a pale reflection or corruption of a mythical preliterate form of “pure” vocal com-
munion, Derrida’s critique of the “metaphysics of presence” provides a corrective against
the tendency, still found in some voice- and sound-studies work, to treat the immersive
pleasures of listening as the ontological foundation of meaning. Perhaps, he seems to be
saying, there are layers of mediation that are always-already inserting distances among the
self, the voice, and the word it speaks.
Compared to the writings of Barthes and Derrida, the lectures of psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan (originally delivered in 1962 and 1963, and published in full in 2004) are more
­radical—and for many readers, more opaque.18 Building on Freud’s concern with taboo
body parts and products, Lacan (1901–1981) understood the voice as a “partial object” (objet
petit a), a category that includes the breast, urinary tract, penis, and feces. Partial objects are
irreducibly “other,” meaning that they always exist in excess of their utility; they symbolize
an unspeakable, unfulfillable desire. Voice, for Lacan, is a transcendental category, separate
from the speaker and the sound of that which is spoken; paradoxically, it manifests as an
absence, the black hole that sits at the center of the human vocal emissions we hear, enabling
them but always-already obscured by them, like the string that holds together a strand of
pearls.19 Following Lacan, philosopher Mladen Dolar has argued:
190  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
what language and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither
of language nor of the body. The voice stems from the body, but is not its part, and it
upholds language without belonging to it, yet, in this paradoxical topology, this is the
only point they share … .
(2006: 73)

In the hands of many Western psychoanalysts and philosophers—Derrida ­notwithstanding—

voice is portrayed as an uncanny, slippery, transgressive phenomenon, a kind of liminal eraser
that blurs the lines that separate interiority from exteriority, body from language, individual
from society. In short, the philosophical orientation treats the voice as a crucible for under-
standing the complexities of the human condition. Far more than a simple sonic event or a
mere vehicle for communication or art, voice is, in this view, a surrogate for the essential
enigma of the self.20
Despite their manifest differences, the philosophical and clinical orientations in voice
studies share an understanding of voice as a universal, pre- or pan-cultural category; voice,
for Sundberg and Titze and Barthes and Lacan alike, is a single broad phenomenon, albeit
one that encompasses many second-order variations and pathologies. Cultural and individ-
ual difference, in other words, add complexity to voice without challenging its ontological
stability. If this is one’s ground assumption, then by experimenting with a single population
of vocalists, or by contemplating voice within a purportedly neutral field of introspec-
tion, one’s conclusions can be smoothly extrapolated to humanity in the broadest sense. It
should not be surprising then that clinical studies and philosophical investigations of voice
frequently present Western vocal practices, and the bel canto singing voice in particular, as
emblematic of vocality tout court. (A notable exception to this view is philosopher Adriana
Cavarero’s insistence that the voice is an essentially plural phenomenon [2005].) One might
call scholarship that presents voice in these terms the “universalist camp” of voice studies.

Vocal Anthropologies
As productive and provocative as universalist theories of voice have been for scholars
throughout the humanities, they have tended to obscure other theorizations, other lo-
cal conceptions of what voices are or should be. Amanda Weidman’s call for a “critical
anthropology of voice” (2003: 196) and the call by Feld and his colleagues for a “vocal
anthropology” (Feld et al., 2004) signal an abiding interest among ethnographers (and
perhaps especially among ethnomusicologists) in the multifarious and often conflicting
roles that vocal expressions and epistemologies play within histories of musical prac-
tice, intra- and inter-cultural communication, and the articulation of cultural difference.
­A nthropological authors differ greatly from those who write within the universalist para-
digm. Substantively, their work tends to be particularist and constructivist, critiquing the
universalist assumptions embedded in the work above and asserting that the dynamics of
situated vocal praxes cannot be ignored. As Weidman argues in a recent review of anthro-
pological literature on voice:

Rather than assume the universal significance of the voice, anthropology should ask
where and when “voice” becomes a salient metaphor and what is at stake in it. It should
inquire into how practices involving the voice—including performance, singing, or-
atory, pedagogy, entextualization, writing, technological mediation—support these
metaphorical elaborations. What forms of subjectivity, identity, and public and political
life are enabled, and silenced, by particular regimes of aurality and the voice?
(2014: 38)
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  191
Weidman’s own ethnographic work is exemplary in this regard, demonstrating how the
widespread equation of “voice” with Enlightenment concepts of agency, self, and essence
fails to obtain cleanly within the world of female Karnatic singing in twentieth-century
South India (2006).21 In a similar vein, Matthew Rahaim’s Musicking Bodies (2012) charts
the layered understandings of voice in Hindustani musical practice and the idiomatic ways
vocalists use movement along with their melodic practices in spatial, temporal, and eth-
ical contexts. Nicholas Harkness’s Sounds of Seoul (2013) demonstrates how the indexical
charge of Western operatic singing can be radically recoded and invested with new agen-
cies to fit the needs of evangelical Korean Christians. And Jessica Schwartz’s ethnographic
work among Marshallese vocalists whose bodies were irradiated by American atomic tests
demonstrates how the voice can be simultaneously an expressive instrument and an index
of a long history of environmental violence (2015). By directing ethnographic attention
to the cultural emplacement of vocal praxes, these and other ethnomusicologists actively
contribute not just to our understanding of “voice” per se, but to the silent structures and
sustained discourses that shape the way voices are heard, used, and imagined.
Some scholars have combined ethnographic approaches with ideas and methods from
auditory cognition. An often-cited example of this work is Cornelia Fales’s 2002 article
“The Paradox of Timbre,” which encourages ethnomusicologists to attend equally to three
realms of sound: production (the physical means by which instruments and the body pro-
duce sound), acoustics (the structure of sound waves themselves), and perception (which
includes the physiological processes of the ear itself, cognitive activities in the nervous sys-
tem and brain, and acoustemologies learned within communities of auditors). Fales demon-
strates the necessity of such a model through an analysis of the Burundian genre Inanga
Chuchotée (whispered Inanga), in which an unvoiced whisper and the harmonics of the
inanga zither combine in a way that Burundian listeners hear as voiced, melodized text. If
a pitch-centric Western scholar were to only discuss what they think they heard as vocal
timbre, they would have failed to account for the ways the sounds are produced, the inter-
acting structures of the component sounds, and the manner in which their own cognition
and cultural position informed their perception of the sound. And importantly, they would
have neglected the distinctively Burundian perception of the sounds. Through a patient
investigation of discrete vocal praxes, this kind of ethnographic writing opens up a space
for questioning the hegemony of Western conceptions of voice and for attending to situated
vocalities and auralities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Voice and Embodiment

A central concern for ethnographic and historical research on the voice is the relationships
among vocality, embodiment, and identity. For example, a well-known article by Feld and
his co-authors argues that the voice is the body’s chief technology of difference: it is the site
in which we aurally distinguish self and other, and therefore interpret identities and individ-
ualities (2004). This is especially noteworthy considering what Eidsheim terms “performa-
tive listening” (2009). Eidsheim argues that the performance of identity takes place not only
at the site of the performer’s embodied voice, but also in the listener’s interpretation of it,
and that it is the audience, as much as the singer, that shapes vocal constructions of identity.
(On performativity and identity, see Waterman, this volume.) As the mediating term be-
tween two polarities, the voice is critical for the negotiation of all manner of boundaries. In
many times and places, voice has been coded as more feminine than masculine, and more
sensual than intellectual;22 this persistent sexual valence has been mobilized within many
vocal praxes to negotiate, maintain, exploit, critique, and transgress hegemonic masculin-
ities and other social structures. The “vocalic body,” in Steven Connor’s phrase, is more
192  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
malleable than the corporeal body; it is “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a
new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous oper-
ations of the voice” (2001: 35). Musicologists Martha Feldman and Suzanne Cusick have
made complementary arguments. Feldman argues that voice operates “at the border of the
­human” and the non-human (2015: 658), and Cusick suggests that it “perform[s] the bor-
ders of the body” (1999: 29), so that voice, which at its creation leaves the body, highlights
those borders by crossing them. “All voices, but especially singing voices,” Cusick contin-
ues, “… perform those borders’ relationship both to the body’s interior and to the exterior
world, a relationship that in late twentieth-century culture can be gendered in terms of the
borders’ relative penetrability.” Building on this work, performance studies scholar Elías
Krell writes about the voice of “queer, transgender, and Latin@ folk/punk musician” Yva
las Vegass, arguing that it can best be understood as operating within a framework of “sonic
borderlands,” ones of gender, sexuality, and cultural identity (2015: 95). In this work, the
voice is understood as a sociopolitical phenomenon where physiological structures meet
power structures and where social boundaries are negotiated.23
In the United States, the most tragic and traumatizing of these boundaries is that which
reifies the fraught social category of race. An important strain of voice scholarship analyzes
the auditory regimes that undergird ideologies of blackness and whiteness; scholars such as
Eidsheim (2009), Derrick Valliant (2002), Geoff Mann (2008), and Grant Olwage (2004)
have shown how historically contingent hearings of “black voices” and “white voices” have
led to essentialist understandings of racial difference and unequal access to social privilege.
This argument is given a thorough treatment in Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s 2016 monograph
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. Building on a lineage of crit-
ical scholarship on race that stretches from W. E. B. Du Bois ([1903] 1997) to Alexander
Weheliye (2014) and Fred Moten (2003), Stoever traces the trajectory of American white
supremacy, emphasizing the historicized listening practices that accompanied and shaped it.
These practices collectively construct and police the “sonic color line,” an auditory regime
that interprets sounds according to the unforgiving terms of the racial binary. While any
sound can be racially encrypted (e.g. “the clang and rumble of urban life” that was widely
read as a type of black noise against the implicitly white “suburban ‘peace and quiet’”; p. 11),
voices have been supersaturated with racialized ideologies throughout American history.
When these ideologies intersect with gendered readings of vocality, the results can be par-
ticularly toxic. As Stoever explains:

In certain contexts … a black woman’s scream is heard differently from a white ­woman’s,
even if both screams displayed similar properties of pitch, tone, timbre, and volume; the
sonic color line maps divergent impacts and meanings for these two sounds, as depend-
ent on the race and gender of the listener as they are on the perceived race and gender
of the screamer. [Frederick] Douglass, for instance, notices the sound of his Aunt Hester
screaming caused the slave master to whip her harder and longer, while in [Richard]
Wright’s fiction, even the thought of a white woman screaming sets murders, lynchings,
and mass migrations in motion.
(22, emphasis in the original)

Hearing voices through filters of essentialized difference conjures social hierarchies of per-
sonhood that contradict the general humanist equation of voice with agency. Based on their
relative positions vis-à-vis the sonic color line (and extrapolating the sonic gender line with
which the color line intersects), some voices are assigned more meaning and gravity than
others. This process is not unique to the United States, of course. Ochoa Gautier’s work
on aurality in the history of European colonialism in Colombia demonstrates the critical
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  193
role that ideas about the voice have played in discourses of modernity and the practice of
­European imperialism in the global south (2014). Analyzing writings from the early coloni-
zation of the Americas, Ochoa Gautier shows how indigenous voices were constructed by
Western listeners as wild and unruly, their “untamed vocality” requiring the civilizing hand
of Europeans. Instances of these kinds of racist interpretations can be found everywhere
that European colonialism spread. For example, the sixteenth-century Calvinist missionary
Jean de Léry took notes as he watched a Tupinambá ritual in Portuguese Brazil, describing
what he perceived as a transformation of “tuneable” and “pleasing” voices into “muttering,”
“trembling,” and “howl[ing],” what de Léry inferred must have indicated possession by the
Devil (de Léry [1578] 2010). As the British Empire’s holdings peaked in the late nineteenth
century, voice was often held up as an explicit site of difference between the peoples of the
world. In an 1869 paper delivered to the Anthropological Society of London, for exam-
ple, laryngologist Sir G. Duncan Gibb called Europe “the cradle of song” and positioned
­European voices as superior to all others (1870: 258). (For a history of the critical scholar-
ship on race and the performance of racial identity in music, see Mahon [this volume]. On
European colonialism and music, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].)
Historical discourses about identity and voice continue to shape contemporary interpre-
tations, and some of the most sophisticated analyses of the politics of voice have come from
critics who are also practicing artists. In The Right To Speak (1992), theatrical voice coach
Patsy Rodenburg warns her readers to look for what she calls “vocal imperialism,” the idea
that there can only be “one right voice” (105)—a hegemonic model that singer and musi-
cologist John Potter identifies in his work as “vocal authority” ([1998] 2006). And Tanya
Tagaq, perhaps the most prominent performer within the vibrant world of contemporary
Indigenous art and activism, has positioned her vocal art as, in part, a critique of settler co-
lonialism in general and violence toward Indigenous women in particular. In reference to
her 2016 album Retribution, which addresses the rape, murder, and disappearance of Indig-
enous women, as well as the metaphorical “rape” of the environment and of Inuk culture,
Tagaq says, “if my singing is a platform to help these issues being raised … then I will do it
with love, with laughter and with fists” (Tagaq quoted in Presley 2016).24

Collective Vocality
For centuries, the trope of voice has been a prominent feature of nationalist projects. Argu-
ing that narratives and songs found in rural traditions capture the heart of national identities,
the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) famously used voice as a metaphor
for community and individual agency. His version of the concept “the voice of the people”
(1807) became a cornerstone of both nascent republican democracy and Romantic nation-
alism (Gibson 2015), and continues to inform nationalist discourses around the world today.
Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, who has translated and compiled Herder’s writings on
music, observes that Herder’s use of “voice” was especially significant in articulating sing-
ing and song as human acts of personal and cultural agency, rather than as originating from
the divine (Herder and Bohlman 2017: 47). Used for both essentializing and empowering
ends, Herder’s ideas about voice have continually infused political discourse. It’s not at all
surprising, then, that the movement for Baltic independence from the Soviet Union would
come to be called “the singing revolution,” in recognition of the power of its choral protests
(Šmidchens 2014). Nor is it surprising that, in his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republi-
can National Convention, then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump would declare to his
followers, “I am your voice!”25
The many nuanced associations of voice with power and agency—both individual and
collective—inspired Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones to encourage a shift in music scholarship
194  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
“from a concern with the phenomenological roots of voice to a conception of vocality as a
cultural construct” and as a site for the making of “non-verbal meanings” (1994: 2, empha-
sis ours). Dunn and Jones define vocality more broadly than voice, assigning to it “all of the
voice’s manifestations”—speaking, singing, crying, laughing, and other content, both lin-
guistic and non-linguistic. A range of other scholars have developed the notion of vocality.
For example, Feld and his co-authors have observed that, because voice is often understood
in anthropology as “a metaphor for difference” and as a “key representational trope for
identity, power, conflict, social position, and agency,” the term vocality is frequently seen as a
kind of “social practice that is everywhere locally understood as an implicit index of author-
ity, evidence, and experiential truth” (2006: 341). And Cathy Berberian defined vocalities as
“‘ways of being’ for the voice” ([1966] 2014: 47).
Contemporary ideas about vocality have also been informed by the work of the literary
scholar, linguist, and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), who famously developed
his understanding of voice in his critical studies of the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. For
Bakhtin, voice is “the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A voice always has
a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones” (Bakhtin 1981: 434). This is not
to say that Bakhtin saw voice as narrowly personal. In any situation, voice is comprised of
both the utterance (a concrete act of speaking in a social setting) and all of the ideologies
that are embedded within it (see Park-Fuller 1986); as a result, every utterance contains
traces of multiple languages (heteroglossia) and multiple voices (polyphony). In the context
of a complex text, such as a novel, there will always be a range of voices, and an author can
handle them in many ways. Bakhtin argued that, in his novels, author Fyodor Dostoyevsky
threw himself into the characters and their dialogic intersubjectivities.26 His writing thus
highlights the ability of an individual utterance to embody someone else’s ideas while still
remaining itself, thus creating a dialogic relationship between the two (Park-Fuller 1986).
In Dostoyevsky’s work, Bakhtin therefore finds “[a] plurality of independent and unmerged voices
and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (1984: 6, emphasis in original).
In the original Russian, Bakhtin used the word mnogogolosie to refer to this plurality, and
that term has been translated in various ways, including, “polyphony,” “polyvocality,” and
“multi-voicedness” (e.g. Belova et al. 2008: 494). The linguist Jacob Mey (1998) glosses
the word as “multivocality,” which he interprets as the management of the many voices
inherent in the dialogic speech act. In a forthcoming monograph, which I (Meizel) discuss
in the next section, I attempt to re-embody the notion of multivocality, anchoring it in the
lived experiences of singers who work on and across borders of identity. These singers use
or have used their voices in multiple ways and in multiple registers as they negotiate spaces,
social contexts, and ways of being.

A Case Study in the Music Cultures of Deafness

My current research examines the work of vocalists who balance both Deaf and hearing
cultures, using sign languages as well as oral speech and song. Because voice is at the center
of a long history of oppression for d/Deaf people and sign languages form the foundations
of Deafness as a cultural identity, these singers are constantly crossing borders in their per-
sonal and professional lives.
One such performer is rock singer TL Forsberg, who identifies as Deaf. Forsberg experienced
hearing loss as a child but can sometimes manage her daily life using hearing aids. “I am audio-
logically dependent for a Deaf person,” she told me in a 2013 interview. “I hear [what someone
says] first, and then I say ‘say it again,’ and then my eyes will pick it up. … Because I was born
hearing, I’m rigged that way.” In the 2010 documentary See What I’m Saying?, ­Forsberg dis-
cusses a feeling of being caught between two cultures, detailing how others—directors, music
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  195
producers, friends—press her to act “more deaf ” or “more hearing.” These experiences have
led her to become an advocate for Deaf diversity and have influenced her performance prac-
tices. She has performed her music on stage by signing in ASL (American Sign Language) and
lip-syncing to her own pre-recorded voice (a practice she calls “sign-syncing”), and she also
interprets the voices of other singers for Deaf congregants at a Los Angeles church. Forsberg
understands her singing and her signing as two distinct embodied voices, ones that are often
in conflict with each other, creating a complex and nuanced multivocality.
Forsberg is not the only singer who must negotiate between different social worlds.
Mandy Harvey, a jazz singer profoundly deaf since the age of eighteen, likewise feels both
part of and excluded from the Deaf community. Without full hearing, her experience of
voice has changed dramatically. For all singers, vocalization depends heavily on kines-
thetic, tactile, and aural sensory feedback, but such forms of perception are particularly
important for deaf vocalists. Harvey remembers how her voice sounded before she became
deaf, but her sense of her singing voice is no longer audiocentric; rather, she has shifted
her focus to internal sensations—what Straus, discussed above, calls “deaf hearing.” In
interviews, Harvey told me that she is “hyperaware” of her entire body’s relationship with
sound, and she has adjusted her musical practices to accommodate her deafness. On stage,
she performs without shoes, so that she can feel the vibrations of her bandmates’ instru-
ments through the floor. In our interviews, she explained that, in this way, she is able to
discern information such as the pulse and the progress of the music’s structure in time, as
well as which instrument is playing. She also relies upon her absolute pitch to learn new
repertoire directly from sheet music. She establishes middle C using a tuner or with the
help of another person, and then is able to sing all of the other pitches in the composition.
Onstage, she signs for the benefit of Deaf audience members, though she tends to com-
bine ASL with the controversial word-for-word types of sign interpreting developed by
non-Deaf people for pedagogical purposes. On occasion, she simply signs a summary of a
song or provides the audience with printouts of lyrics. In some performances, her venue’s
sound system is connected to a “hearing loop” (an electromagnetic transmitter that sends
a signal to hearing aids and cochlear implants worn by audience members). Additionally,
she likes to increase the amplitude of her band’s drums and bass to allow d/Deaf attendees
to more clearly feel the vibrations. The multiple modes of her performance—in song and
in sign—negotiate both Deaf and hearing culture in a multivocality that is unique to her
experience and different from Forsberg’s.
The experiences of Forsberg and Harvey challenge the idea that deafness might be de-
fined as an oppositional relationship with voice or with sound. Their work highlights the
complexity of the relationship between speech and singing, and positions the simultaneous
performance of singing and signing as more than the juxtaposition of two languages but
as the juxtaposition of two vocalities—two separate if intertwined ways of embodying and
enacting identity. If vocality involves an acoustic, physiological, cultural way of being,
then signing-while-singing is as much an expression of vocality as any act performed by a
hearing person and exemplifies multivocality as a strategy of cultural border-crossing. Fors-
berg’s and Harvey’s experiences suggest a broad potential for ethnomusicological research
that expands the study of sound and voice beyond aurality and orality.

***
Coursing through the realms of the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, and
through environmental and mediatized spaces, the study of sound and its most cathected
manifestation, voice, promises to coax ethnomusicology out of its hothouse province,
in which, as anthropologist Michelle Bigenho (2009) has trenchantly observed, music
196  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry
performance too often becomes a beguiling object of study whose status as a “special realm”
renders it resistant to critique. The broader spectrum of sonic acts and vocal practices cannot
be so easily essentialized, and that is surely a healthy thing. One can imagine a near future
in which ethnomusicology adopts the more expansive horizons of sound studies and voice
studies, becoming in practice a full-fledged anthropology of music, sound, and voice—even
if, for logistical reasons, its anachronistic name remains.27 Conversely, ethnomusicology as
it is currently practiced involves an attentiveness to and respect for the messy complexities
of social experience, and especially for local epistemologies that point to domains (of music
and other behaviors) that extend well beyond “sound,” “voice,” and the Enlightenment
metaphysics that continue to characterize Western discourse on these concepts. Sound stud-
ies and voice studies need these ethnographically informed perspectives if they are to di-
versify and relativize the Western epistemologies that continue to dominate their thinking.
We conclude by observing that the commingling of ethnomusicology, sound studies,
and voice studies that we have described here is taking place at a moment of great intel-
lectual flux, social disruption, and environmental crisis. The permeability and fragility of
­borders—be they national, economic, intellectual, or disciplinary—increases the potential
both for fruitful exchange and inclusivity, as well as for proliferating injustices, backlash,
and the precarity we discussed above. In tumultuous times such as these, it behooves us all
to increase the inclusivity of our institutions and practices, and to work to reduce the injus-
tices that they produce. With this in mind, and building on the tradition of internal critique
that we inherited from anthropology, ethnomusicologists need to accept an obligation to-
wards sound studies and voice studies that is as simple to state as it is difficult to implement:
we must, as we continue to decolonize ourselves, help decolonize them.

Notes
1 Embodiment is a central theme in contemporary scholarship and is addressed in many of the chapters
in this book. See Text Box 1.1.
2 On the significance of Sound and Sentiment for linguistic approaches in ethnomusicology, see B
­ easter-Jones
(this volume).
3 Other texts that laid the foundation for sound studies include Schafer (1977), Corbin (1998), and
Chion (1994).
4 On Feld’s acoustemology and theories of participation, see Rahaim (this volume).
5 At the opening of his landmark treatise Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999: xxxix), Friedrich Kittler
sums up the technological determinist position in a pithy sentence: “Media determine our situation.”
Early historiographic work on sound and music technologies often reinscribed this position by empha-
sizing the impact that revolutionary new products had on listeners and giving short shrift to the agen-
tive powers and diverse interpretations of the listeners themselves. (See also McLuhan [1964] 1994.)
6 Within ethnomusicology, see Feld and Brenneis (2004) for a prolonged discussion of this topic.
Within sound studies, Emily Thompson (Thompson and Mahoy n.d., discussed below) is a good
example of a scholar who presents sound recording as a mode of investigation.
7 This album also includes “Aerial,” a track featuring Steven Feld.
8 In a discussion of “sonological competence,” Schafer (1994: 154) similarly points to the variability
of listening, but his conclusions generally remain speculative and broad (such as arguing that “the
Eskimo’s space awareness is acoustic,” in contrast to the visually constituted space of the West).
9 The term “habitus” refers to sets of bodily practices, dispositions, and ideas which are internalized
by members of a society and which contribute to that society’s reproduction. The term has a long
history in philosophy and social theory, but it was most famously elaborated by the sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu ([1972] 1977) and today is widely associated with his work. See also Manuel (this volume),
Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.1.
10 I (Meizel) would like to thank to Kelly Gervin for introducing me to Pedelty’s work.
11 Here, we are using the term “network” in the sense of the term developed by science and technology
scholar Bruno Latour (2007). Within the context of Actor Network Theory, a critical orientation
Latour helped establish, a network is a gloss for the dynamic and fluid gatherings of human and
 Sound Studies and Voice Studies  197
non-human actors that end up having social effects in the world. “Instead of thinking in terms of
surfaces—two dimension—or spheres—three dimension,” Latour writes, “one is asked to think in
terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections” (1996: 3).
12 Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker has applied the notion of deep listening to the specific context of
music, proposing a physiological correlation between highly emotional experiences of music and
religious trance (2004). See Waterman (this volume) for a discussion of Deborah Wong’s chapter in
Kapchan’s book, which explores audition and witnessing (2017). On the role of listening in theories
of participation, see Rahaim (this volume).
13 Neurologist Oliver Sacks believed that music-color synesthesia is among the most common forms of
synesthesia, one of a multitude of physiological experiences “dependent on the integrity of certain
areas of the cortex and the connections between them” (2007: 179).
14 See Brumm and Slabbekoorn (2005) and Putland, Merchant, Farcas, and Radford (2017) for evidence
of anthropogenic noise interfering with human and nonhuman animal communication.
15 The Society for Ethnomusicology Voice Studies Special Interest Group was founded in 2012 and
initially chaired by Eve McPherson and myself (Meizel). Other scholarly societies have established
groups whose purviews extend to voice and vocality. The Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group
within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, for example, takes on issues of aurality, mediation,
and acousmatic vocal performance that are central to voice studies.
16 For a helpful overview of neuroscientific work on voice production, perception, and processing, see
Sidtis and Kreiman (2011).
17 Social scientific research on the voice is closely linked to phonology (a subdiscipline of linguistics that
examines systems of speech sounds), other branches of linguistics, and semiotics (the study of sign
systems). On linguistic and semiotic approaches in ethnomusicology, see Beaster-Jones (this volume).
18 Both Derrida and Lacan were part of a broad movement in the humanities known as p­ ost-structuralism.
For more on post-structuralism, see Sugarman (this volume).
19 For a Lacanian reading of voice as an immaterial, invisible string, see Dolar (2006: 23). For a cogent
overview of Lacan’s conception of voice, see Lagaay (2008).
20 See Daughtry (2016) for a fuller articulation of this position.
21 On the eighteenth-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, see
­Sugarman (this volume, n9).
22 Adriana Cavarero (2005: 6) charts how voice has historically been coded as “secondary, ephemeral,
inessential—reserved for women.” “Feminized from the start,” she writes, “the vocal aspect of speech
and, furthermore, of song appear together as antagonistic elements in a rational, masculine sphere that
centers itself, instead, on the semantic.”
23 For a discussion of border spaces in the context of performance, ethnography, and liminality, see
Waterman (this volume).
24 For a critical analysis of media responses to Tagaq and the “ideologies of voice” (Weidman 2014) that
they covertly promote, see Taylor-Neu (2018).
25 The history of the demagogic appropriation of a collective’s vocal agency is long and dark, encom-
passing despots from the Peróns in Argentina to Adolph Hitler himself. In an essay by none other
than Joseph Goebbels (1936), the Fuhrer’s voice was placed in tight relation to the will of the nation:
“[Hitler’s] word alone was enough to transform an entire period, to defeat an apparently strong state
and to bring in a new era … . The magic of his voice reaches men’s secret feelings … . In Germany,
God chose one from countless millions to speak our pain!” Additionally, Trump’s pronouncement
unwittingly replicates the famously sensual lines from an early fragment of Walt Whitman’s “Song of
Myself,” “I am your voice—it was tied in you—in me it begins to talk. /I celebrate myself to celebrate
every man and woman alive; /I loosen the tongue that was tied in them, /It begins to talk out of my
mouth” (2003). Presumably, neither Whitman’s inclusive sentiment nor his orgiastic tone was what
the President had in mind.
26 For other discussions of Bakhtin, see Titunik (1986) and Beaster-Jones (this volume).
27 Internal critiques of the label ethnomusicology date back at least to Feld’s call for an anthropology of
sound in the 1980s. See Feld (2017) for a narration of this line of thinking.

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8 Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Ethnomusicology
Approaches to the Lived Experience
of Music
Harris M. Berger

Perhaps even more than the works that she cites, the methodologies that she employs, or
the conferences that she attends, a scholar’s fundamental orientation in research is the thing
that most viscerally defines her disciplinary identity. This is particularly true in ethnomusi-
cology, at least in North America, where there are relatively few departments of ethnomu-
sicology and most graduates in the field do not have the word “ethnomusicology” written
on their diploma. There is, of course, great intellectual diversity in our field. But if there is
anything like a common denominator in the discipline today, a concern for the lived ex-
perience of music would be high on the short list of candidates for the position. Following
a long tradition of anthropological work that saw its most fully developed articulation in
the thought of Clifford Geertz (e.g. 1973), a large portion of scholars in our field want to
understand music from the perspective of the people who make it and listen to it (see Berger
and Stone, introduction, this volume). Indeed, when we read the work of someone from an
adjacent field, the thing that makes them seem to be part of our world is our intuition that
this author sees music as playing out in the context of the social life of a person or group,
and wants to capture the texture of musical experience as it is lived there. Where a scholar
might go with such an orientation can vary widely, of course, and not all ethnomusicolo-
gists embrace the interpretive project. But for many of us, centering on experience—or at
least starting there—is the hallmark of ethnomusicology.
For this reason, phenomenology has been a particularly compelling theoretical orienta-
tion in our field. While phenomenology is a diverse intellectual tradition with many strong
disagreements among its leading figures, the idea of lived experience is central to much of
the tradition. This is not to say that ideas from phenomenology can be easily brought into
conversation with those from ethnomusicology; much work has to be done to make con-
cepts that were sown in philosophy bear fruit in ethnomusicology. But, to use the contem-
porary parlance that would have been unfamiliar to its early twentieth-century founders,
phenomenology is the intellectual movement that has most richly theorized the notion of
experience. And because of that, it has attracted diverse and passionate adherents in our
field. It would be impossible, of course, to summarize the ideas of the philosophical tradi-
tion in single chapter. My goal instead is to give a sense of the styles of thinking and major
ideas that have developed from this tradition, sketch out its intellectual history, show some
of the ways that ethnomusicologists have drawn on this tradition to make unique insights,
and point the way toward future directions for research.

Phenomenology: The Philosophical Tradition

The word “phenomenology” had been in at least occasional use for over a hundred and fifty
years when Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) published his Logical Investigations ([1900–1901]
2001) and adopted the term as the name of the new form of philosophy he was developing
 Phenomenological Approaches  205
(Smith 2013). In older philosophical work, as well as in many non-technical usages of the
term today, to do “phenomenology” meant simply to talk about experience, with this term
understood as an internal and subjective state. Husserl’s phenomenology was concerned with
experience, but he approached the topic very differently from the thinkers that preceded
him. Philosophers in the tradition of British empiricism, for example, associated experi-
ence with sense data, the mechanical effect of the physical world on our perceptual organs.
­Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German idealist who had such a profound influence
on ­Western thought, made a sharp distinction between the things of the world themselves
and the entities that populate our consciousness. Kant developed sophisticated arguments to
show how categories like time and space where not properties of the things themselves but
were projected onto the world by the perceiving subject, and the larger project of the idealist
tradition has been to identify the universal nature of the subject. Whether or not one accepts
Kant’s ideas about the subjective nature of the categories per se, the vision of this kind of
idealism is clearly unsettling, as it posits a yawning and perhaps unbridgeable chasm between
our experience and the world that we think we know. That chasm seemed to be widened
by the breathtaking advances of the sciences in the nineteenth century, which appeared to
depict a world ever more estranged from the one we encounter in everyday life. It was in this
context of these ideas and developments that Husserl’s phenomenology was formed.
Husserl had great respect for the sciences, but he felt that to have secure knowledge,
their intellectual foundations needed to be rethought.1 Science clearly depends on mathe-
matics, but how do we know that mathematics is true? In the mid-nineteenth century, the
German philosopher Gottlob Frege had tried to find a firm foundation for mathematics in
logic, but Husserl asked what logic itself was based upon. As Anthony Steinbock has argued
(2001), Husserl’s answer was what he called “passive synthesis,” the person’s fundamental
perceptual and affective engagement with the world ([1926] 2001). Before we create rep-
resentations in words or mathematical symbols, before thinking, we have a direct embodied
engagement with things. This direct embodied engagement closes up that yawning chasm,
puts us in touch with the world, and must be the starting point for all inquiry.
Husserl developed his ideas on passive synthesis in the middle of his career, but the great
methodological advance that set the tone of phenomenology was developed much earlier.
Since the time of Plato, Western philosophers had made arguments about the relationship
between experience and reality. This seems like a starting place for any metaphysics or
ontology, but Husserl suggested that in making an argument about how mere experience
related to reality, they had necessarily stacked the philosophical deck. If we want to get at
this question in a more rigorous fashion, Husserl argued, we need to place an epoché (set of
brackets) around the question of whether experience was internal or external, subjective
or objective, and try to describe experience itself ([1913] 1962). When we do this, we find,
much to our surprise, that strictly as experience the things of the world maintain their
mind-independent character. Taken as experience, the phenomena before me—the pen I
hold and the paper upon which I write, for example—aren’t subjective, ephemeral mental
representations but things in themselves, part of a world in which I find myself. Operating
within the epoché, the project of Husserl’s phenomenology is an attempt to understand
structures of lived experience, necessary features of the ways in which the person engages
with the things of the world and constitutes them as lived phenomena. Approaching a topic
in this way allows us to attend to the richness and complexity of our experience and to un-
derstand those rich textures neither as qualities of the world itself nor as subjective mean-
ings pasted onto a meaningless universe, but as the product of our acts of constitution.
This constitutive relationship, which puts the person back in touch with the world, is
the most basic of the structures of experience that Husserl uncovered, and his term for
this is the intentionality of consciousness. To say that consciousness is intentional is to say that
206  Harris M. Berger
consciousness never exists by itself but, rather, that all consciousness is always “conscious-
ness of something” ([1913] 1962: 223, italics in the original). Operating within the epoché,
the basic descriptive project of Husserlian phenomenology is to understand how we consti-
tute experience in its myriad forms and modalities—perception and thought, memory and
imagination, dreams and wakefulness, and the diverse forms of social interaction.
One of the hallmarks of a phenomenological perspective is to remove from the word “ex-
perience” the connotations of the internal and the ephemeral that this term has in everyday
talk. But everyday talk also associates experience with the individual: we think of the nov-
elist who “writes from her experience” or the painter who has a uniquely personal vision.
It is no surprise, therefore, that phenomenology has sometimes been misunderstood as an
individualistic way of thinking about things. But because phenomenology’s study object is
the process of constituting experience (rather than internal, object-like representations of the
external world), it allows us to put social relations at the heart of our inquiry. At the end of
his Cartesian Meditations ([1931] 1960), Husserl shows that the category person—understood
there, very roughly, as a body that has experience—is the necessary precondition for the
ideas of both self and other, and that the thoroughgoing sociality of experience is grounded
in our embodiment and precedes any form of cognitive activity. As I have argued elsewhere
(Berger 1999: 169–73; 2010: 14, 97–104), the constitution of lived experience is best under-
stood as a kind of social practice, in the practice theory sense of that term (see Text Box 2.1);
we learn how to build our experiences from those around us, and our constitution of those
experiences is not achieved in the isolated mind of the knower but in interactive processes
done with others.
My discussion so far has broadly focused on Husserl’s philosophical vision, but there is far
more to the movement than its founding articulations. Some of Husserl’s followers carried
forward his program by developing detailed studies of focused topics within philosophy,
such as Roman Ingarden’s work on literature, art, and music ([1933] 1989) or Edith Stein’s
research on empathy ([1917] 1989). However, Husserl’s best-known successors took phe-
nomenology in very different directions.
Husserl’s most famous student was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Being and Time, his
first major text, argues that questions of experience should be subordinated to questions of
being, and Heidegger’s work sought to understand both being in general and the distinctive
form of human being. From a Heideggerian perspective, Husserl’s idea of intentionality
characterized only a portion of human existence; before we are an intentional subject con-
stituting the world in experience, Heidegger argued, we have a pre-reflexive relationship
to the world in practical activity. His famous example is from everyday conduct, where
he contrasts the situation of a carpenter unproblematically hammering a nail into a piece
of wood with the situation of that same carpenter suddenly confronted with a broken
hammer (Heidegger [1927] 1962: 98–102). In the former situation, the hammer is what
Heidegger would call “ready-to-hand”: it isn’t a separate entity in experience, an object for
an ­experiencing subject, but simply part of the carpenter’s action, part of her “being-in-
the-world” as a carpenter. It is only in the later situation, one in which her practical action
is interrupted, where the hammer is “present-at-hand.” Now, the carpenter must suddenly
treat the hammer as a discrete object of attention that is constituted in focused experience.
This distinction is part of a much larger inquiry into the ways that the person finds herself
in the world before an act of consciousness constitutes and discovers individual things.
Examining our way of being-in-the-world, Heidegger argues that the mode of existence
that humans have is different from that of other entities, because we are the only beings for
whom the nature of our existence is a problem. Any given way of human ­being-in-the-world
is thus an interpretation of being in general, and Heidegger sees individual cultures and his-
torical periods as having distinctive modes of existence.2 Heidegger’s approach to philosophy
 Phenomenological Approaches  207
during this phase of his career is often referred to as hermeneutic (i.e. interpretive), and the
idea of interpretation here plays out in at least two senses: that any particular mode of
human being-in-the-world is an interpretation of being in general and that philosophy is
therefore necessarily an interpretation of a reality (human being) that is itself fundamentally
interpretive.
Emphasizing the person’s capacity to constitute the world in experience, Husserl’s philo-
sophical approach is referred to transcendental phenomenology. In contrast, Heidegger’s empha-
sis on being-in-the-world and his vision of philosophy as an interpretive process have led
some scholars to refer to his work as existential phenomenology or hermeneutic phenomenology.
Through both their commonalities and their contrasts, Husserl and Heidegger served as
the starting point for much of the work that followed in the phenomenological tradition.
Though Heidegger’s explicit use of hermeneutics ended with Being and Time (see Ramberg
and Gjesdal 2014), this vein of research was actively carried forward by other thinkers. In
Truth and Method ([1960] 1989), for example, Hans Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) developed
powerful ideas about the nature of interpretation and the problem of interpreting literary
texts, while Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) made the perspective of hermeneutic phenome-
nology speak to an array of central topics in the humanities and social sciences. In a long
and productive career, Ricoeur suggested how everyday conduct could be interpreted as
a text ([1986] 1991), worked to reconcile phenomenology with rival intellectual traditions
(1970), and explored the problem of interpretive antagonism in social life ([1969] 2007). The
most famous existential phenomenologists are Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Maurice
­Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). One of Sartre’s major concerns was with the nature of free-
dom, and his Being and Nothingness ([1943] 1948) used nuanced portraits of everyday interac-
tion to shed light on issues of agency and affect. Drawing on then unpublished manuscripts
by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s rigorous and evocative descriptions of perception illustrated
the centrality of the body for every area within philosophy. His Phenomenology of Perception
([1945] 1962) uses subtle readings of everyday life to reveal how the lived body emerges
for us, by turns, as object and as subject; building on these discussions, Merleau-Ponty
reveals that consciousness is necessarily—rather than contingently—embodied, and that
agency and social relations can only be understood as bodily phenomena. Though Sartre’s
sway over mid-century intellectual life was enormous, his influence has decreased over the
years while Merleau-Ponty’s has only risen, and much of the contemporary emphasis on
embodiment can be traced to the latter’s pioneering ideas. (For additional perspectives on
embodiment, see Text Box 1.1.)
The work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty make it clear that phenomenology is no tradition
of individualistic thought, and the social and political philosophy that has been pursued
within phenomenology is highly varied. Seeking to ground Max Weber’s interpretive so-
ciology in Husserl’s ontology, the major works of Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) develop sys-
tematic accounts of the experience of others in social interaction ([1932] 1967; Schütz and
Luckmann [1973] 1975; 1983). In painstaking detail, Schütz explores the ways that mean-
ings emerge in the temporal flux of everyday life, how they are partially shared between
interlocutors, and how large-scale social structures emerge in experience. A skilled pianist,
Schütz wrote extensively about music, and his article “Making Music Together” (1951),
which focuses specifically on temporality in musical interactions, has become a cornerstone
phenomenological ethnomusicology (see also Schütz 1976). If Schütz sought a phenomeno-
logical grounding for Weber’s liberal social theory, other thinkers in the tradition worked to
forward radical politics. The ideas of Karl Marx, for example, deeply informed Sartre’s writ-
ings, and phenomenology is one of the currents of influence on the work of the celebrated
post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). For example, the chapter titled “The Lived
Experience of the Black Man” from Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 2008: 89–119) develops
208  Harris M. Berger
a powerful phenomenology of the agonies of racialized subjectivity and presents a blistering
critique of Sartre’s writings on race, an approach that was carried forward in the work of
later writers like Thomas F. Slaughter (1977). The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) by Simone de
Beauvoir (1908–1986) is a foundational document in feminist theory, while phenomenolo-
gies of gendered embodiment like Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980) have
been widely influential.3 In differing ways, these authors show how the categories of persons
are unavoidably political and illustrate how forms of domination like empire and patriarchy
shape the lived experience of persons who find themselves as raced and gendered subjects.
The issue of alterity was also important for Emmanuel ­Levinas (1906–1995), but he sought
to steer phenomenology in a completely new direction. Arguing that we must understand
the nature of social relationships before we can make inquiries into being or knowing, Levi-
nas’s Totality and Infinity ([1969] 1991) uses a subtle phenomenology of the face of the other in
social interaction as the starting point for a vast intellectual enterprise that challenges almost
every element of Western philosophy. Levinas emphasizes the open-ended nature of social
interaction and the humbling experience of confronting the agency of an other who cannot
be subordinated to our schemes of meaning making. In these phenomena, Levinas sees a
new foundation for ethics and politics, as well as metaphysics and epistemology.4
Phenomenology has continued to develop since the 1970s, and to locate its place in the
contemporary intellectual scene, we need to situate it in the context of opposing intellectual
movements. And to do that, we need to backtrack a bit.
In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology was arguably the dominant
tradition of philosophy in continental Europe, but the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury saw it face sharp challenges, many of which emerged within the French academy. In
the 1950s and 1960s, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966), for example,
focused scholarly attention away from the description of lived experience and toward
the analysis of cultural texts, which were seen as the product of underlying structures
of mind. (On structuralism, see Beaster-Jones [this volume].) The 1960s saw the first
publications or rise to great prominence of a diverse and complex set of radical think-
ers within and beyond philosophy—for example, Michel Foucault ([1966] 1989, 1984),
Jacques ­Derrida ([1967] 1973, [1967] 1997), and Jacques Lacan ([1966] 1996)—whose
highly influential work has been referred to, starting in the 1980s, as “post-­structuralism”
or, more vaguely and with decreasing frequency, as “French Theory.” Contemporary
­scholars have a range of viewpoints about whether these thinkers constitute a unified
intellectual movement. The philosopher Judith Butler, for example, has argued that
“French ­T heory” was ­something of an American invention ([1990] 1999:  x), as these
thinkers were not always seen in their home country as creating a unified ­movement, and
the differences among them could be substantial. However, other scholars—a ­m ajority in
the contemporary scene—have emphasized the continuities in their work. 5 Despite these
conflicting readings of intellectual history, we can say with clarity that the mid-century
French radical thinkers rejected or highly modified phenomenology’s focus on lived ex-
perience and its understanding of the subject as the crucial source of meaning. For them,
it was fruitless to search for universal features of the subject, which they felt was always
situated in particular historical and social conditions. This opposition to phenomenology
was married to a wide range of perspectives and agendas—the view that text, culture, or
power constitutes the subject; a skepticism about grand historical narratives and the phil-
osophical quest for securing the foundations of rationality, ethics, or knowledge; and a
concern for forms of domination beyond economic exploitation. (On post-structuralism,
see Sugarman [this volume].)
To more fully map out the contemporary intellectual terrain, we need to identify a sec-
ond cleavage, one that is far less controversial. The primary division in North American
 Phenomenological Approaches  209
philosophy departments today is between Continental philosophy (which includes both
phenomenology and post-structuralism) and analytic philosophy, an intellectual move-
ment stemming from the work of philosophers Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig
­Wittgenstein (see Text Box 1.2). The later tradition emphasizes the rigorous analysis of
language in ­addressing philosophical questions, largely develops liberal or conservative
­approaches to political theory (rather than, for example, Marxist ones), and allies closely
with ­contemporary advances in logic and with the natural sciences. Analytic philosophy is
by far the dominant tradition within American philosophy departments, while Continental
thinkers like Foucault and Lacan are highly influential in other humanities fields, particu-
larly those related to literary studies.
The position of phenomenology—and phenomenological ethnomusicology—in all of
this is complex. Despite the dominance of the analytic tradition, phenomenology remains
an active movement within philosophy proper. From folklore to film studies and beyond,
phenomenological approaches have been used in a wide range of humanities disciplines
outside of philosophy (Embree 1996: 1), as well as in the humanistic social sciences like
portions of cultural anthropology and sociology (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Katz and
Csordas 2003). And while the line between analytic and Continental philosophy is not
frequently breached in today’s philosophy departments, ideas from phenomenology have
had complex interactions with those from other traditions and disciplines. Heidegger, for
example, was a crucial influence on Foucault (see Dreyfus 1991: 9), while Derrida, who was
steeped in Husserl, can be seen variously as phenomenology’s fiercest critique or its most
creative exponent. With its emphasis on lived experience and social practice, phenomenol-
ogy has had a powerful influence on a number of ethnomusicologists. Set in the broadest
perspective, this should come as no surprise. As Ruth Stone has observed (2008: 169), the
late nineteenth century saw links between the predecessors of phenomenology and the dis-
cipline that developed into ethnomusicology, comparative musicology. What will occupy
our attention now is the creative ways that ethnomusicologists have taken up ideas from the
philosophical tradition and carried them forward in new directions.

Phenomenology in Ethnomusicology
The first use of phenomenology in ethnomusicology came with Stone’s publications in
the early 1980s (Stone and Stone 1981; Stone [1982] 2010). Her 1982 book, Let the In-
side Be Sweet, is equally an ethnography of the Woi epic of the Kpelle people of Liberia
and a program for phenomenological ethnomusicology. In contrast to older approaches in
ethnomusicology, which focused on musical works, repertoires, or music cultures, Stone
takes the performance event as her study object and offers a detailed framework for un-
derstanding how such events are built up from the interactions of their participants. To
theorize these events, Stone draws on Schütz’s “Making Music Together” (1951), in which
he argues that for performance to be involving, musicians and listeners must have a shared
experience of the way that the music is unfolding over time. Equally important for her is
Schütz’s broad vision of social life (e.g. Schütz and Luckmann [1973] 1975) and the closely
allied tradition of symbolic interactionism in sociology (e.g. Blumer 1969), which richly
explore the dynamics of face-to-face conduct. Schütz’s work was based on his immersion in
the culture of Western art music, where performers typically played pre-composed works
for their audiences, but more important for Stone’s vision were the perspectives of her
Kpelle interlocutors. For them, music performance wasn’t the presentation or appreciation
of a pre-existing composition but rather an interactive process of co-constituting an event.
Stone’s work shows how Kpelle performers and audience members engage in the multisen-
sory exchange of symbols to coordinate and form meaningful experience. Stone does not
210  Harris M. Berger
merely emphasize musical activity over decontextualized musical texts; rather, she shows
how, from a Kpelle perspective, pre-composed musical elements are primarily experienced
as a medium for the unfolding of interactions and events, and Let the Inside Be Sweet builds
from this idea to a broader event-oriented theoretical framework for ethnomusicology.6
Developing this theme, marking and cuing hold a central place in the book. Stone offers
detailed accounts of the way that performers and their audiences process around an open
area in their village to delineate the performance space, signal the beginning or ending of
a performance through verbal formulae and other devices, and move from one section of
the epic to another by exchanging musical cues. Initially, it may appear that marking and
cuing are nothing more than pragmatic activities that allow the participants to coordinate
their behavior, activities that are merely ancillary to the music itself. As Stone’s discussion
develops, though, it becomes clear that no such division exists: the exchange of cues itself is
the focus of musical aesthetics. From the smallest negotiation of tempo and timbre, through
the weaving of interlocking polyrhythmic patterns among the drummers, to passages of
call and response at the level of the phrase, every element of the music is an exchange of
symbols by which the participants make the event meaningful in their experience together.
Culture plays a central role in Stone’s work, as she shows how the exchange of symbols
in performance are intimately connected to social context and must be understood from
the participant’s perspective. In the most ambitious construction of its philosophical tradi-
tion, phenomenology reveals how the subject constitutes the world in experience, and the
application of phenomenology’s methods to individual domains of social life (e.g. music,
literature, film, social interaction) would, it was hoped, reveal structures unique to each
domain. Stone’s phenomenological ethnomusicology finds subjects constituting experience,
but they are profoundly cultural subjects, deeply informed by the social worlds in which
they are embedded and constituting “music” in ways that Schütz could not have foreseen.
While clearly grounded in Schütz’s ideas, Stone reveals dynamics of musical experience that
transcend anything suggested in his work.
The emphasis on meaning making in interaction plays out in a different way by eth-
nomusicologists influenced more by the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Ricoeur. For example, Powerhouse for God (1988), Jeff Todd Titon’s classic
ethnography of an Appalachian Baptist congregation, sets the hymn singing of their wor-
ship services in the context of a wide range of other performance events and genres, such
as religious instruction in Sunday school and the telling of life story narratives. In a distinc-
tively ­R icoeurian move, Titon understands everything from hymnody and sermon to per-
sonal experience narrative and everyday situations as texts to be interpreted. In this context,
Titon’s study object is interpretive processes writ broad—the distinctive way that people
in this community have of making social life meaningful by reference to the fundamental
beliefs of their culture. The result is an intimate and three-dimensional portrait of a group
of people and their world, one that illustrates hermeneutic processes in musical practice and
everyday activities that go beyond the dynamics identified in the philosophical literature.
Closely linked to Titon’s work is that of Timothy Rice, whose highly influential research
on Bulgarian folk traditions (1994) and issues of theory and method in ethnomusicology (e.g.
2008, 2017) draws on a related set of philosophical sources. In hermeneutics, Rice sees a way
of overcoming the polarization of insider and outsider to which ethnomusicology’s tradi-
tional emphasis on “local perspectives” can lead. While the ethnographer and her research
participants often have very different pasts, they share a similar interpretive predicament.
Confronted with the major texts and most resonant practices of a culture, both insiders and
outsiders begin with immediate, pre-reflexive understandings, go through a process of ac-
tive analysis and interpretation, and ultimately find themselves transformed by the process
of making these works and practices meaningful. For Rice, ethnography is therefore less an
 Phenomenological Approaches  211
attempt to get into the heads of one’s research participants than it is the process of allowing
oneself to be transformed by the same set of powerful cultural landmarks that have shaped
their lives. Rice’s richest illustration of these ideas comes in his discussion of learning to play
Bulgarian bagpipes. Early in his fieldwork, lessons from established musicians gave Rice a
steady, incremental improvement in his performance skills. Eventually, however, he reached a
plateau and was incapable of mastering a set of melodic ornaments that are iconic of the local
culture—ones that could not be explicitly explained by his teachers. Only a period of inten-
sive listening and embodied practice allowed Rice to internalize the technique and acquire
the style seen by its adherents as central to the tradition. In his Ricoeurian reading, Rice’s
journey was not so much one of moving from insider to outsider as it was of moving closer to
the tradition, its works, and its practices, and allowing himself to be transformed by it.
Phenomenology has been used to explore a wide range of issues in ethnomusicology.
­Steven Friedson’s ethnographic work in Malawi (1996) and Ghana (2009), for example,
draws on Heidegger’s thought to develop powerful insights into the musical experiences
that emerge in healing and trance rituals. The nature of time is a perennial concern of
both philosophers and musicians, so it is no surprise that this topic has interested phe-
nomenological ethnomusicologists as well. From Stone’s work on the Kpelle concept of
“expandable moments” (1988), to Friedson’s ideas about the perception of multi-stable
rhythms in Tumbuka ceremonies (1996), to Roger Savage’s cross-cultural examination
of the way that intense musical experiences create a kind of time out of time (2010),
Andy McGuiness’s Sartrean insights into the temporal dynamics of shame in British indie
rock performance (2013), and my own work on temporality and tonality (1999) or affect
(2010), phenomenological ethnomusicologists have shown that people have a level of
control over the way that music unfolds in their experience and that this unfolding is pro-
foundly shaped by culture. While Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-­Consciousness
([1929] 1964) is the seed from which much of this work has grown, these authors have
discovered forms of temporality in experience—and the meanings of such forms—that
had not been previously identified in the scholarly literature.
The role of the body in music has also received much attention by scholars in phe-
nomenological ethnomusicology. Matthew Rahaim’s work, for example, uses ethnographic
techniques to explore the significance of gesture in North Indian classical singing (2012).
Drawing on ideas from Merleau-Ponty, Rahaim understands melody, not as abstract form
or purely sonic structure, but as a kind of motion, one that may have its most vivid life in
sound but that is also expressed through physical gesture. As minds that are inherently em-
bodied, we know the phenomenon of motion by being bodies that move through the lived
spaces of the world. It should be no surprise, therefore, that song and bodily motion are of-
ten married together, and Rahaim shows the culturally specific ways in which ­H industani
vocalists articulate melody through means that are both sonic and kinesic, making music
not just with the vocal tract, but with the entire body. These examples only scratch the
­surface of the diverse phenomenological work done by ethnomusicologists. From the in-
tercultural dimensions of performance (Bakan 1999), to music and memory (Conn 2012),
time and media technologies (Porcello 1998), and beyond, scholars in our field have used
ideas from phenomenology to explore a wide range of topics and develop a unique set of
insights into social life and culture. (See Berger [2015] for a further discussion of the litera-
ture in phenomenological ethnomusicology.)

Phenomenology in the Field: Northeast Ohio, 1992

Phenomenology has been central to all of my research, and my first major fieldwork project
was conducted in the early 1990s in four music scenes in Northeast, Ohio. In Cleveland,
212  Harris M. Berger
I worked with a group of young, European American musicians that played commercial
hard rock and dreamed of international stardom on the model of bands like Poison or
Whitesnake. There, I also conducted field research with a group of African ­A merican jazz
musicians in their thirties and older who played contemporary post-bop jazz. In ­A kron,
I worked with young white musicians in a heavy metal scene that found its center of grav-
ity in death metal—an aggressive, commercially marginal style characterized by elaborate
song forms and vocals delivered in a broad range of raspy timbres. I also talked with a
group of white Akron jazz musicians, largely in their forties and older, who played ac-
cessible jazz in a style associated with the 1950s. The musicians in all four scenes were
predominantly men.
One of the main goals of my initial Ohio fieldwork was to get a concrete and detailed
understanding of the musicians’ experiences in performance and rehearsal. What is it like
to stand on the stage at a big rock club in Cleveland or sit in an intimate jazz bar in Akron?
To work out arrangements in a rehearsal space or take lessons with a teacher? More than a
strictly descriptive or interpretive project, I also wanted to develop more general insights
into how musical experiences are formed. Are such experiences largely personal and idio-
syncratic, or can we find patterns in the performers’ awareness of their events? What roles
do culture and power play in all of this? And what of the musicians’ agency, their ability to
shape and direct experience?
To answer these questions, I started with one of the basic structure of experience
that phenomenology has uncovered, that of focus, fringe, and horizon (see Ihde 1976).
There is almost no part of our lives in which phenomena appear to us as isolated enti-
ties. Instead, we find ourselves confronted with a field of phenomena, and our attention
to that field is graded. Things in the focus of our attention are given with the greatest
intensity and detail; those in the background appear to us in a muted fashion, and the
background of the field trails off into a horizon, beyond which we have no immediate
awareness. A cursory exploration of this focus/fringe/horizon structure reveals that,
while phenomena in the background are given with less strength and clarity than those
in the focus, they often color the way one experiences foregrounded phenomena. A dull
pain in the background of my experience or the half-acknowledged anticipation of a
happy event to come will cast an affective shadow on the phenomena in the focus, much
in the same way that a bass line in the background of a musical texture will frame the
harmonic qualities of the melody in its foreground, shaping and informing the sense
of tonal center that we hear in the tune. The horizon may seem like little more than a
limit or void, but it plays a critical role in the field of experience: not merely the trail-
ing edge of awareness, the horizon points toward a world beyond what is immediately
present for us. Walking down the street, for example, I don’t see the visual horizon as
the end of the universe but as the edge of my current experience—a place within my
awareness that offers the possibilities of future phenomena that might eventually appear
in the focus or fringe.
The example of walking down a street brings up two other noteworthy experiential pro-
cesses. First, experience is dynamic, with phenomena constantly moving between focus and
fringe. Indeed, in any given situation the rhythm of our experience—the manner in which
phenomena emerge, reappear, and pass away for us—is one of the primary things that gives
that situation its character. Second, the organization of experience is highly pragmatic.
Only the most adept meditator may have complete control over her experience, but in
everyday life we constantly organize our attention. When we read, for example, the words
on the page and our own responses to them constantly shift between focus and near fringe,
while phenomena like the growling of a hungry stomach or the chatter from the office next
 Phenomenological Approaches  213
door trail off toward the horizon, keeping us tuned into our body and environment without
distracting us from our literary task.
If employed as a crude checklist, the intellectual apparatus from any theoretical tradi-
tion can reduce the complexities of the field to a mere caricature, but treated as a way of
understanding people’s lives, ideas from theory profoundly deepen and enrich participant-
observation fieldwork and ethnographic interviews. Using the notions of focus, fringe, and
horizon as a starting point, I sat down with musicians and asked them about their experi-
ences in different musical settings. I also attended as many performances and rehearsals as I
could, watching and listening to the crowd and the musicians to get a sense of the elements
of the event to which they might be paying attention. While some musicians were initially
reluctant to talk about their experiences, most were eager to discuss them, and my field-
work confirmed something I long expected: musicians are masters of attention. Whether a
performer is coordinating sixteenth notes on the double kick drums with the bass player’s
pounding ostinato, cutting the changes in “Giant Steps,” nailing the high harmony part in
a rock song when he can’t hear the lead vocal in his monitor, or finding an improvised line
on the vibes when an overbearing accompanist insists on playing voicings with too many
notes, the working musician has an extraordinary ability to organize attention.7
Some commonalities could be found across my interviews. All of the musicians said that,
in an ideal performance, they would be deeply involved in the music, experiencing the
event as a smooth and unbroken flow of emotionally laden sounds. Likewise, all agreed that
if there was a problem in any of the fundamental elements of the music, like the coordina-
tion of tempo, they would focus their attention there to resolve the issue. Getting deeper
into the topic, patterns unique to each music scene began to emerge. For example, each
kind of ensemble had typical patterns of reciprocity and circulation of attention, with jazz
drummers and bass players holding each other’s parts in the center of their experience to
secure a steady but flowing groove, and accompanying pianists and soloists listening care-
fully to the harmonic implications of each other’s parts to avoid conflicts. Both metal and
rock musicians explained that the sound systems in most local clubs were so bad that it was
often quite difficult to hear one’s own part or that of the other musicians. In such a situation,
one would imagine the other player’s parts in one’s head to keep one’s place in the struc-
ture of the song and, if at all possible, follow the drummer’s tempo to maintain rhythmic
­coordination. The musician’s attention to the audience differed greatly between the jazz
and rock scenes. Rock musicians spoke of trying to compel the audience’s attention with
their performance. While the jazz players said that they appreciated an attentive crowd,
there was no way that they could compel the listener’s attention with their music, they said;
the most that they could do was invite the audience’s attention and hope the crowd would
take up their musical offer.
The patterns in the data that were most suggestive had to do with the place that thought in
words or other forms of abstract cogitation had for musicians in performance. For the A ­ kron
jazz musicians, as well as both the commercial hard rockers and the metalheads, abstract
thought on stage was used strictly to solve problems. If the drummer kept rushing, if a singer
was concerned that he couldn’t hit the high note in a phrase, if the pianist kept using an un-
familiar chord substitution, the bass player, singer, or soloist might slightly displace the flow
of sound from the center of his experience and devote some attention to actively planning
a course of action that would solve the problem. If possible, though, such periods would be
brief, and the ideal gig had the sound of music and its affective qualities in the center of at-
tention, while the body’s unproblematic performance and the audience’s supportive attention
and energy lingered in the near background, giving the event energy and momentum. Such
a texture of experience was desirable for the younger African American jazz musicians in
214  Harris M. Berger
Cleveland, but they saw thinking in words as having the potential to be something more than
a problem solving tool. In contrast to the musicians from the other scenes, they spoke posi-
tively of performances in which an effortless current of music sound and bodily performance
was simultaneously accompanied by an effortless current of thought in words or other forms
of plotting and planning. Thinking should never compromise performance and overly clever
musical techniques weren’t desirable, they said, but they didn’t see purely sonic experience as
the only standard by which a performance was judged.
Exploring patterns in my research participants’ experiences allowed me to speak to key
issues in the study of expressive culture. For example, a wide range of scholars celebrate
the power of performance to generate intense, even euphoric experiences of involvement,
what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has referred to as “flow states” (e.g. [1975]
2000; Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988). In some contexts, talk about musical
involvement can take on a romantic quality, naively celebrating bodily engagement with
others and representing thought as something that does nothing more than separate the
person from others and erase the joy of music participation. Taking a phenomenologi-
cal approach to musical experience allowed me to see the differing ways that reflexive
thought in words can be constituted and valued in music cultures. We make music for
a wide range of reasons and in a wide range of ways, and a-reflexive involvement in the
flow of sound is only one mode of musical experience that people may find valuable. (See
Rahaim’s chapter in this volume for a broader discussion of musical involvement and the-
ories of participation.)
These patterns also show that something as intimate and seemingly idiosyncratic as
the organization of attention is shaped by larger social forces. The jazz musicians that I
worked  with in Cleveland saw jazz as an African American art music, an intellectually
sophisticated form of expression that has flourished despite the racism that has consistently
marginalized people of color in the United States; their practices of organizing attention,
which fostered self-reflexive thought in words along with experiences of affectively laden
sound, were directly tied to these ideologies and their larger political contexts. Connections
between situated experience and large-scale social forces were everywhere in my fieldwork,
and using ideas from phenomenology helped me to understand these complex relationships.
For example, a good part of my project examined how experiences of harmony and rhythm
in death metal depended on particular ways of organizing attention, and how these prac-
tices, in turn, were tied to the contexts of deindustrialization and working-class rage. It is
not merely the case that larger social forces shape experience. In the book that came from
that fieldwork (1999) and in later publications (2010), I suggested how perceptual practices
are linked with wider currents of musical activity, and how the practices that take place in
the domain of expressive culture have the potential to impinge back on other spheres of so-
cial life and macro-social orders. Set in the broadest perspective, this kind of work allowed
me to understand the profound ways in which the person’s lived experiences of music are
always social experiences. Far from mental phenomena “in my head,” one’s musical expe-
riences are oriented toward and influenced by the experiences of others in our immediate
situation and are shaped by—and have the potential to impact upon—the widest currents
of social and political life. In one sense, then, my fieldwork in Ohio reaffirmed the oldest
and most traditional element of the phenomenological vision—that the person engages
with the world and makes it meaningful. But in another sense, it connects more directly
with later phenomenological work and other recent forms of social theory by showing how
the meanings that the person makes are unavoidably connected with larger social forces
and relations of power. Rather than fleshing out universal structures of subjectivity, this
kind of work sees the subject as fundamentally situated in particular historical and social
conditions. Taking lived experience as my study object, I found that phenomenology gave
 Phenomenological Approaches  215
me tools for more effectively pursuing ethnomusicology’s interpretive project of under-
standing the experiences of the people I worked with, and it also allowed me to open that
interpretive project onto larger political arenas.

***
The topics that I have discussed in this chapter are diverse—the dynamics of performance
events, the problem of time in music, the nature of musical embodiment, and the organiza-
tion of attention—but they do not begin to exhaust the potential of phenomenological work
in ethnomusicology. For example, with the publication of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenolo-
gies (2006), critical phenomenological approaches to gender and sexuality have received wide
attention in recent years, but relatively few ethnomusicologists have picked up this highly
important area of research. Stephen Amico’s important book Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian
Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (2014) is a key exception, and more work is needed
on this topic. Building on Fanon’s ideas, Ahmed also points to the utility of phenomenol-
ogy for critical research on race/ethnicity, particularly in the context of institutions (2007),
and the opportunities for ethnomusicologists to forward this line of research are substantial.
Drawing on a slightly different body of work, Daniel Fisher’s research with Indigenous
youth in Australia has shown how phenomenology can shed new light on the paradoxes of
post-colonial identity that emerge in the context of the mass media, cultural organizations,
and policy (2015). These developments point the way to even broader vistas. While much
phenomenological research is focused on face-to-face interaction, it need not do so. My
recent work with Giovanna Del Negro on the role of expressive culture in the constitution
of organizations has primarily been elaborated in terms of practice theory (2016); however,
the deepest roots of that project come from phenomenology, and our current work seeks
to make the phenomenological dimensions of this perspective explicit. What these lines of
scholarship illustrate is the relevance of phenomenology for the full breath of topics in social
and cultural life. Providing powerful ways of understanding lived experience, serving as a
foundation for interpretive ethnography, and suggesting new approaches to critical research,
ideas from the phenomenological movement—both within and beyond ethnomusicology—
will continue to offer the potential for powerful new insights for years to come.

Notes
1 For Husserl, particularly toward the end of his life, this was not a narrowly technical exercise in
epistemology. Though he converted to Lutheranism as an adult, Husserl was born Jewish. Pursuing
his philosophical career in German, he experienced Nazi anti-Semitism directly and saw the rise of
fascism in the 1930s as part of a larger cultural rejection of rationality in Europe, one that had deep
philosophical roots (see Carr 1970: xxvii). Begun in 1934 and still incomplete at the time of his death
in 1938, his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Hus-
serl 1970), speaks to these issues.
2 It would be difficult to discuss Heidegger’s thought without mentioning his relationship to Nazism.
In 1933, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, which required him to make public
expressions of allegiance to the Nazi Party. Scholars have long argued about Heidegger’s connection
to the Third Reich, asking if he actively supported, passively went along with, or covertly resisted
Nazism, and what, if any, impact all of this had on his philosophy. These questions became more
painful in 2014 with the first publication of his “black notebooks,” a series of handwritten journals
that Heidegger kept in the 1930s (English translation, 2016). Not only do these writings evince a
virulent anti-Semitism, but they also suggest that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was tightly bound up
with his philosophical ideas. At the time of this publication, Heidegger scholars are actively working
through the implications of these revelations (e.g. Farin and Malpas 2016; Mitchell and Trawny 2017).
3 For more on Fanon, see the chapters by Mahon (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
On Marxism and feminism in ethnomusicology, see the chapters in this volume by Manuel and
­Sugarman, respectively, and Text Box 2.2.
216  Harris M. Berger
4 For a rich discussion of the relevance of Levinas’s ideas about alterity for ethnomusicology, see R
­ ahaim
(2017). On Levinas and participation, see Rahaim (this volume).
5 On Derrida’s and Lacan’s ideas about voice, see Meizel and Daughtry (this volume).
6 As a faculty member in the Institutes of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Stone
had a close relationship with performance theory in folklore studies. On folklore and performance,
see Text Box 6.1.
7 Of course, our control of experience is never complete. J. Martin Daughtry’s crucial work on sound
and listening in the Iraq War richly reveals the ways in which our experience as auditors is shaped
by the unique sonic and social situation in which we find ourselves (see Daughtry 2015; Meizel and
Daughtry, this volume).

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———. 1983. The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent. Vol.
2. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Slaughter, Thomas F. 1977. “Epidermalizing the World: A Basic Mode of Being-Black.” Man and World
10: 303–8.
Smith, David Woodruff. 2013. “Phenomenology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by
Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2013. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/phenomenology/.
Stein, Edith. (1917) 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith
Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite. Vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS
Publications.
Steinbock, Anthony J. 2001. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis:
Lectures on Transcendental Logic, by Edmund Husserl, xv–lxvii. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Stone, Ruth M. (1982) 2010. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of
Liberia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Trickster Press.
———. 1988. Dried Millet Breaking: Time, Words, and Song in the Woi Epic of the Kpelle. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
———. 2008. Theory for Ethnomusicology. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Stone, Ruth M., and Verlon L. Stone. 1981. “Event, Feedback, and Analysis: Research Media in the Study
of Music Events.” Ethnomusicology 25 (2): 215–25.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment
Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3 (2): 137–56.
9 Theories of Participation
Matthew Rahaim

We are surrounded by forms of collective musical action undertaken entirely for the sake
of those who join in, and which produce distinctive forms of collective sociality (a band,
a party, a choir, a dance floor). We are invited (if we are invited at all) to get into it, to
join in, to be in a groove, and this inside offers powers, pleasures, and dangers not avail-
able to those on the outside. While a piece of music may be studied at some distance by
an observing subject, participation requires becoming part of something. It thus seems to
blur the lines between knower and known. The rhythmic patterns and social structures
that yielded their secrets a moment ago, the description of which could have fit on a sin-
gle piece of paper, now fade from attention. Upon joining in, something quite different
comes into view: a groove, a circle, a living, moving, musicking entity of which any in-
dividual is only a part. Because of these distinctive ontological possibilities, participation
has long been regarded as a very particular sort of method, a mode of comportment that
sacrifices critical distance in order to reveal a social collectivity larger than any one ob-
server. ­Generations of ethnographers have attempted to tack methodologically between
participation and observation in order to describe the power of collective performance.
The participatory worlds that emerge, and their apparently incontrovertible truths, can be
overwhelmingly seductive. Especially against a background suspicion about individualist
humanism and scientific detachment, descriptions of group participation often ring out in
tones of breathless celebration, extolling the pleasures of sharing, belonging, moral con-
viction, and metaphysical oneness.
Collective performance is nothing new, and the metaphysics of participation has been
a source of philosophical controversy since Parmenides. But it wasn’t until the twentieth
century, in the midst of fervent nationalisms and anxieties about social disintegration,
that advocates of participation (from anthropologists to theater directors, from music
educators to theologians to political organizers) have argued zealously that we ought to
participate—not just because it feels good, but because it appears to be “essential to our
well-being as individuals and social creatures” (Ede 1997: 6). Others have argued that the
pleasures and solidarities of participation can pose distinct dangers: mobs, for example,
animated by a concerted totalitarian will, drunk with conviction, are often vehicles for
political violence against outsiders (Adorno [1941] 2002; Levinas [1991] 1998; Turino
2008: 205). Much of the debate about the politics of participatory performance hinges
on how to characterize the emergent socialities that it produces: as fascistic or radically
democratic, as childishly regressive or politically progressive. The purpose of this chapter
is not to make a moralizing case either for or against participation in general but to map
out the terrain of the debates, trace out key philosophical lineages, and suggest some paths
for deeper readings.1
220  Matthew Rahaim
Participation: The Philosophical Tradition
The ethnomusicological sense of participation refers both to a practical musical relation of
absorbed interaction and to a metaphysical relation by which apparently separate beings
inhere in a prior unity. This double meaning is implicit in the Greek philosophical term
methexis (translated into Latin as participatio, and thence to English).2 Methexis referred
both to a mode of ritual theatrical performance in which audience members join in and
to a metaphysical relation by which apparently separate phenomenal particulars participate
in a prior universal form. In the Platonic tradition, methexis is the key metaphysical term
that draws a transcendent form together vertically with its worldly particulars and draws
together a group of apparently separate particulars into a horizontal unity. One canonical
Platonic image of methexis is a single sun that illuminates many things with one light; an-
other is a single cloth laid over a group of people, making a unity out of many individuals. 3
In the Christian tradition, two well-known images for methexis are a single body with
many limbs and the ritual partaking of Christ’s flesh through communion.4 Through exe-
getic commentary, methexis became a key metaphysical resource for Christian theological
construals of spiritual unity and relational ontology, and this concept entered the Islamicate
philosophical tradition through Arabic-language translations of Aristotle, Porphyry, and
Proclus.5
Methexis is often contrasted with mimesis, a process of imitative (but never identical)
re-presentation. While a mimetic copy always maintains its metaphysical distance from the
original (as a movie star might “fall in love” again and again in successive films without
actually falling in love), methetic participation is always bound up in immediate unity (as
particular lovers participate in Love itself ). The opposition between these two terms has
been presented in various ways,6 but from neoplatonic mysticism to Catholic theology to
performance studies to groovology, participation nearly always serves as the favored term in
a binary, in contrast to a mimetic opposite: presence vs. re-presentation, unity vs. duality,
sincerity vs. duplicity, bodily involvement vs. reflective distance, live music vs. recording.
The revival of scholarly interest in participation in the twentieth century was enabled
by the sociology of Emile Durkheim (1858–1919), founded on a vision of vast, coherent,
supra-individual social forces.7 In particular, Durkheim’s account of “collective efferves-
cence” (transformative ritual moments in which a group of people becomes united) influ-
enced nearly every later theorist of participation:

Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from
their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation…
[B]ecause a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order
that permits harmony and unison of movement, these gestures and cries tend to fall
into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and dances.
([1912] 1995: 220)

Note that here, participation in a pre-given social totality generates rhythmic regularity; in
ethnomusicological construals, it is usually the other way round.
The specific turn to participation as a philosophical theme is largely due to Lucien
­Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), a philosopher and avid follower of comparative metaphysics who
was deeply influenced by Durkheimian social theory and fascinated by missionary accounts
of failed conversions. Lévy-Bruhl projected the methexis/mimesis binary onto a pair of dis-
tinctive mentalités: a “primitive” mentality characteristic of indigenous peoples and a “civi-
lized” mentality characteristic of the European colonizers who (much to their own surprise)
often failed to convert them.8 Lévy-Bruhl claimed that these unconvertible “primitives”
 Theories of Participation  221
were not, as many European commentators had long assumed, racially deficient; they sim-
ply had a different mentality, one founded on participation. By participation, “the one
and the many, the same and the other” were bound together in a “mystic community of
substance.” Whereas for a “civilized” mentality, an individual may represent a group, a par-
ticipatory understanding maintains “actual identity” between one and many without any
sense of logical contradiction (1926: 77). Lévy-Bruhl’s work was met with near-unanimous
criticism from anthropologists—partly for his uncritical acceptance of missionary accounts
and partly for his racialist generalizations about so-called primitives.9 He later renounced
the idea of a distinctive “primitive mentality” in favor of the idea that participation was
“available in every human mind” ([1938] 1975: 100–101).
Lévy-Bruhl’s vision of participation as a universal human capability became central
to the work of his most forceful exponent, metaphysical literary theorist Owen Barfield
(1898–1997). Inspired by the anthroposophical mysticism of Rudolf Steiner, Barfield of-
fered a critique of alienated modern “idolatry,” in which objects are taken to have an
independent reality apart from their perceivers (58), and prophesied a coming new age of
“final” participatory awareness, in which the world would appear in its luminous partic-
ipatory metaphysical aspect (1965: 133). Crucially, this was a matter of ethical refinement
for Barfield; he insisted that the practices that enable final participation require not just
“hypothetical thinking,” but active “thought, feeling, will, and character” (141). The idea
that participation is a cultivated way of being that remedies modern alienation was at the
foundation of later ethnomusicological construals of participation, such as Charles Keil’s
activist writings (discussed below).10

Participation: The Political Tradition

Treatises on statecraft, war, and liturgy have long recognized the small-scale, local solidar-
ities produced by singing and moving together,11 but participatory music making appears
to have arisen as an explicit model for large-scale, socially cohesive political formations
with particular force in the age of nationalism. From the French Revolution to Indian
anti-colonial nationalism to the Industrial Workers of the World, participatory singing (on
the scale of dozens of people) cultivated a vivid sense of vast, unprecedented macrosocial
solidarities (on the scale of millions).12 In interwar Germany, the ideal of Gebrauchsmusik
(participatory music for useful purposes) animated both communist and Nazi populisms,
elevating the communal vitality of everyday song and dance over the “decay” of bourgeois
high art (Eisler in Pritchard 2012: 35; Shirer in Turino 2008: 207). German musicologist
Heinrich Besseler was an early advocate of participatory music as a method of forging a
national community. He celebrated simple participatory pieces for singing and dancing in
glowing, Heideggerian terms: we engage in everyday singing and dancing “with personal
commitment,” he believed, in contrast to the contemplation of “high art” music, which
occurs at a distance through a special “aesthetic attitude” ([1959] 2012: 60). But after World
War II, the taint of Nazi ideology—and Besseler’s own enthusiastic participation in the
Nazi party—largely discredited the concept of Gebrauchsmusik (Hinton [2001] 2014).
The vision of a participatory politics grounded in participatory performance, however,
was given new life in the postwar American counterculture. The civil rights movement
repurposed traditions of African American song performance for building solidarities of
resistance (Turino 2008: 215). The forms of political theater practiced by Amiri Baraka
(1934–2014) and other experimental writers and theater directors invited audiences into
“ceremonial communion” with the performers, fusing a loose communitarian politics of sol-
idarity with a metaphysics of unity (Azouz 2015; Bishop 2012). The New Left of the 1960s,
repelled by the totalitarian horrors of Stalinism, looked to spontaneous, non-hierarchical
222  Matthew Rahaim
forms of improvised participation for a political model. Informed by these traditions, a
distinctly improvisational set of political practices emerged among recent anti-war and
­anti-globalization activists, visible in forms of “direct” participatory performance (such as
street theater and the various “occupations” of the Occupy movement) that seem to present
an alternative to the failings of “indirect” politics (i.e. merely voting for representatives)
that mirrors in politics the metaphysical distinction between methexis and mimesis.13

Participation: The Ethnomusicological Tradition

Ethnomusicologists are not alone in their attraction to participatory performance. Both
the method of participant-observation and the topic of communal joining-in have long
been matters of reflection for ethnographers. In particular, studies of small-scale egalitar-
ian societies, such as the Mbuti of Central Africa (Turnbull 1961) and the Kaluli of Papua
New Guinea (Schieffelin 1976; Feld 1982), have emphasized the links between partici-
patory performance and social cohesion. Participation has likewise been a key theme in
the field of performance studies (see Waterman, this volume), emerging out of collabora-
tions between ethnographers (Richard Bauman, Victor Turner, Linda Hess), experimen-
tal theater directors (Amiri Baraka, Paul Carter Harrison, Joseph Chasikin), and theater
scholars (­Margaret B. Wilkerson, Kimberly Benston),14 broadening the theoretical scope
of participatory performance beyond staged theater into group bonding, public ritual, and
politics. The concern of Victor Turner (1920–1983) with the processes and transformational
effects of participatory ritual (rather than its abstract forms, artifacts, or symbols) led to his
theory of communitas: “anti-structural” moments generated by participatory performance in
which participants step out of conventional structures of social status, bonded together in a
notional, ritually sustained equality (1969).
But ethnomusicologists, perhaps more than anyone else, have thematized participation
as a distinctive form of collective musical practice. Some, to be sure, simply note that some
music is meant for joining in, not for spectators. But the most extensive and influential ac-
counts of participation are infused with the metaphysical, intellectual, and political traditions
outlined above. Building on a disciplinary aversion to the supposed mimetic inauthenticity
of high art and mass media, as well as a disciplinary attraction to the methetic immediacy of
performance, ethnomusicologists have long celebrated the power of participatory music to
cultivate unity. Alan Lomax (1915–2002) teased out a cantometric link between the partic-
ipatory “vocal empathy” of Pygmy choral singing and the famously egalitarian “cooperative
style of their culture” (1962: 437).15 Edward O. Henry’s studies of South Asian folk song led
him to a distinction between nonparticipatory and participatory music; the latter was aimed
at “sonic unity” (1988: 149). Martin Clayton has demonstrated that the force of synchronized
rhythmic entrainment is so strong that Hindustani tanpura players can unintentionally fall
into sync when making music together (2007). John Miller Chernoff grounds participation
in a normative formulation of African performance: “the African orchestra is not complete
without a participant on the other side” (1979: 50). ­Drawing on ­A lfred Schütz’s formulation
of “inner time,” Ruth Stone charted out a sophisticated account of the “inside” of Kpelle
song, sustained by a “temporal and sonic fit” between performers, which allows a group of
participants to “[go] down the same road” together (1982: 71). Victor Grauer goes so far as
to claim that the participatory musical practice of polyphonic interlock (as in the “Pygmy/
Bushmen” style he identifies throughout the world) is the oldest and most fundamental mu-
sical practice in the world, providing the basic condition of possibility for egalitarian social
life (2006).
The first to systematically introduce participatory metaphysics into ethnomusicology
was Charles Keil, a wide-ranging scholar of African and American musics. His theory of
 Theories of Participation  223
participatory discrepancies (PDs) (1987, 1995) explicitly drew inspiration from the meta-
physical tradition of Lévy-Bruhl and Barfield. But Keil was also a musician and a veteran of
the American participatory counterculture that looked to spontaneous involvement rather
than aesthetic distance as a remedy for alienation. He thus drew on his practical experience
with the “groovy, sensual musics of the world” (1995: 1) to link metaphysical participa-
tion with a participatory politics. Keil had already marked out the conceptual territory
for this theory in earlier work (1966), which counterposed processual “engendered feel-
ing” (linked to the pleasures of swing, movement, and dance) against syntactic “embodied
meaning” (linked to the temporality of delayed gratification, aesthetic distance, and above
all to ­Leonard Meyer’s theory of musical feeling [1956]). By 1987, Keil had re-conceived
this binary in terms of participation and alienation, joining the solidarities of political re-
sistance (“the opposite of alienation from nature, from society, from the body, from labor”)
to a Barfieldian participatory metaphysics of unity. “If you can participate once,” he wrote,
“in one song, dance, poem, rite, you can do it more times and in more ways until you are
‘at one’ with the entire universe” (1987: 276). One might expect that the musical expression
of this metaphysical oneness would sound like eternal droning unison, but Keil argues that
it is precisely discrepancies—processual tensions that never quite resolve into a stable sonic
unity—that invite participation. PDs in music may be rhythmic (“the little discrepancies
within a jazz drummer’s beat, between bass and drums, between rhythm section and so-
loists” [277]) or textural (“the blended harmonics of two trumpets … a certain bright and
happy sound that invites people to get up and dance” [278]).16 But in all cases, the “urge to
merge” (1987: 276) in participatory oneness is brought about by dynamic tensions rather
than resolutions and is itself a form of lived cosmology, in which “the universe is open,
imperfect, and subject to redefinition by every emergent self ” (1994a: 171).
The theoretical power of Keil’s work, however, is not in offering “mere ideas” (Keil,
personal communication to Feld, quoted in Feld 1988: 104). Like Barfield, Keil teaches by
example; his poetic style (filled with lilting rhythms, ecstatic interjections, and participa-
tory exhortations to a prior “we”) performs, rather than merely describes, these discrepant
soundings. He offers an invitation to dance. One prominent interlocutor to take him up
on this invitation was Steven Feld (see the discussion of groove, below). Their many years
of improvised dialogue, shot through with interruptions and provocations (published as the
book Music Grooves, 1994b), foreground the active process of theorizing. Two key theoreti-
cal dispositions emerge in this work, and they are mapped onto a twentieth-century cultural
geography of Manhattan: the “uptown” of official scholarship (heady, intellectual, reflexive,
distanced, mimetic) and the “downtown” of poetry and musicking (groovy, emotional, ac-
tivist, involved, participatory). Keil’s practical ethics of doing theory is quite explicit:

rather than saying that we need to think through the fixed concepts in order to grasp
the groove … it’s the reverse; we need to groove more in order to break open some
concepts, drop others, keep all mere ideas at a safe distance.
(Keil, personal communication to Feld, quoted in Feld 1988: 104)

Thomas Turino brought participation into the mainstream of “uptown” ethnomusicolog-

ical inquiry in the 2000s. Turino explicitly draws on Keil’s work on participation (2008:
26) and shares his zeal for lived participatory relationships in which “we feel, for those best
moments, as though our selves had merged” (19). His key theoretical distinction, between
participatory music and presentational music, was at first a way to account for a distinctive
indigenous participatory ethic of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, which, he argues, invites
“the fullest participation possible” and where “there is little or no distinction between
performers and audience.” This is contrasted with a presentational capitalist-cosmopolitan
224  Matthew Rahaim
ethic that “emphasizes rationalist control of the performance, increased objectification of
the art object, and the distinctions between artists and audience that make ticket and re-
cording sales possible” (Turino 2000: 46–50). The distinction between participation and
presentation later became the key guiding theme of his influential Music as Social Life: The
Politics of Participation (2008).
Turino’s approach is novel in several ways. First, while Keil tends to focus on the small-
scale dynamics of groove and participation, gesturing only occasionally toward pre-given
“societies,” Turino is deeply concerned with the power of participatory performance to shape
cultural formations. This emphasis on the politics of participation offers an alternative to the
politics of re-presentation that had dominated ethnomusicological studies of identity in the
1990s. Second, Turino’s account of participation is pitched in terms of C. S. Peirce’s semiot-
ics (see Beaster-Jones, this volume), accounting not only for linguistic reference, but also for
non-verbal signs that seem to mean what they mean directly—by virtue of association and
resemblance rather than arbitrary symbolism. This expansive semiotics offers a language to
describe the power of participation as a participatory immediacy, rather than a symbolic me-
diation. Turino pays particular attention to one of Pierce’s sign types, the dicent-index (a “sign
of actual relations and fact”) by virtue of which “direct kinesic and sonic response to others
may well be experienced as a deep type of communion, although one can rarely fully express
the feeling in words” (1999: 241). In Turino’s later work, he creatively maps Peirce’s ontolog-
ical categories (the thirdness of mediated re-presentation, the secondness of direct relation, and
the firstness of pure being) onto an original “phenomenology” of musical states (2012).17 Thus,
in Turino’s scheme, distanced reflection on music corresponds to thirdness; direct participa-
tion corresponds to secondness, in which “participants are fully in the moment and integrally
united with each-other-and-sound-and-motion” (2014: 204); and firstness corresponds to
an ineffable state of pure being, where “all thought and perception have ceased” and where
the conscious self “is in-and-of-itself ” (205). At many points in Turino’s writing, distanced
reflection and thirdness in general is set up as a sort of problem to be solved, presented as a
barrier that keeps us from “the most direct way of being-in-the-world” (2014: 213). For these
moments, Turino’s ethical prescription is very much in tune with Keil: “we should simply
participate” (213). At other times, unlike Keil, Turino also suggests a competing ethics of a
“balanced self ” that requires distanced reflection as well as participation.
Turino also offers a vision of participation that is ethnographically observable from the
outside, drawing on social scientific theories of rhythmic solidarity—synchrony (Hall
1983), flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, discussed below), and “muscular bonding” (McNeill
1995). It is partially for this reason that Turino’s version of participation has proven to be
such a handy resource for ethnomusicologists who want to account for the power of col-
lective music making (Widdess 2013: 124; Fischer 2014: 18; Miller 2016). Likewise, Diane
Thram’s inquiry into music’s therapeutic potential posits a single efficacious principle: it is
participation (the “joining of one’s individual energy with the communal energy of the
whole”) that generates “a physical release, a unique buoyancy, a feeling of being carried
or made weightless,” all of which “has a therapeutic effect … on the entire being of the
individual” and generates a (presumably desirable) “loss of self-consciousness” (2002: 135).
As we will see, the controversies over participation often hinge precisely on the ethical and
political value of this self-consciousness.18

Related Theories of Musical Process: Groove, Musicking, Flow

Groove, in its technical sense (developed rigorously in Steven Feld’s “Aesthetics as Iconicity
of Style” [1988]), is not so far off from its casual sense: a distinctive rhythmic dynamism,
ever-changing yet coherent, like a gait, that one enters into. Even on the scale of seconds,
 Theories of Participation  225
it is easy to feel when one has entered a particular groove. Like participation, grooviness is
known in part by its pleasures: “pleasurable sensations ranging from arousal to relaxation,”
“a positive physical and emotional attachment,” comfort, and “feelingful participation”
(1988: 75). But one never simply grooves in general; one is necessarily in some p­ articular
groove or another. Responding (like Keil) to Leonard Meyer’s canonical formulation
of style (1967), Feld’s grooves are always local and specific. But unlike Meyer’s highly
­mediated metaphorical workings of style, the particularity of each groove lies, in princi-
ple, in an unreflective, “iconic” homology between style and lifeworld.19 In other words,
each groove, in principle, not only seems natural and inevitable but actually is a “direct”
and “feelingful” connection between the “thing-out-there” and the ­“ feeling-in-here”
(1988:  93). The model groove that Feld returns to again and again is dulugu ganalan
­(“lift-up-over-sounding,” a Kaluli practice of creating collective, n ­ on-overlapping, lay-
ered musical textures). Dulugu ganalan, to the extent that it is a groove in Feld’s sense,
is in principle iconic with a general Kaluli style of ethics, politics, and labor: “collabora-
tive autonomy,” “anarchistic synchrony,” “non-hierarchical yet synchronous, layered, fluid
group action” (83–84). To conceive of dulugu ganalan as a groove, then, is to consider it
as a “distilled essence” (74) of Kaluli life.20
These distilled essences can, in principle, be heard in recordings, allowing comparative
work on groove across many places and times without extensive participant-observation.
This enables Kofi Agawu, for example, to assert that groove in general and a specific kind
of African groove in particular (rooted in divisive time, inviting participation) is the es-
sence of African music in general, an aesthetic and ethical lingua franca across hundreds
of ethnicities; non-groove practices (such as the additive time of declamation or reflective
listening) emerge only as occasional exceptions to the rule (2015: 258–59). Mark Abel, on
the other hand, claims that groove is something rather more musically and historically spe-
cific: metrically multi-leveled, pulse-based time marked by syncopation and backbeat, orig-
inating in early twentieth-century Western popular music (2014). Though Abel’s narrow
sense of groove likely would not accommodate Ewe dance music or Kaluli dulugu ganalan,
he nonetheless follows Feld’s path through style and iconicity, suggesting that groove is
essentially emancipatory, reworking the “the abstract, alienated time of capitalism” into a
“praxial figuration of a liberated temporality” (256).
The creative reworking of the term musicking by Christopher Small (1927–2011) opens
similar ontological questions about essence and process. The word itself is no stranger than
the common English word “picnicking” and has for centuries been used to refer to sing-
ing, dancing, and playing instruments. But Small’s technical usage is far broader: “to take
part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by
rehearsing or practicing, by [composing], or by dancing” (1998: 9). This much seems flatly
relativistic. And yet it becomes clear that, for Small, the morally normative way to “take
part” is through participation. His account of concert hall listening practices, for example,
describes a loss of sociability, a lack of communication and social contact among performers
and audience members (27).
More importantly, musicking opens a crucial analytic horizon, directing our attention
to actions (singing, listening, amplifying, dancing) rather than to musical objects (works,
scores, recordings, genres). As with the conventional usages of dulugu ganalan (Feld
1988: 83), to musick grammatically requires us to consider verbs alongside nouns and thus
to emphasize process over product. A rigorous commitment to this analytic would disclose
a world in which “there is no such thing as music” because “music is not a thing at all, but
an activity, something that people do” (2). This offers rather different possibilities than does
groove; a hard ontological commitment to processes could never disclose anything as fixed
as a distilled essence. The musicking heuristic likewise opens up a rich practical politics of
226  Matthew Rahaim
musical action, in contrast to the more familiar interpretive project of excavating the politics
contained in a musical object. For example, it opens the consideration of violent (176), mi-
sogynistic (150), and disruptive (160) acts of musicking, rather than simply assigning abstract
violence, misogyny, or rupture to a text.
A rather more individualistic way of describing participation in music is through recourse
to the concept of flow, given its technical sense by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
“the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement” (1975: 36).
Flow states seem to occur in complex activities (such as basketball, chess, or rock climbing)
that are neither boringly easy nor frustratingly difficult (49). Like participation, flow is de-
fined oppositionally against a taken-for-granted background state of self-consciousness and
reflective cognition. Flow thus stands out in relief against what it is not, marked by a lack
of dualistic, distanced reflection (38), a limited field of stimuli (40), an absence of extrinsic
goals, and a loss of self-awareness (42). On the surface, this would seem to account well for
many everyday musical pleasures. But Csikszentmihalyi begins and ends with the indi-
vidual, and thus his sense of “flow” does not account easily for the emergent socialities of
participation. To the extent that there are other people involved at all, flow emerges against
a static social backdrop with fixed rules in which there is “no need to negotiate roles,” “no
deviance,” and no ethical reflection “about what should or should not be done” (43). While
most ethnomusicological accounts of collective musicking concern themselves with forms
of social relation, flow largely foregrounds pleasures, annoyances, and sensations. Indeed,
the basic psychological terms of flow analysis are grounded in the economy of individual
attention (49), and the principal theoretical utility of flow is in accounting for the intrinsic
pleasure that a flow activity offers a single person (1). Even the “politics of enjoyment” that
­Csikszentmihalyi hazards (185 and passim) is grounded in arranging for the personal con-
tentment of individual laborers at work, rather than in any sort of solidarity, resistance, or
structural reform. Ethnomusicologists have nonetheless found ways of applying the notion
of flow to manifestly relational situations, in which flow states emerge precisely from group
interaction (e.g. McLeod and Herndon 1980; Turino 2008; Widdess 2013). As Turino
points out, flow is only one means among many for achieving a participatory “secondness”
(see above) of direct relation (2014: 206).

Participatory Listening
For many advocates of participation, merely listening to music is presented as the opposite
of joining in. But this assumes a very particular figuration of listening (distanced, aesthetic,
structural, seated, still), geared toward discerning the large-scale designs of art music and
thus modeled, in many ways, on seeing at a distance.
There are, of course, other ways of listening, some of which would seem to be inher-
ently participatory. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, construes listening to timbre as a sort of
resonance characterized by “methexis: participation, contagion (contact), contamination,
metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric transference” ([2002] 2007: 22). In contrast
to a violent politics of the “objectifying gaze,” Nancy’s participatory “politics of sonority”
offers a political vision founded on mutual resonance between free individual subjects,
which Lauri Siisiäinen, writing on Nancy’s work, characterizes as “free from the domina-
tion of the gaze” (2010: 40, n13; see also Erlmann 2010). Architectural theorist Paul Carter
has likewise advocated for a move away from a mimetic, visualist politics of re-presentation
to a methetic “acoustic knowledge paradigm” modeled on the ambiguities of ever-present
echoes and mishearings, an orientation to listening that “presupposes a participatory model
of making and marking” (2001). Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s account of clashing regimes
of aurality in colonial Colombia draws on Carter’s work to highlight the participatory
 Theories of Participation  227
ambiguities of echoic mishearing, in contrast to the mimetic certainties of colonial sonic
re-presentation (2014). Maria A. G. Witek likewise focuses on the aural capabilities (“the
groove state of listening”) that make participation in groove possible in the first place
(2009). In her account of “deep listening” practices, Judith Becker argues that a porous,
participatory form of the self is necessary for trancing, in contrast to a “bounded, unique,
inviolate” self that resists trance (2004: 89).
The very prospect of a number of people participating in a shared musical world would
seem to likewise require some notion of shared practices of listening: shared temporalities,
shared attunements, shared ways of musical being and knowing. Steven Feld’s acoustemolo-
gies (common, mutually resonant acoustic epistemologies among groups of aural subjects)
would thus seem to be a necessary condition of participation (2015). One conceptual pitfall
in assuming such a principled commonality, however, is the conflation of a contingent,
local acoustemology (say, of a choir or a hunting party) with a putative ethnic acouste-
mology characteristic of an entire culture “group.” Ethnomusicologists have thus had to
resist the temptation to assign acoustemologies to cultures (e.g. “Kurdish acoustemology,”
“­Yanomanö acoustemology,” “Western acoustemology”) as though each person in a soci-
ety, by virtue of their essential habits of listening, spends their days in a single, culturally
determined acoustical world. This would reduce a processual, participatory way of know-
ing to a static collective re-presentation, returning us to a familiar “net of reifications” (Feld
1984: 405) made of imaginary, internally homogeneous (though empirically elusive) social
totalities. (The theme of listening practices and Feld’s acoustemology are also central in the
field of sound studies. See the chapter by Meizel and Daughtry in this volume.)

Participatory Powers and Dangers

From corporate drum circles to esoteric initiation rites, from Lock! Her! Up! to the Occupy
movement to ecstatic Sunday morning hymn singing, participatory performance is every-
where. Participation, famously a tool of anti-capitalist countercultures, has also become
a cornerstone of the “new capitalism,” widely prescribed for teambuilding exercises and
optimizing productive efficiency (Vrakas 2015; Saddler 2017). Given this wide practical
reach, few theorists have been willing to categorically embrace or reject musical participa-
tion as such. The loudest critic of participatory musical consciousness was Theodor Adorno
(see Manuel, this volume, and Wallach and Clinton, this volume), who famously warned
that “rhythmically obedient” types attracted to popular dance music were “susceptible to
a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism” ([1941] 2002: 460). But
even the most enthusiastic advocates of participation acknowledge this much. Keil warns
of “participations fueled by fear and desperation” that foster “cargo-cult beliefs,” and he
furthermore suggests that participation can become “the very essence of fascism” when
practiced by “large-scale nation-state organizations with aggressive purposes” (1987: 276).
(Keil’s litmus test for these bad participations is, however, a bit vague, hinging on whether
they are “large-scale” and whether they exacerbate inequality (277)—the latter of which
would seem to reduce participation to a mere means to an end.) Turino, noting that “the
powerful semiotic potentials of music can be used in mass movements for dangerous ends,”
dedicates a sizable chunk of Music as Social Life to Nazi participatory music, the explicit
goal of which was that “the German people might be willingly led anywhere and to do
anything” (2008: 210). Nor is participation necessarily empowering, as evidenced by the
mandatory participatory singing forced upon Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps
(Brauer 2016). Even Durkheim’s participatory collective effervescences took on a chilling
new dimension after his death. The rise of fascism in Europe shocked his student Marcel
Mauss, who was horrified to see that the populations of modern nation-states “could be
228  Matthew Rahaim
hypnotized … and set in motion like a children’s roundabout.” Where an earlier genera-
tion of sociologists could romantically hold out hope that “it was in the collective mind
that the individual could find the basis and sustenance for his liberty, his independence,
his ­personality, and his criticism,” the twentieth century revealed the political dangers of
participatory collectivities (Mauss in Lukes 1985: 339, n71).
The very idea of participation remains intellectually seductive, and one well-established
critical tradition urges caution precisely for this reason. Michelle Kisliuk points out that
the “mystique” of egalitarian participation may well lead ethnographers to overlook subtle
contestation, resistance, and inequality in group performance (2000). The very idea of rad-
ical immediacy underlying so many ethnomusicological construals of participation would
seem to surrender the critical function of ethnomusicology in unveiling oppressive forms
of mediation and mimesis. Harris Berger critiques Keil’s model in which sonic discrepan-
cies automatically and universally generate ecstatic participation, pointing out the severe
moral stakes of a normative theory in which refusing to participate can only be aberrant
(Berger 2010: 82–84). David Hesmondhalgh’s careful consideration of participation locates
the desire for social integration in capitalist modernity, critiques the “reflectionism” that as-
signs participatory politics to participatory performance, and hazards a psychoanalytic cau-
tion about founding a musical politics on a yearning for unity (2013: 100–01). E ­ mmanuel
­Levinas noted that Lévy-Bruhl’s conception of participatory being had, for better or worse,
reshaped twentieth-century philosophy by placing collective social experience at the center
of being (1998: 51); he cautioned that a participatory orientation in which “the subject not
only sees the other but is the other” ([1947] 1987: 43) collapses alterity into a comprehensive
oneness, reducing true ethical responsibility to the mere maintenance of an all-­consuming
self.21 To the extent that participation excludes “any possibility of duplicity” (Turino 2008:
136), it is a form of power, albeit a pleasurable one, that establishes “an order from which
no one may keep his distance” (Levinas [1961] 1979: 21). In a recent essay (2017), I have
extended Levinas’s critique of participation into a consideration of what ethnomusicology
might gain from a musical metaphysics grounded in irreducible alterity, rather than partic-
ipatory unity.
Is there an “iconicity of style” between performance and politics that would allow us to
groovologically distinguish between participatory singing at Nazi rallies and at civil rights
marches simply by listening? Or is participation simply a neutral, universal musical technol-
ogy put to various uses? Is it possible to imagine a laudable participatory politics in the ser-
vice of an oppressive political regime? Or does advocating for participation simply amount
to advocating for the political solidarity of a favored social formation? No one doubts that
participation can be pleasurable and powerful. But if we are willing to admit that these
practices may feel good without being good (or, for that matter, without necessarily being
evil), then theories of participation offer a way of understanding these powerful entangle-
ments of performance, metaphysics, ethics, and politics.

Notes
1 The notion of participation is related to the notion of social practice, and this latter theme has been of
interest to scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines and intellectual movements in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. On social practice and practice theory, see Text Box 2.1. —Harris M. Berger.
2 The translation of methexis into Latin and then English adds some conceptual baggage not found in
the Greek. For example, “participating” in a survey, a vote, a program, and so forth, involves hun-
dreds or millions of independent parts-of-a-whole who never meet each other (Gadamer [1988] 2007:
311). The theological sense of active liturgical participation (participatio actuosa) joins the Greek and the
Latin meanings, so that participation in ritual is, in principle, a form of immediate unity (see Skeris
1990).
 Theories of Participation  229
3 In Plato’s dialog the Parmenides, these metaphors are presented as a provisional dialectical scaffolding,
rather than as a final answer (131b), and the familiar images of “horizontal” unity are quickly shown
to be inadequate to the larger metaphysical task at hand.
4 For example, 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, in which Paul speaks of methexis and koinónia (communion) in
parallel, as though they were synonyms, or 12:26, where he writes “if one member suffers, all suffer
together.”
5 On participatory metaphysics in Christian liturgy, see Cavanaugh (2003: 184) and Tilling (2015:
265–66). Rice (2016) reports a similar metaphor, perhaps inspired by the Pauline image in the Sunni
homiletic tradition. As far as I know, there has not yet been a comprehensive study of participation
in Arabic literature, but among the Arabic translations for methexis were al-qub ūl and al-ishtirāk. I am
grateful to Carl Ernst and Cristina D’Ancona for these leads.
6 For more on this tradition, see especially the neoplatonic commentaries of Plotinus, Proclus,
­Porphyry, and Iamblichus, many of which are available in Algis Uzdavinys’s The Golden Chain
(2004). Book IV of Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides, in particular, is dedicated to problems
of methexis.
7 Durkheim’s ideas were foundational for the development of functionalism and structural-­f unctionalism
in the discipline of anthropology. See Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume).
8 S. A. Mousalimas (1990: 44) points out that Lévy-Bruhl was concerned with the metaphysics of the
methexis/mimesis binary from the beginning to the end of his work. See also Throop (2003).
9 See especially the thorough and sympathetic critique of Lévy-Bruhl by Edward Evans-Pritchard
(1934), as well as his productive correspondence with Lévy-Bruhl (1952).
10 On the notion of modernity, see Manuel (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume).
11 See McNeill (1995) on the history of military “muscular bonding,” Van Orden (2004) on music and
dance in early modern French military discipline, Kertzer (1988: 13) on ritual and politics in classical
China, and Skeris (1990) on participation in liturgy.
12 On French Revolutionary song, see Mason (1996) and McKinley (2008). On singing in Indian
­a nti-colonial nationalism, see Bakhle (2005) on musicologist Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande’s national-
ist vision of India singing a song together, and see Schultz (2013) on nationalist kirtan performance.
On the songs of the Industrial Workers of the World, see Denisoff (1983) on “magnetic” traditions of
participatory song.
13 On horizontalism and direct action, see Sitrin (2012) and Dean (2017). See also Gayatri Spivak’s wise
caution against conflating political representation and metaphysical re-presentation (1988).
14 It’s worth noting that Richard Schechner, one of the founders of the field of performance studies, fits
in all three of these categories. For a further discussion, see Waterman (this volume).
15 On Lomax, see also Manuel (this volume).
16 For multiple perspectives on PDs, see the special issue of Ethnomusicology dedicated to this topic
(Titon 1995).
17 Though Peirce himself seldom used this term, Turino’s approach is intended as “phenomenological,”
in the broad sense that it is meant to account for lived experience. On Peirce, Turino, and phenome-
nology, see Berger (2015, n13).
18 For a related discussion of self-consciousness in performance, see Berger (this volume).
19 Like Turino, Feld looks to Peircean iconicity as a justification for im-mediacy. The role of Peirce’s
interpretant, however, is passed over in silence. On homology theory, see Manuel (this volume).
20 See Feld’s and Keil’s conversation “Dialogue 2: Grooving on Participation” in Music Grooves for a
dialectical elaboration on the idea of internally consistent, holistic “shared culture” (1994a: 161).
21 On Levinas and phenomenology, see Berger (this volume).

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Notes on Contributors

Jayson Beaster-Jones is Associate Professor of Music in the Global Arts Studies Program
at the University of California, Merced. An ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on
the music and film industries of India, he is the author of Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopol-
itan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Music Commodities,
Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of Music in
Contemporary Indian Film (Routledge, 2017). He has also published a number of essays in
academic journals and edited volumes.
Harris M. Berger  is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology and Director of the
Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of
Newfoundland. His work examines American popular music, heavy metal, and the the-
oretical foundations of ethnomusicology and folklore studies. His books include Metal,
Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Identity and Everyday
Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (co-authored by Giovanna
P. Del Negro), and Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive
Culture. He has served as co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore, a series editor of
Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture book series, and President of the Society for
Ethnomusicology.
Esther Clinton  is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Popular Culture in
the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University, and she
received her PhD in folklore from Indiana University with a focus on narrative and Old
English literature. Her research interests include the history of ideas, proverbs, narrative,
tricksters, ethnomusicology, and Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in Asian Music,
Journal of the National Medical Association, and Proverbium, and in the books Archetypes and
Motifs in Folk Literature, The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory, Modern Heavy Metal,
Heavy Metal and the Communal Experience, and Connecting Metal to Culture.
J. Martin Daughtry  is Associate Professor of Music and Sound Studies at New York
University. He teaches and writes on acoustic violence, human and nonhuman vocality,
listening, jazz, Russian-language sung poetry, sound studies, the auditory imagination,
and air. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime
Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Pub-
lishers and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. At present,
he is writing a book about vocality and environment in the Anthropocene.
Maureen Mahon  is Associate Professor of Music at New York University. She is the
author of Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke
University Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Journal of Popular
Music Studies, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Ethnomusicology, and
234  Notes on Contributors
online at EbonyJet.com and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum website. Her
book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll is forthcoming
from Duke University Press.
Peter Manuel has researched and published extensively on musics of India, the Caribbean,
Spain, and elsewhere. His several books include Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from
Rumba to Reggae; Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India; and Tales,
Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music. He has also pro-
duced three documentary videos, including Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the
Caribbean. Formerly an amateur performer of sitar, jazz piano, flamenco guitar, and high-
land bagpipes, he teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York.
Katherine Meizel  is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State
University. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol was published in
2011. She has co-edited the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and authored
the forthcoming Multivocality: An Ethnography of Singing on the Borders of Identity.
Matthew Rahaim  is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of
­M innesota, with affiliate appointments in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature
and in Religious Studies. His first book, Musicking Bodies (2012), dealt with the trans-
mission of gesture among Hindustani singers. His current book project, Ways of the
Voice, investigates the cultivation of vocal dispositions among a wide range of singers
in North India—Bollywood singers, qawwals, classical vocalists, and purveyors of the
eclectic contemporary styles known as “singing Sufi” and “singing Western.” He is also
a performing Hindustani vocalist in the Gwalior tradition, trained under L. K. Pandit.
Ruth M. Stone is Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology and African Studies at Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana. Her research has focused on the temporal dimen-
sions of musical performances among the Kpelle of Liberia, West Africa, which she
has detailed in Let the Inside Be Sweet (Indiana University Press, 1982; Trickster Press,
2nd edition, 2010) and Dried Millet Breaking (Indiana University Press, 1988). Among
her publications are Music in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Theory for
­Ethnomusicology (Routledge, 2007). She is also the editor of the Africa volume of the
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998).
Jane C. Sugarman is Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Ethnomusicol-
ogy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of
­Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (University of ­Chicago
Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles on music and dance in and from southeastern
Europe as they relate to gender and sexuality, nation, diaspora, transnational circulation,
and conflict situations. Her current research examines mediated Albanian musics from the
former Yugoslavia and their role in imagining “modern” Albanian identities.
Jeremy Wallach  is Professor of Popular Culture in the School of Cultural and Critical
Studies at Bowling Green State University. He has written or co-written over two dozen
research articles; co-edited, with Esther Clinton, a special issue of Asian Music (2013); au-
thored the monograph Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2008; Indonesian Edition, Komunitas Bambu, 2017) and
co-edited, with Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal
Music around the World (Duke University Press, 2011). A founding member and former
chair of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Wallach is a
Series Editor of the Music/Culture book series at Wesleyan University Press.
 Notes on Contributors  235
Ellen Waterman’s interdisciplinary research interests include improvisation, experimen-
tal performance, sound, identity, and ecology. Her early work as an artist-scholar focused
on Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s environmental music theatre. Waterman
is a core member of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation,
and she co-founded the flagship journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en
improvisation. She is co-editor (with Gillian Siddall) of Negotiated Moments: Improvisation,
Sound, and Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2016). Waterman is the inaugural Helmut
Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University.
Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

AACM see Association for the Advancement Bhabha, Homi 119, 122
of Creative Musicians (AACM) Bhatkhande,Vishnu Narayan 43, 229n12
Abel, Mark 225 Bigenho, Michelle 195–6
Abu-Lughod, Lila 84, 86, 90 Birmingham School 61–2, 66n10, 101–3, 111n6
acoustemology 178, 227 black feminism 62, 73, 81–2, 103, 105, 110
Adorno, Theodor 54, 60–1, 65, 127, 227 Blacking, John 5, 8, 29
African American music 40–1, 108, 159–61, blues music 15, 58–9
212–15; see also specific music genres Boas, Franz 99, 101
African Americans 81–2, 100–1, 103, 105–10, Bohlman, Philip 104–5, 193
156, 180 Boilés, Charles 38–9
African diaspora 99–100, 103, 110 Bollywood film music 42–4, 56, 63, 129; see also
Agawu, Kofi 225 film music
Ahmed, Sara 215 Borgo, David 157–8
Albania 86, 89–90 Born, Georgina 162
Alberti, Leone 64 Bourdieu, Pierre 39, 53–4, 61, 76–8, 80
Althusser, Louis 65, 76, 78–80 bourgeoisie 51–3, 55–6, 58–60, 64–5, 115, 221
Amico, Stephen 215 Brazil 119, 144, 157, 193
analytic philosophy 32–3, 209 Brown, Jayna 87–8
anthropology 18n1, 20n15, 29, 73–5, 76–7, Bühler, Karl 143
145–8, 196; ethnomusicology and 3, 5–6; Bulgaria 210–11
feminist 71, 74–5; gender studies and Burke, Patrick 107
83–6; of voice 190–1, 194; see also cultural Butler, Judith 79–81, 85, 143–5, 152–3, 158,
anthropology; linguistic anthropology 185, 208
Appadurai, Arjun 114, 123–5, 179 Buxton, David 60
Asian Americans 81, 106, 130, 155, 157 Byl, Julia 126
Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (AACM) 157, 159–60 Canada 147–9, 161
Attali, Jacques 159, 162 cantometrics 63, 222
Auslander, Philip 144 capitalism 51–3, 55–62, 63–5, 115, 118,
Austin, J. L. 32–3, 79, 143, 152 124–6, 227
Carby, Hazel 102
Bakhtin, Mikhail 29, 41, 122, 151, 194 Caribbean 100, 110, 117, 119
Barfield, Owen 221, 223 Carr, Daphne 180
Barthes, Roland 189–90 Carson, Charles 38
Bataille, George 158 Carter, Paul 226
Bateson, Gregory 32–3, 143–4 Cheng, William 183
Bauman, Richard 32, 144, 146, 164n6 Chernoff, John Miller 222
Beaster-Jones, Jayson 37, 46n24 Chion, Michel 183–4
Beauvoir, Simone de 208 Chomsky, Noam 16, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 43
Becker, Judith 227 Christianity 89, 116, 191, 220; see also religion
Bendrups, Dan 148 CIS see critical improvisation studies
Berger, Harris M. 58, 144, 211–15, 228 civil rights movement 72–3, 100, 103, 107,
Berlin School 1 157, 221, 228
238 Index
Clayton, Martin 45, 222
Clinton, Esther 129
Colombia 126, 192–3, 226
colonialism: European 56, 107, 116–17, 192–3;
gender and 83, 88–9, 91; globalization and
123–6; history of 116–17; Marxism and
114–15; race and 110; see also globalization;
post-colonialism
Combahee River Collective 73, 81, 103, 109
communication 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 35, 44–5;
see also language
Connell, R. W. 83–4
Connor, Steven 191–2
Conquergood, Dwight 149–53
Cooper, Robin 35–6
Coplan, David 56, 59
Côte d’Ivoire 130
countercultures 221, 223, 227
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 82, 103–4
crisis of representation 6, 18–19n1, 114
critical improvisation studies 141–2, 155–63
critical race theory (CRT) 73, 82, 103–4
critical theory 19n4, 19–20n5; see also
critical race theory (CRT); cultural
studies; gender; Marxism; phenomenology;
post-colonialism; race
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 214, 226
cultural anthropology 99, 123–4, 142, 144–7,
150, 209
cultural studies 61–2, 102–3; see also
Birmingham School
Cusick, Suzanne 192
Daughtry, J. Martin 179–80, 186–7, 216n7
Davis, Angela 81
Davis, Tracy 141
Deaf culture 185, 194–5
decolonization 13–14, 91, 107, 110, 117–19,
131–2, 163, 196
deep structure 28, 35
Denzin, Norman 150–1
Derrida, Jacques 79, 121–2, 152, 189–90, 208–9
Descartes, René 30, 116; see also Enlightenment
Diamond, Beverley 107, 123
digital technologies 57, 63, 91, 115, 125, 127–8,
182–3; see also technologies, sound
disability studies 159, 163, 184–5, 194–5
Dolar, Mladen 189–90
Du Bois, W. E. B. 100–1, 109
Dunn, Leslie 193–4
Durkheim, Emile 220, 227
Eagleton, Terry 52
Eastern Europe 58, 129
ecomusicology 37, 177, 180–1
Egypt 84–5
Eidsheim, Nina Sun 188, 191–2
embodiment 30, 54, 183, 189, 205–8, 211;
experiences of 154–5; performance and 76,
149–52; situated practice and 141; of songs 39;
of voices 177, 191–3, 195
Enlightenment 79, 92n9, 116, 191, 196; see also
Descartes, René; Kant, Immanuel; modernity
Erlmann,Veit 59, 126
ethnic studies 73, 83, 100, 106
ethnicity 51, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 90, 100, 105, 111n2
ethnography of performance 145–9
ethnomusicology: anthropology and 3, 5–6,
20n15; critical improvisation studies and
157–9; deafness and 195; disability studies
and 185; gender and 85–90; globalization and
127–31; Marxism and 51, 55–6, 58, 60–3, 65–6;
participation and 222–4, 228; performance and
141–5, 147–52, 163; performative ethnography
and 152–5; phenomenology and 204, 207,
209–15; race and 105–10; sound studies and
176–80, 183–5; voice and 190–1, 193, 195–6;
see also research methods
Fales, Cornelia 191
Fanon, Frantz 100–1, 119, 121, 207–8
Fausto-Sterling, Anne 73
Feld, Steven 36–7, 51, 127, 178–9, 190–1,
194, 223–5
Feldman, Martha 192
feminism 71–5, 79, 80–5, 104–5, 121; Marxism
and 62; performance and 145, 153, 158, 162;
see also black feminism; women’s studies
feudalism 53–5, 56, 64
fieldwork see research methods
film music 38, 61, 183; see also Bollywood
film music
Finland 130
Fischlin, Daniel 159–60
Fisher, Daniel 215
flow states 214, 226
folklore 20n6, 32, 54, 142–4, 146–7
Foucault, Michel 61, 77–80, 84–7, 107,
143, 208–9
Fox, Aaron 41, 58
framing 32, 143–4
Frankenberg, Ruth 104
Frankfurt School 60, 127
free jazz 155–6, 159
Frege, Gottlob 32–3, 205, 209
Freud, Sigmund 79–80
Friedson, Steven 211
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 207, 210
Geertz, Clifford 3–4, 75, 150, 204
gender 55, 73, 192; categories of 79–80, 83, 90–1;
colonialism and 83, 88–9, 91; ethnomusicology
and 85–90; identities 152; in India 88–9;
Marxism and 51, 57, 61–2; music and 71, 74,
81–2, 84–91; norms 71, 86, 89; performance
of 85–91; performativity and 79–81, 152–3;
phenomenology and 208, 215; sexuality
and 16, 72–7, 79, 84–5, 158, 215; voice
and 192; see also black feminism; feminism;
intersectionality; LGBT issues; masculinity
gender studies and anthropology 83–6
generative grammar 28, 35, 43
 Index  239
genre 29, 37–8, 40–1, 58, 66n5, 105–9, 126–30, improvisation 40–1, 141–2, 155–63
134n23, 146, 184, 210 Indian music 55–6, 61–3, 88–9, 126, 191;
Ghana 211 see also Bollywood film music; Hindustani
Gill, Denise 185–6 music; Karnatic music
Gillespie, Dizzy 161 indieglobalization 130
Gilman, Lisa 86–7 Indigenous music 144, 180, 193
Gilroy, Paul 40, 88, 102–3, 120, 126 Indigenous peoples 107, 109–10, 117–18, 123,
globalization 17, 52, 179; colonialism and 123–6; 127, 220; see also specific cultural groups
ethnomusicology and 127–31; post-colonialism Indonesia 58, 124, 127–8, 130
and 114–16, 119–23; see also colonialism; Ingarden, Roman 206
post-colonialism intersectionality 59, 62, 72–3, 81–3, 88,
Goffman, Erving 32, 144, 163n2 103, 105, 108–10
Gopinath, Sumanth 182–3 intersexuality 73, 80
gospel music 110 Iraq 186–7
Gramsci, Antonio 61–2, 75–6, 83, 102 Irigaray, Luce 158
Grauer,Victor 222 Islam 84–5, 120; see also Muslims
Greene, Shane 130
groove 161, 213, 219, 223–6, 227 Jackson, Stephanie 130, 160
Guy, Nancy 180 Jakobson, Roman 28, 31, 143, 146
Jamaica 58
Hahn, Tomie 154–5, 158 Jameson, Fredric 57, 65
Hall, Stuart 61, 75, 101–3, 109 Japan 60, 115, 154–5, 157
Hannerz, Ulf 124 jazz 37, 40–1, 88, 106–7, 129, 157–61, 212–14;
Harkness, Nicholas 191 see also free jazz
Harris, Cheryl I. 104 Jones, Alisha Lola 110
Harvey, David 57 Jones, Nancy 193–4
Hauser, Arnold 53, 64
Hayes, Eileen 105–6 Kabyle people 76–7
heavy metal 66n5, 129, 164n9, 212–14 Kaluli people 36–7, 178–9, 222, 225
Hebdige, Dick 61 Kant, Immanuel 53, 92n9, 121, 205
Heble, Ajay 155–6, 159–60, 162 Kapchan, Deborah 149, 178, 183–4
hegemony 51–2, 87, 159; masculinity and 83, Karnatic music 191
191; resistance and 59–63, 65 Katz, Max 126, 182
Heidegger, Martin 206–7, 209–11, 215n2 Kawano, Kei 129
Helmreich, Stefan 183 Keil, Charles 8–9, 58–9, 221–4, 227–8
Henry, Edward O. 222 Kenya 130, 132
Herzog, George 35 Kim, Christine Sun 185
Hesmondhalgh, David 228 Kipling, Rudyard 116
Hindustani music 191, 211, 222 Kisliuk, Michelle 154, 228
hip-hop 37, 57–8, 82, 129, 180 Korea 132, 191
Hoggart, Richard 102 Koskoff, Ellen 85–6
homology theory 45n3, 63, 66n10, 225 Kpelle people 10–11, 56, 209–11, 222
homosexuality, historical construction of 72, 78, Krell, Elías 192
82; see also LGBT issues Kristeva, Julia 79, 158
hooks, bell 81 Kubisch, Christina 179
Hosokawa, Shuhei 129 Kuhn, Thomas 7–8
Hume, David 116
Husserl, Edmund 15, 164n9, 204–7, 209, LaBelle, Brandon 189
211, 215n1 Lacan, Jacques 78–9, 189–90, 208–9
Hymes, Dell 31–2, 144, 146 language 26–30, 31–4, 35–41, 44–5, 78, 189–90;
see also communication; sign languages;
identity: African American 100–1, 103–4; cultural speech acts
61, 192, 194, 215; disidentification and 80–1; late capitalism 56, 66n5, 125, 159; see also
embodiment and 77, 81; fluidity of 149, 153; capitalism; neoliberalism
formation 80, 83; gender 11, 80–1, 152–3; Latin America 60, 65, 101, 118, 129, 148
improvisation and 157; music and 38; national Latour, Bruno 196n11
55; performance of 144–5, 191–3; personal 57, León, Javier 57
65; politics 73, 92n5; race and 100–2, 105–10, Levin, Ted 180
192–3; socio-economic class and 58–9; voice Levinas, Emmanuel 208, 228
and 189, 195; see also gender; intersectionality; Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15, 29, 74, 208
LGBT issues; performance; performativity; race Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 220–1, 223, 228
240 Index
Lewis, Bernard 120 music: capitalism and 63–5; critical
Lewis, George 156–8, 160 improvisation studies and 155–9; deaf
LGBT issues 71–3, 88 cultures and 194–5; in films 38, 61, 183;
Liberia 10–11, 56, 209 gender and 71, 74, 81–2, 84–91; globalization
Liberian drum languages 35 and 127–31; hegemony and 59–63; human
linguistic anthropology 31–3, 36–7, 40, 45, fragility and 185–6; language and 35–41,
143–4, 146 44–5, 189–90; linguistic theories and 26–30;
linguistics 26–34, 36, 38, 42–3, 45, 78; see also listening to 183–5, 226–7; Marxism and
semiotics; speech acts 52–65; mass media and 62–3; participation
Lipsitz, George 160 and 221–7; performance studies and 144–9,
listening 152, 158, 176–81, 183–7, 191–2, 225–7 151, 153–5; phenomenology and 209–15; race
lived experience 103, 109, 183, 194, and 40–1, 99, 105–10; semiotics and 35–45;
204–9, 214–15 socio-economic classes and 57–9; vs sound
Lomax, Alan 56, 63–4, 222 176–7; sound and 177–81; technology and
López, Francisco 179 128, 181–3; voice studies and 187–94; see also
Lorde, Audre 81 specific music genres
Luckmann, Thomas 10 music industries 37, 55–8, 60–5, 108–9, 115–16,
Lysloff, René T. A. 124, 127 123–4, 127–31, 181–3, 215; see also digital
technologies; technologies, sound
Madrid, Alejandro 141, 145, 149 musicking 225–6
Mahmood, Saba 84–5, 87 Muslims 55, 89–90, 185; see also Islam
Mahon, Maureen 108–9
Malinowski, Bronislaw 151 Nancy, Jean-Luc 226
Manuel, Peter 61–3, 65, 117 Nash, Jennifer 82
Marx, Karl 5–6, 51–2, 55–61, 65, 75, 114–15, 207 Native Americans 101
Marxism: approaches of 51–5; capitalism and 6, Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 38–9, 44, 180
55–7, 63–5, 115; feminism and 62; feudalism neoliberalism 56–7, 63, 65, 124–6
and 53–5; gender and 51, 57, 61–2; post- Nettl, Bruno 5, 71
colonialism, globalization and 114–15, 124–5, Njaradi, Dunja 148
127; poststructuralism and 75–6; race and 104; North Africa 90, 120
socio-economic classes and 57–9; Western 102 Novak, David 115–16, 176
masculinity 71, 109–10, 120, 153, 157, 191
masculinity studies 82–4 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María 126, 181, 192–3, 226
mass media see music industries Ohio music scenes 58, 211–15
Maus, Marcel 227–8 Oliveros, Pauline 158–9, 184
McGuiness, Andy 211 orientalism 120, 154–5
media studies 62, 196n5; see also music industries; Ortner, Sherry 74
technologies, sound Ottoman dance 89–90
Meintjes, Louise 87, 105
Meizel, Katherine 188, 194–5 Pan-Africanism 100–1, 161
MENA countries see Middle East and Papua New Guinea 36, 109, 178, 222
North Africa region (MENA) participation 87, 183, 219; ethnomusicology
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30, 119, 207, 211 and 222–4; listening and 226–7; musical
Merriam, Alan 5, 8, 40, 176 processes and 224–6; philosophy and 219–21;
metacommunication 37, 143 politics and 221–2; powers and dangers
Meyer, Leonard 223, 225 of 227–8
middle class 55, 58, 73, 81, 128 participatory discrepancies (PDs) 8–9,
Middle East and North Africa region 223, 229n16
(MENA) 120 Patel, Rupal 188
Miller, Kiri 13, 183 Pêcheux, Michael 80–1
Mills, Mara 185 Pedelty, Mark 180
modernity 51–2, 105, 116–21, 125–6, 132n4; Peirce, Charles Sanders 33–5, 38–41, 224
Indigenous modernities 123; see also Peña, Manuel 58
neoliberalism; post-modernism performance: embodiment and 54, 76, 146,
Molino, Jean 38–9 149–50; ethnomusicology and 144–5; events
Monson, Ingrid 40–1, 107, 157, 164n5 209–15; feminism and 145, 153, 158, 162; of
Morcom, Anna 88–9 gender 79–81, 88, 152–3; of identity 144–5,
Morris, Jeremy Wade 63 191; of language 27; participatory 219, 221–2,
multiculturalism 161 224, 227–8; studies 141–55
Muñoz, José Esteban 81, 153 performance ethnography 13, 149–52
 Index  241
performative ethnography 152–5 Said, Edward 120, 155
performativity 79–81, 143–4, 152–3, 158, 191; vs Sakakeeny, Matt 106, 176
performance 106, 155, 163n2, 165n18; see also Samuels, David 179
performance; speech acts Sartre, Jean-Paul 207–8
Peru 61, 130 Saussure, Ferdinand de 16, 26–30, 33–4,
phenomenology 87, 122, 133n13, 183, 37, 40, 43
204–8, 209–15 Savage, Roger 211
Piekut, Benjamin 156 Schafer, R. Murray 147–8, 179
polka music 58–9 Schechner, Richard 141, 145, 147–9, 153
popular music 57, 60–4, 81, 128–30, 133n19, Schütz, Alfred 10, 207, 209–10, 222
144, 180, 211–15, 225; see also music industries; Schwartz, Jessica 191
specific music genres Seeger, Anthony xi, 144, 147, 184
Portugal 116, 126 Seeger, Charles xi, 5, 37
post-colonialism 62, 76, 84, 110, 114–15, 117–23, semiotics 33–4, 45, 88, 224, 227; Bollywood Film
126–7, 131–2; see also colonialism; globalization music and 42–4; music and 35–41
post-modernism 18–19n1, 57, 65, 66n4, 153; see sexual continuum 73
also late capitalism; neoliberalism sexuality 72–91, 158, 215
poststructuralism 18–19n1, 71, 75–9, 83–4, 91, Shao, Oliver Y. 130–1
92n14, 93n19, 104, 107, 120–2, 153, 208–9 Shona people 223
Potter, John 193 sign languages 194–5
Pozo, Chano 161 sign vehicles 33–4, 40
practice theory 54, 66n2, 105–7, 157, 206, 215; signing 195
see also Bourdieu, Pierre; social practices signs: linguistic 26, 152; music and 35–40, 42–4;
proletariat 56, 58–9, 115; see also working class non-verbal 143; Peirce’s system of sign types
Protestantism 110 34, 224; systems of 27–8, 75, 78; thought and
Puar, Jasmin 82 33; see also semiotics
punk music 61, 81, 129–30, 153, 192 Siisiäinen, Lauri 226
Silverstein, Michael 41
queer identity 71–2, 79–82, 105–6, 110, 153, 192 Singer, Milton 144
queer theory 79–82, 110, 145, 153, 164n8, 215 situated practice 35, 44, 141, 147, 155, 157, 163;
Qureshi, Regula 55 see also practice theory
Slaughter, Thomas F. 208
race: colonialism and 110; ethnomusicology and slavery 88, 90, 100–1, 117, 159, 192
105–10; music and 40–1, 87–8, 99, 155, 157, Slobin, Mark 9
160; theories of 61–2, 82, 100–5, 192–3, 208, Small, Christopher 225
215; see also intersectionality Smith, Julie Dawn 158
Radano, Ronald 104–5 social aesthetics 156–7, 161
raga systems 35–6, 43 social interaction 31–2, 144, 206–8
Rahaim, Matthew 191, 211, 228 social practices 76, 78, 110, 141–2, 154, 156, 163,
Rahman, A. R. 42–4 164n9, 180, 206; see also practice theory
Ramshaw, Sara 156 socio-economic class 57–9
Rancier, Megan 180 Solis, Gabriel 109–10
recording industry see digital technologies; music Solomon, Thomas 114
industries; technologies, sound sound studies 177–87
Reed, Daniel 115 sound technologies see technologies, sound
religion 55, 90–1, 99, 132, 210, 220; soundscape 36–8, 152, 177–81
see also Christianity; Islam; Muslims; South Africa 57, 59, 87, 101, 105, 126, 128
Protestantism South Asia 63, 222
research methods 10–14, 20n12, 20n14; see also Spain 116
ethnography of performance; performance speech acts 32, 143, 152–3, 164n8
ethnography; performative ethnography Spivak, Gayatri 80, 119, 121
Rice, Timothy 8, 12, 210–11 Stanyek, Jason 157, 161, 182
Ricoeur, Paul 207, 210 Stein, Edith 206
ritual 145, 147–8 Steinbock, Anthony 205
rock music 15, 108–9, 128, 130, 194, 211–13 Steiner, Rudolf 221
Rodenburg, Patsy 193 Steingo, Gavin 57, 128
Romani people 89 Sterne, Jonathan 177, 181–2, 184
Romero, Raúl 61 Stirr, Anna 45
Rubin, Gayle 79 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn 192
Russell, Bertrand 32, 209 Stokes, Martin 57
242 Index
Stone, Ruth M. 10–12, 56, 209–11, 222 van Gennep, Arnold 145
strategic essentialism 80, 121, 133n16 voice studies 176–7, 187–96
Straus, Joseph 184–5, 195
structural linguistics 26–30 Wallach, Jeremy 115, 128–30
structuralism 29, 35–7, 74, 208 Wallerstein, Immanuel 75, 116
Sugarman, Jane C. 54, 86, 89–90 Waterman, Ellen 147–8, 158, 161
Sundberg, Johann 188, 190 Waxer, Lise 129
Weber, Max 207
Tagaq, Tanya 193 Weidman, Amanda 126, 190–1
Taylor, Charles 161 West Africa 56, 102
Taylor, Diana 145 Westerkamp, Hildegard 179
Taylor, Timothy 57–8, 60, 115, 125–7 Western art music 35–6, 39–40, 131, 134n26
technologies, sound 13, 55, 61–3, 115, 124, Western Europe 56, 73, 78, 89
127–8, 152, 162, 178–9, 181–3, 194–5, Western Marxism 102
196n5; AUMI (adaptive use musical whiteness studies 104, 192, 215
instrument) 159–60; for deaf hearing 195; Williams, Raymond 52, 75, 102
see also digital technologies; music industries; Witek, Maria A. G. 227
popular music Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32–3, 209
Thompson, Emily 181 Wittig, Monique 79
throat singing 180 women’s studies 72–4, 80
Titon, Jeff Todd 181, 210, 229n16 Wong, Deborah 106, 130, 142, 151–2, 154–5,
Titze, Ingo 188, 190 157, 176
Tomlinson, John 125 working class 51–2, 58–60, 65, 72, 106, 160, 214;
Truax, Barry 179 see also proletariat
Tucker, Sherrie 158–9 world music 115, 127–8, 150
Turino, Thomas 39, 44, 64, 223–4, 227
Turkey 126, 185 Young, Iris Marion 208
Turnbull, Colin 148, 154, 178 Young, Miriama 182
Turner,Victor 145, 147–50, 222 Yuval-Davis, Nira 82

United States 58, 101, 105, 107, 117, Zheng, Su 130

192, 211–15 Zimbabwe 118, 223