Colin Turnbull's death, on July 28, 1994 (Pace 1994) hurdled me back into lengthy daydreams about the classes in anthropology I took with him from 1969-71 as a college junior and senior, classes that featured patiently detailed story after story drawn from his years of living with the Mbuti pygmies in the Ituri forest of Zaire. Colin was a humanist who came into anthropology from studies in philosophy and religion, and from a substantial background as a skilled keyboardist as well. He was my first model of an anthropologist whose understanding of sociability was nurtured by a deep musical engagement.

Numerous dimensions of this paper were stimulated by and formulated in response to two of my favorite groove-sters, Robert Plant Armstrong and Charles Keil, to whom it is dedicated. Bob was my main uptown source of inspiration; elegant, visual, heady, abstract, he could contemplate every phenomenological ounce of melody from a sculpted object. I think of Bob as the His Master's Voice of the groove, loving the intensity of form, and the sensuality of witnessing it. Charlie has been my strongest downtown critic, hearing Kaluli ideas and sounds as street-solid critiques of Western modes of musical production and consumption, always ready to help celebrate what liberation or resistance they can inspire. I think of Charlie as the James Brown (“Give it up or turnit a-loose!”) proto-rap-scratcher of the groove, putting pennies on the tone arm, push-press-pulling the record back and forth before digging the spin.

Research support for fieldwork with the Kaluli 1976-7, 1982, 1984 was generously provided by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Philosophical Society. For discussion of early variants or versions of these ideas much thanks and no blame to audience participants at lectures/colloquia at the University of Texas Semiotics Colloquium, Rice University Circle, Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology, American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, New York University Anthropology Department, Carleton University Conference on Alternative Musicology. As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of my collaborators and kinsmen, nado Babi (Bambi B. Schieffelin) and nabas Bage (Edward L. Schieffelin), both of whom lifted-up-over several versions of this essay, and Jubi, Kulu, Gigio, Honowo, Ayasilo, and many other Kaluli who have shared song, talk, food, and trail. Thanks too for helpful lift-up-over comments to Dieter Christensen, John Miller Chernoff, Charlie Keil, Gail Kligman, Greg Urban, and anonymous readers. Bikpela thanks to Shari Robertson for her photographs, and to Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies Music Department for tracking down the original Krymus Band recording of Wanpela Meri.

Music has a fundamentally social life. It is made to be consumed—practically, intellectually, individually, communally—and it is consumed as symbolic entity. By “consumed” I mean socially interpreted as meaningfully structured, produced, performed, and displayed by varieties of prepared, invested, or otherwise historically situated actors. How does this happen? What does it mean? How can one know about it? These questions focus on the nature of the music communication process, and to rethink them I turn back to the question posed often by Charles Seeger: what does music communicate? To answer he also needed to ask: what does speech about music communicate? Through diagrams and dense prose, Seeger (1977:16–44) argued that to address the issue of what music communicates requires specifying what it could not communicate. The logical preoccupation with differences between the speech and music modes led to the notion that speech is the communication of “world view as the intellection of reality” while music is communication of “world view as the feeling of reality” (ibid.).

Relations between language and music have traditionally been addressed at two distinct levels of discourse. One is phenomenal and often taxonomic, addressing the boundaries of speech and song, prosody and intonation, text and tune, paralanguage and vocables, sprechgesang and sprechstimme, and motivation toward signifier or signified. The other level is analytical and sometimes abstract, addressing the adaptation of phonological and syntactic linguistic models to features of musical structure (a review and critique is Feld 1974).

$30,000 to license one minute of Rajasthani music for an American insurance company's television commercial. Sampling by two French musicians of a Solomon Islands lullaby, which, mixed with pop rhythms and computerized chords, results in an international success with millions of dollars in profit through CD sales and income from television commercials in France and the U.S.A. (and perhaps other countries). Note by note borrowing of another Solomon Islands lullaby (these lullabies seem to be a hit!) by a well-known French composer, jazz musician and interpreter of classical and contemporary music who declared the composition as his own. $8,000 (only!) proposed by a Rumanian pop musician living in Germany, for sampling an Albanian song …

I live in the heart of Seoul, Korea. I am riding across town in a taxi listening to the music that the driver is playing too loudly. I hear a man's voice, it is harsh and certain tones are punctuated, as if his heart is broken and he is crying out in anguish. Perhaps he is merely untrained and has just been smoking too much. But by now I know there is more to it than that; he must have developed that sound over years of intense training. The driver turns the volume down slightly and asks me why I am living in Korea. I explain that I am here to study traditional Korean folk music. The driver immediately begins a rather typical commentary on Korean music and its relation to history. He explains that the Korean people, throughout their long and glorious 5000 year history have had to endure many hardships, some at the hands of others, and as such a great deal of Korean music is filled with han – the music itself acting as a catharsis. Little did this man know that that is exactly what I came to Korea to investigate. Unfortunately, we reach my destination before I could ask him the crucial question — What does han sound like?

The Karelian lament, or itkuvirsi, is an extraordinary expressive form found in eastern Finland and Soviet Karelia that uses music, language, gesture, and the icons of crying to communicate affect and power. It has its roots in the ancestor worship of the ancient Karelian folk religion, and contains vestiges of classical Eurasian shamanism in its ecstatic, trancelike manner of performance. The lament is performed only by women, usually within the ritual context of funerals or weddings; however, it is also performed at non-ritual occasions with strong overtones of affect, such as when old friends meet after a long absence or as a complaint about the hardships of life. The lament is now only barely remembered by a handful of Karelian women, most of them refugees from World War II now living in Finland. The ritual contexts have completely died out in Finland, although the funeral context still partially survives in Soviet Karelia. The primary source material for this paper is drawn from my fieldwork with Karelian refugees in 1984-85, who had learned laments prior to World War II in traditional village settings.

In 1884 a triumvirate of Austro-German music historians, Friedrich Chrysander, Philipp Spitta, and Guido Adler, founded the first journal of musicology,1 the newest fledgeling amongst the sciences,2 namely, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft [Musicology Quarterly]. The first issue opened with a paper written by Adler, defining the scope, method and aim of the new science. This proved to be a potent formative influence on the establishment and development of the academic discipline of musicology in Europe and elsewhere, notably the United States of America, an influence that is strongly felt to the present day. Thus, in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980: s.v. “Musicology,” by Vincent Duckles, et al.), its importance is made evident in that it is summarised as the still extant model of musicology.

The main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the need for a comprehensive theory of music and music-making, and for studies that seek to distinguish musical change analytically from other kinds of change, and radical change from variation and innovation within a flexible system.

I am not quite sure when the world fell apart. When I began my study of ethnomusicology in 1968, there was a great deal of excitement and optimism about this relatively new field of study, even though the United States was in the middle of a horrible war in Vietnam. It seemed that, as we say in English, “the world was our oyster.” We could apparently go anywhere (with the possible exception of Vietnam) and study any music that struck our fancy. Since then, however, not only has this naïve optimism and energy been subjected to a withering postcolonial critique but, especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the situation for many people in the world seems only to be getting worse and worse, making the prospect of doing fieldwork in a growing number of places in the world nearly unimaginable. For a few people, including most readers of this journal, our personal worlds have probably improved during this period, but what of the rest of the world, including the poor and unfortunate in our own countries? The United Nations today lists more than sixty countries in which there is open, armed conflict between groups or between resistance groups and the government. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has wracked some parts of the world, most notably Africa. All reports indicate that the gap between rich and poor is growing, both in developed, capitalist countries, and between rich and poor regions of the world. Climate change seems to be posing an ever-more-obvious threat to life on our planet, and rising ocean water levels are causing some people in the Pacific to plan for a future far from their native atolls. Where can we go to work ethnomusicologically today, and what kind of work should we be doing there?

The central issue in musical theory is the problem of description. Neither musicologists nor ethnomusicologists have yet devised a system of analysis which is sufficiently powerful to explain what we can know intuitively as a result of experience in culture, namely, the essential differences between the music of Haydn and Mozart, or of the Flathead and the Sioux Indians.

This article attempts to summarize leading ideas in dance research within the European scholarly tradition and to draw attention to similarities and differences between the anthropological and choreological approaches. Thereby, we hope to shed light on dance research in general and to outline possible directions for future studies.

The recent shift of scholarly focus towards the body and performance has helped to raise the profile of dance as a significant academic site for cultural investigation and to open up channels for dialogue with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Chapters on dance may now be found in collections on gender, the body and ethnography, for example and there is abundant evidence of the impact of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking in mainstream dance literature itself. This interest may engage with ethnographic approaches to dance to formulate questions around “whose body in performance?” so that issues of gender, social status, kinship, ethnicity and power can be addressed, as well as more reflexive concerns related to bodily experience. From an ethnological perspective, such contemporary aspects of study in relation to the moving body may be examined diachronically, particularly in dance practices where the past is perceived as being of key significance.

We are living in an age of transnational development and major changes in transportation, communication, leisure activities, and work environments. For centuries, and in some places still, the accumulation of land and the enslavement or employment of farm laborers has ensured wealth. In many places this was supplanted by the ownership of factories and the employment of manual labor, or the ownership and exploitation of non-renewable raw materials such as oil, coal, and precious metals. But today the richest man in the United States is not the owner of a large ranch or a railroad, or of vast reserves of petroleum. He is Bill Gates, the owner of a computer software company called Microsoft. One of the United States’ largest exports is entertainment “software” — films, television, recordings, and computer software. Ideas are big, big business, and even U.S. foreign policy is influenced by considerations of intellectual property.

Over a century after its gestation in the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the tango has become a global music in several interdependent ways. It is global in the most literal sense of geographic reach, flourishing in Buenos Aires and Tokyo, in Saigon and Durban, in small towns in Scandinavia and in the U.S. It has attained and maintained such a reach through its distinctive and enduring musical profile and, more importantly, through several kinds of semantic flexibility. The tango bears strong yet mutable links to place and culture; it is variously but vividly perceived as belonging to the Rio de la Plata culture of the Argentine and Uruguayan capitals, as the national music of Argentina, as more generically Latin, or just as pleasantly (or bizarrely) exotic, older dance music. It rewards the intense attention offered by aficionados in Buenos Aires, by a core of tango kichigai (tango fanatics) in Japan, and by serious devotees elsewhere, in addition to the passing notice of people exposed only to isolated dances in movies or at an ice-skating rink. For different populations, the tango is either a historical footnote, a healthful hobby, or a stunningly complex and all-consuming focus for emotional life.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century, major reterritorialization1 has occurred in Central Asia, including both the geographical reformulation of political territories and the socially constructed reformulation of cultural territories. The central facts are well known: between 1865 and 1920, all of Central Asia north of the Amu Darya became part of the Russian, and subsequently, the Soviet, colonial empire. Under Soviet rule, Central Asia was divided into political territories whose boundaries did not accurately reflect the cultural boundaries of the populations that lived there. The Central Asian republics remained geo-politically stable from 1929, when Tajikistan was recognized as a full-fledged Soviet republic, until 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the five Central Asian republics—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, Kirghizia, and Kazakhstan—were thrust, some of them rather unwillingly, into a new life as independent states.

In a Stimulating and comprehensive survey of some of the problems of ethnomusicology, Professor Mantle Hood distinguished three important aspects of our study of music: 1. The function of music as an aspect of the behaviour of man in society. 2. Characteristic musical style identified in its own terms and viewed in relation to its society. 3. The intrinsic value of individual pieces of music viewed in relation to the world of music.

Elaborating upon the social aspects of dance (or dancing), makes reference to its most general and comprehensive features, because dance is in essence a particular form of social interaction. Even if dance can be artificially separated from its social context and considered solely in its physical features as an independent artistic means of expression, the social component is implicit to the dancing person as an individual and as a member of a socio-cultural community. From this perspective dance structure may be considered as a culturally determined “program” where social, historical and environmental factors interlock with the physical, psychological and mental features of the individual (Giurchescu 1984: 35). Considered as a psychosomatic entity, the dancer is the “soul and body” of dance. He or she is the dance.

The greatest problem in any talk on folk dance—whether it be during the meetings of the International Folk Music Council or in any national or international meeting of this kind—is this, namely, that the single term “folk dance” is used to mean different things. More than once I have tried to call attention to this inconsistency and even to remove it—unfortunately with only very little success.

If once more I am speaking about this problem today, I am doing so with no real hope of bringing the matter to a conclusion, or even of being understood by everyone. My purpose is rather once more to bring the problem home to you and to stimulate thinking about the nature of this problem.

In its broadest sense, music archaeology is the study of the phenomenon of past musical behaviours and sound. This cross-disciplinary discipline comprises a series of approaches, including archaeological and musicological perspectives. The basis of research is music-related material finds, such as excavated and otherwise conserved sound artefacts (or ancient tools for sound and music production), as well as depictions of instrumentalists, singers, and dancers showing musical instruments and performance postures, sometimes including views of the original settings. As various archaeological cultures left such finds, many of the sociocultural contexts and meanings of past music can be studied. Today it is widely accepted that finds and depictions of ancient musical instruments are not only markers of musical traditions in space and time—especially when the archaeological contexts are well documented—but also a valuable means for experimentally testing ancient playing techniques. In the case of original sound artefacts (or their replicas), their acoustic function and the basic acoustic characteristics of a once performed music can also be reproduced and analysed. Additionally, acoustic spaces, such as architectural structures, caves, and other natural places, are the subject of music archaeological studies. The information obtained from the archaeological record can be deepened considerably when ancient scripts, historical treaties, and other written sources concerning music are related. Such documents offer notes on performance practices and their sociocultural contexts. For some cultures, hints concerning ancient music theory and musical aesthetics may also be found and, if ancient notations are related, even clues to aspects of musical structures are provided. Finally, the study of contemporary music cultures in which past musical traditions are preserved is valuable for comparative studies. In this paper the virtues of studying these sources are defined, but the limits of music archaeological research are also considered.