In Greece, text, melody and movement have had a long creative history and a close relationship with the people. This trilogy has often been used as an important element in the struggle for freedom, or resistance, whether in the songs of the Klepfts, or in the various step combinations of the refugees from Asia Minor. The Metaxas dictatorship, for instance, in the late 1930s, banned many singers and texts of songs of the so-called rebétika, yet also reinforced the idea of folk tradition. From April 1967 until November 1974, the colonels' junta also banned performances of certain ancient and other plays because of their political content. The songs of Theodorakis, of Loizos landed the composers in exile, which was also the fate of other artists who opposed the regime, such as the famous actresses Melina Merkouri and Irene Pappas. Tradition flourished after a period of silence that began in the movement for a popular music of protest against the junta. Under the dictatorship, this trilogy of text, melody, and movement became a medium of resistance.

In Spain, the establishment of ethnomusicology as a discipline fully conscious of its methods and objectives is relatively recent. Procursors can be seen in early studies of folk song which were catalyzed in European society by Herder and other scholars. It is obvious that 19th century research into Spanish folk song has little to do with current ethnomusicology, although there exists a common denominator: in both cases, scholars center their attention on those musics which are on the margin of “great musical art.” However, we could hardly understand the development and current state of the discipline in Spain if we did not take its beginnings in folk music studies into account. Comparative musicology of old, which concentrated on music of non-occidental origins and which laid the foundations of current ethnomusicology, was practically absent in the Spanish state. We do not find in Spain at that time a consolidated method or a satisfactory concretization of goals, but we can already encounter an object of study — denominated “folk music” — and social attitudes toward this object which allow us to consider those early collectors the predecessors of Spanish ethnomusicology.

Until at least the 1980s, scholarship on Caribbean carnivals tended to overemphasize European roots because of the celebration's ties to the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, scholarship on Caribbean music has long been embroiled in nationalistic paradigms that have hindered a view of the Caribbean as a cultural region with more commonalities than differences among the music cultures of the various nations (see Bilby 1985). In this paper, I combat these paradigms with the concept of convergence, an alternative to the problematic “syncretism.” It is complementary to current notions of creolization and hybridity, but unlike those concepts, it serves to emphasize the construction of cultural meaning over biological notions of race or ethnicity.

In this paper I wish to outline, very provisionally, a proposition for understanding more clearly the nature and operation of (mainly musical) tradition. It is, in essence, an argument concerning a fundamental social entity rather than an instrumental concept, the sort of discussion which Immanuel Wallerstein considers “always diffïcult“:

The discussion considers six strategies used by Filipino populations in the United States in the maintenance of ethnic identity. These strategies are derived from the examination of the overseas Filipino as a generalized category. The study deals with music and music-related activity in the period 1984-1985. It intends to contribute a general typology of strategies for minority maintenance within a majority culture.

Haiti and its citizens are frequently squeezed between a confusing and uneasy pair of polarizing superlatives: the Caribbean nation is routinely identified as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” at the same time that its culture is upheld as one of the richest in the post-colonial Americas. Although these labels can (and probably should) be dismissed as oversimplified and destructive, they do offer a striking dichotomy to contemplate. Can seeming economic poverty be balanced against so-called cultural richness? Can the domains of economy and culture be reconciled as mutually useful? Specifically, can culture be exploited to enhance daily life and improve material existence?

One of the crucial lessons that anthropology has taught ethnomusicology is the importance of trying to understand things from the inside, to explore the emic view, the folk view, actor's view, evaluation, explanation, model, representation; there are lots of terms for it. The point was made clearly many years ago by Alan Merriam in The Anthropology of Music, in the contrast between what he termed the folk evaluation and the analytical evaluation (Merriam 1964:31-32). Like other authors, Merriam emphasised the need for the researcher to find out how people define music and distinguish music from non-music:

In the mid-1980s, I began doing fieldwork in Northumberland, in the Northeast of England, interested in studying a regional musical revival. Research in Northumberland, a place that is comparatively small (although large for an English county), with a strong regional identity and a distinctive body of music, appealed to me as a way of thinking about musical revival and renewal, and I spent about a decade, on and off, doing fieldwork and historical research there. Then, nearly a decade later, I began fieldwork in Cape Breton, on the edge of North America, in eastern Canada, another regional world of music, one in which local music is burgeoning as never before. The Cape Breton situation is somewhat different—arguably, it is a revival, but, and equally arguably, it is not well described by that term. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the rubric revival to describe musicking in Northumberland and Cape Breton, and I will also refer to the widely influential American folk revival. When I speak, in this essay's title, of revivals “on the edge,” it is in two senses, one a matter of geography, the other one of scholarship. Northumberland and Cape Breton are both geographically on the margins, Northumberland a borderland, Cape Breton a comparatively isolated island on the edge of a continent. And in my discipline, the study of revivals has until recently been a marginal pursuit.

In Argentina, aboriginal music and dance—as part of what UNESCO has called “intangible cultural heritage“—has been overlooked for a long time. During the construction of Argentina as a nation, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European-derived societies and cultures were the privileged models in our country. In that period, the national government sponsored the wave of European immigration and, at the same time, the military persecution of aboriginal peoples and their forced assimilation to “Western Christian civilization.” One of the consequences of this history, mostly in the cultural imagination of the urban middle classes, was the pervasive thought that “Argentinians are descendants of the ships”—a popular saying referring to the ships that brought “our grandparents from Europe,” mainly from Spain and Italy.

I have only twice before had the temerity to speak at a Conference of the IFMC. This will be my third and last time.

I feel I owe my audience an apology because my subject will be the same as on previous occasions and I have little to say that has not already been said many times. But the subject is such an important one that it is good to be constantly reminded of the problems.

For the last two hundred years, in fact ever since the awareness of folk song emerged during the Romantic period, scholars have argued over the definition of folk song. As Goethe said: “Man schreibt so oft den Namen Volkslieder aus und weiss nicht immer ganz deutlich was man sich dabei denken soil.” And if that were true in Goethe's time how much truer is it today when little distinction is drawn by the general public between folk and popular song.

In “Culture on the Ground,” Tim Ingold states that “a more grounded approach to human movement, sensitive to embodied skills of footwork, opens up new terrain in the study of environmental perception, the history of technology, landscape formation and human anatomical evolution” (2004:315). In “Being Alive” he continues this argument, explaining that

Northern Ireland experiences a large and often politically sensitive parading tradition annually between March and September. Music takes a prominent position in these parades, with flutes, accordions, bagpipes, snare drums, and bass drums being the most popular instruments on display. Percussion instruments are often the only instruments that are found in the vast majority of parading bands throughout Northern Ireland (figure 1). A particular drumming style, known locally as blood and thunder, has evolved as a result of working-class bands attempting both to imitate military styles and to adapt them to changing working-class tastes. Through a combination of ethnographic material and technical analysis, this paper enables an in-depth understanding of the way a unique tradition has developed as a result of working-class attempts to mimic the musical practices of the dominant military power without access to the tuition techniques and facilities on which that dominant style depended.

Dance research is a rapidly expanding field. Because a detailed overview and categorization of dance studies has been published recently, I will not dwell on the historical background of dance research here. My aim rather is to emphasize some areas that have not been adequately discussed in other papers, and to offer some positive suggestions for future research.

There is a long history of association between music, ethnic identity, and emotion in Greek culture, but it seems that representations of these associations are made from non-performative, non-participant and other-defined perspectives. This paper discusses the cultural constructions of passion and expression which are constituted within Greek music-making and dancing in Adelaide, South Australia. The perspective presented here is one largely informed by the experiences of the writer as musician, dancer, ethnomusicologist, and participant in many discussions on this personal and emotional issue.

In this article I intend to describe some of the social processes that have led to the development of the sardana, a Catalan dance, to its present form. This is not meant to be a thorough description of the dance itself but rather a treatment of it as an expression of certain social and cultural processes which, although not of a strictly musical nature, have strongly influenced, and even determined, this dance and its music. My objective here is first to review the differentiated social perceptions of sardana in the course of its history and then to clarify the relationship between that dance and the phenomenon of folklorism. As a result, the interdependence of musical morphology, social customs, function and ideology in relation to the sardana should become apparent. Through this example, we can observe the function of music and dance as socially articulated elements within society.

The origin of the Bon-Odori, or Bon Dance, is described in the Ullambana Sutra of Buddhist scripture. It tells how Mauggallana (sometimes spelled Maudgalyana, and in the Japanese language called Mokuren), one of the ten disciples of Buddha, became aware of his mother's suffering in the inferno of the dead. He tried to relieve her hunger by offering her rice, but when she brought it to her lips it turned to fire. Mauggallana went to the Buddha for help and was advised for his mother's sake to give food-offerings to the bhikus (priests), on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when they returned from the mountains after their long meditation during the rainy season. The spontaneous dance of joy following his mother's release from the torment of hell was the first Bon Dance. This ritual offering and festive celebration became an annual event.