In 2002, less than a year after releasing her first album, Afrikaans rocker Karen Zoid gained a level of notoriety then unheard of among Afrikaans female musicians. She achieved this when she enacted the overtly masculine rock ritual that Aerosmith's Joe Perry has labelled “the ultimate statement of anarchy” (Perry, quoted in Christensen 2004): she smashed her guitar. While frequently interpreted as an attention-getting strategy (which it undeniably was), Karen Zoid's performance was also an act of political positioning, locating her within the already passé tropes of international rock, but also on the margins of the Afrikaans music industry. It also, ironically, allowed her to appropriate some of the rock “authenticity” connected with this display of overt masculinity, despite the fact that her performance can be read as a deliberate (perhaps even camp) parody of this masculinity. This is because, as I will argue in this article, Zoid's legitimacy as the “voice of her generation” and a vocalizing representative of New South African identity has hung precariously off her performed masculinity, despite her destabilization of this image through a variety of queer performances. In this article, I will examine the interlinked history of South African music (with a focus on Afrikaans rock) and national identification that has created a normative masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa (1994-present). I will present Karen Zoid's performance style as an example of resistance to this norm, paying particular attention to the vocal characteristics of gendered South African sound as a site of normativity and resistance. Finally, I will consider the extent to which, in order to enact this resistance, Zoid has been obliged to perform the gendered national norm or has been interpreted in normative terms in order that audiences are able to comprehend her national identifications. By these means I aim to make visible the normally hidden gender bias that undermines South Africa's apparently representative post-apartheid nationalism.

This performance study is situated within the twentieth century and into the present, a period characterized by a number of sociohistorical developments. This epoch, as noted by Oyewumi (2004:1), “witnessed a host of social and cultural transformations.” During this period, gender appeared as one of the determining factors for categorizing and analysing societies. Given that gender is fundamentally a sociocultural construct, its discursive formations through the performance of égwú àmàlà are peculiar to the Ogbaru people. Égwú àmàlà is a women's dance genre that employs music, dance, and drama as media for enacting the culture of the Ogbaru community. Because it vivifies and mirrors Ogbaru traditions in music and dance, égwú àmàlà occupies a prime place in the social life of the Ogbaru people. In performance, the genre exhibits some gender issues that I will expatiate on in the course of this article.

Since the 1980s, I have been observing members of the Polish Górale community teaching their music and dance in Canada. Over these years I have witnessed several generations continuing or being initiated into a “so-called traditional music of a particular place” (Wolf 2009b:5), that is, the mountains of southern Poland, while otherwise participating in a local culture quite different from that being taught in Canada and the US. Both women and men have been devoting their valuable time to teaching children how to sing, dance, and play in the Górale style (po góralsku) in preparation for a variety of ensemble-based performances. Being variously involved in these activities over the years has led me to consider this transmission process. This paper builds from this experience to reflect more generally on music and dance learning in contemporary contexts and deliberately focuses on the ongoing human component in a process now greatly facilitated by new technologies. In particular, it considers music learning as it relates to paradigmatic gendered performance styles that have been recontextualized within evolving intercultural settings.

The genre commonly labelled “gospel” is probably the most lucrative music business in Kenya. Its popularity is facilitated in part by the propensity of musicians to draw on diverse resources for Christian religious songs. Musicians further invoke indigenous Kenyan and contemporary popular music genres in local and international languages for national distinctiveness and global inclusiveness. Top-of-the-line recording facilities in Kenya enable artists to produce a broad spectrum of music at a pace comparable to anywhere in the world. The diversity of repertoire and a ready access to studios have spurred some individuals to venture into the gospel music industry for fame and fortune. This complex, ambiguous position is articulated in an interview with three Kenyan female gospel artists who “are well aware that secular music makes for better business and exposure but the trio is not doing it for either.” They stay with gospel because “gospel music made us” (Kageni 2009).

During my youth, the fact that I am of Karanga descent gave me exposure to mhande dance performances for clan rituals (mapira) that venerate the family or clan ancestral spirits. These ritual ceremonies were held regularly in my rural home community in Bikita district in Masvingo province, Zimbabwe. Mhande dance performance involves singing, drumming, and dancing. The hallmark of my lived experience of mhande was double-edged: fascination and bewilderment. On the one hand, the interlocking drum patterns produced by two drummers in each performance fascinated me most; on the other hand, the dance features left me wondering what they were meant to achieve because I did not enjoy watching them, yet they appeared to be the hub of each ceremony.

“Ethnomusicological theory,” despite its name and despite the fact that it in some ways permeates our field, has yet to take firm root in our disciplinary imagination. Indeed, the phrase appears to be used rarely, in comparison to references to an unmodified “theory” in or for ethnomusicology. Minimally, ethnomusicology today engages with three types of theory: social theory, music theory, and discipline-specific ethnomusicological theory. Unmodified references to theory have tended to obfuscate the nature of ethnomusicological theory and have left ethnomusicologists a bit unsure, and perhaps even insecure, about the relevance and place of theory, however understood, in their work.

In this article, I am concerned with the ways in which engagement with performance has shaped—and continues to shape—the ideas and theoretical perspectives of ethnomusicologists. In many ethnomusicology programmes (including several I have been in as a student or teacher), graduate students are required to participate in performing ensembles, take lessons both at home and in the field, and participate in performance as part of their thesis or dissertation research, yet the rationale for these widespread practices is not easy to decipher from contemporary definitions or overviews of the field. While my formal studies of ethnomusicology took place in the United States, and much of the literature discussed here is an outgrowth of North American practices, my perspectives are also shaped by more than two decades of teaching, research, and interaction with scholars and performers in East Asia. Although I will make reference to researchers and developments in Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, and Korea, the stories of ethnomusicology and performance in those locales deserve articles of their own, and I do not even pretend to speak for practices and issues elsewhere in Asia or in Europe, Latin American, Africa, or Oceania. Nevertheless, I believe that the issues raised here are of at least potential interest to all those involved in the intersection of music and ethnography, and I hope that these preliminary ideas will inspire comparative perspectives from scholars elsewhere.

Over several years the authors of this article have had intensive discussions to find common ground in the topic they both specialize in: dance. Egil Bakka is a Norwegian ethnochoreologist, specializing in Nordic traditional dance/folk dance; Gediminas Karoblis is a Lithuanian philosopher, specializing in phenomenology and ballroom dancing. Our starting point was a philosophical question about the notion of dance knowledge and a shared worry about the empirical basis for many academic works on dance that other colleagues have also pointed to (Hoerburger 1959; Lange 1983; Adshead-Lansdale 1994; Grau 1998; Farnell 1999; Fügedi 2003). Bakka then brought up the widespread reservation against the use of film/video for the documentation and analysis of dance. We continued with a wish to clarify to ourselves the epistemological basis for research in dance, and somewhere along the way we started writing this article. We experienced that a dialogue in which methodological issues in dance research were confronted with philosophical scrutiny brought about a number of interesting perspectives. We hope that our exercise may be of interest to a broader audience. The aim is to explore how our different disciplinary points of departure—philosophy and ethnochoreology—can be brought to interact in creating a deeper understanding of our topic, rather than comparing the disciplines or discussing their differences.