Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia offers an inclusive lens through which to study the music, dance, and allied arts of South Asia, its diasporas, and the people who produce and use these cultural expressions. The authors in this collection--ethnomusicologists, dance scholars, anthropologists, and practitioners--understand music and dance as everyday lived experience. "The everyday" comprises practices of South Asians in multiple countries, whose identities include numerous castes, classes, tribes, genders, sexualities, religions, nationalities, more than twenty languages, and other affiliations. With the goal to de-emphasize an approach that fetishizes analysis of classical form and its technical virtuosity, this book instead contextualizes the understanding of aesthetic meaning within six themes: place and community; style, genre, and function; intersectional identities of caste, class, and tribe; gender and sexuality; technology, media, and transmission; and diaspora and globalization.
The thirty chapters in this collection demonstrate how the arts are meaningful expressions of human identities and relationships for ordinary people as well as virtuosic performers. Each author ties their thesis to hands-on, participatory exercises that provide multiple entryways to understand and engage with cultural meaning. In so doing, they empower classroom dialogue that treats embodied experience as a vital mode of enquiry, supplementing critical textual analysis to cultivate attentive, responsive, and ethical dispositions toward the music and dance practices of other humans and their life experiences.
Industry Reviews
"An outstanding volume that combines exceptional scholarship and range striking a register that will appeal to the expert as much as the general reader. The recognition that music and the performing arts are the lifeblood of social relations in South Asia, ranging across spaces that include the domestic, the sacred, the cinematic, and the contentious politics of performance framed by power and hierarchy, makes this volume singular and unique in its imagination.
An intervention that will change forever how we think questions of embodied and sonicaesthetics in relation to the political in South Asia." --Dilip Menon, Professor of History and Director of the
Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand
"This book is a tour de force on South Asian music and dance. Its thirty distinct essays use embodied approaches to examine every day cultural experiences with ethnographic and analytical rigor. They disrupt and unsettle hegemonic hierarchies and aesthetic values of styles, genres, canons, and the artificial boundaries between music and dance. The innovative pedagogically-oriented scholarship is a much-needed addition to the existing world music anthologies."
--Pallabi Chakravorty, Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts/Dance, Swarthmore College
"Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia provides a fantastic sampling of current research on music and dance in South Asia and its diaspora. The thematic organization breaks down old divisions between the folk, popular, and classical that have long organized the study of music and dance in South Asia, and traverse national boundaries to explore the dynamics of how musical form and embodied dance practices encode, express, and enable different projects
of identity and sociopolitical contestation. Audiovisual and supplementary materials on the companion website enable readers to directly engage with dance and musical forms, making this a unique and extremely
valuable resource for teaching." --Amanda Weidman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
