This is the first anthology on South Asian music that covers a broad range of genres and contexts brought together under a timely theoretical framework. It represents a significant response by South Asianists to recent theoretical developments within ethnomusicology away from area studies and toward the study of mass media, globalization, and the international popular music industry, including Bollywood. Theorizing the Local returns the focus to ethnographic musical microstudies of South Asia, including Iran, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. Further, it theorizes change, musical geography, transmission, embodied knowledge, and dialogical ethnography. The chapters bring out the complex differences within local practices, patterns of interconnection across cultural boundaries, and histories of cross-cultural exchange.
The thirteen essays in the collection approach “theorizing the local” in a variety of ways, including local contextualized practices, social orders, systems of music “implicit in performing and experiencing music” (p. 8), and the reappreciation of local aesthetics of value. Most, however, draw from the ethnomusicological method of learning to perform music in order to understand its systematic theoretical construction, yet they go further than previous work to theorize ethnographic processes as local knowledge production and to study the tension between musical practice and discourse. An emphasis on “challenging counterpoints to prevailing explanatory discourses among participants in a tradition” (p. 15) is found throughout. This includes cultural analysis of classical musics that have dominated the attention of ethnomusicologists until recently. Welcome scrutiny of internal differences such as the indigenization of Western instruments and the theorization of hereditary oral sources results in a long-awaited deconstruction of the hegemonic, the Orientalized, and the universal. This is the book's greatest contribution.
The book has four sections. Section I, “Instruments and Bodies,” approaches localizing through the perspectives of uncommon actors, musical roles, and instruments. Amanda Weidman argues that the development and naturalization of the karnatak violin changed the aesthetics of the voice, challenging the common understanding that karnatak instruments mimic vocal aesthetics. Martin Clayton's work theorizes the paradoxical location of the Indian guitar as simultaneously the most global and the most local of “Indian” instruments. Clayton shows that people make sense of the Western in relation to local cultural context. This case also questions constructions of Indian social identity by pointing to Christian Indians, whose “sounds [especially in film music] are well known while their histories and identities are obscure” (p. 66). He reasons that this resulted from an ideological divide in the twentieth century between those playing India's nationalized classical musics and those whose identities and musical styles reflect oppositional interaction with the West or colonial powers.
The essays in section II, “Spaces and Itineraries,” exemplify cultural geography in ethnomusicology. Greg Booth outlines the rules that Indian brass bandsmen explicate that govern their migration within the network of commercial brass bands. As a study of levels of cultural geography, Booth shows that a regional (North Indian) context of a global colonial musical phenomenon (brass bands) is still “ruled” by local caste and place-based social identities. In her essay on the relationship of musicians to the shrines of their patron deity in Rajasthan, Shubha Chaudhuri understands origin stories as a means to theorizing musical social interactions, while Gert-Matthias Wegner describes the actualization of urban space as a mandala through Newar Buddhist processional music and ritual.
Section III, “Learning and Transmission,” challenges the preconceived notions of master-disciple transmission, the role of conversation and dialogue in hereditary transmission, and the role of kinesthetic memory in the acquisition of musical knowledge in the body. Rolf Groesbeck's ethnography shows how Kathakali centa drumming pedagogy moves beyond a model of mere rote repetition of the guru to include complementary horizontal influence among disciples that contribute to the individual drummers sense of identity and stylistic diversity within the school.
Regula Qureshi's work on the local in Hindustani music culture as that which is orally and relationally constituted, particularly within family lineages, is significant for South Asian ethnomusicology. Through dialogical ethnography she demonstrates how musical culture is embodied in individual musicians and lineages “through a process of musical enculturation and socialization that may well account for the unique qualities hereditary [Muslim] musicians have brought to Hindustani music” (p. 166).
Section IV considers spheres of “Theorizing Social Action” beyond performance. Steve Blum provides a useful model for the differences between performance knowledge and pedagogical presentations among Iranian bards. Richard Wolf's contribution includes unique analysis of the classical genre of varnam and the mnemonic genre-based vocable system of Tamil folk music. Both of these can be thought of as musical beginnings that model what follows.
In his introduction, Wolf addresses theoretical issues including gender. Unfortunately, he reifies the category of gender, defining it exclusively in terms of the female sex. Susan Reed's essay, on the other hand, beautifully develops local theories that distinguish gender as feminine and masculine dance styles, both performed by female bodies within Sri Lankan Kandyan dance. Her analysis also includes the feminist empowerment of women to perform traditionally male rituals, Bollywood's influence on feminine sexuality, and the effects of urban middle-class culture on the dynamics of transmission.
This is a unique set of essays framed by an important call to reinvest in the theoretical understandings of the local meanings of music and their global connections that South Asian area studies have to offer. It will be particularly useful in graduate colloquia to demonstrate the complexity of music in South Asia.
