Henry Stobart's ethnography of music in highland Bolivia is based on two longer periods of ethno-musicological fieldwork in 1991 and 1992 in rural villages in the Northern Potosí region, along with numerous later, briefer trips back to the area. The book is organised in four parts, each with a varying number of chapters. Part I, ‘Creating Context’, consists of three chapters that introduce the ethnographic setting, theoretical premises and overall framework for the analysis. Here Stobart explains some of the meanings he wishes to evoke with the phrase ‘poetics of production’ in the book's title. He stresses that he means ‘production’ not just in the traditional sense of the strictly material and economic, but rather more broadly as ‘the mutual interdependence of musical and socio-economic production’ (p. 5); by ‘poetics’ he means the meaning-making practices that interweave and articulate expressive practices such as music and dance with material practices such as agriculture and raising animals. While meaning is a key concept here, Stobart to a certain extent skirts around the term rather than defining it directly or elaborating an explicit theory of meaning. It is not quite clear to me, for example, what Stobart means when he briefly argues that ‘meanings are evoked by, not embodied in cultural symbols’ (p. 6). Since some of the most compelling ethnographic material in the book has to do with musical performance in relation to intense bodily experiences, which would seem to lend itself well to theorisation in terms of embodiment, it would have been useful for Stobart to expand upon what he means by evocation in musical meaning-making, and why he finds this approach more useful than embodiment.

Part II, consisting of two chapters on ‘Guitars and Song’, makes a significant contribution to Andean musical ethnography with its focus on the music of stringed instruments. Whereas much Andeanist ethnomusicology (including other chapters of this book) has focused on the music of panpipes and other kinds of flutes, Stobart provides here a detailed account of the construction, circulation, symbolism and performance techniques of various guitar-type instruments played in the region of northern Potosí. One topic that could have been further explored here is the poetics of the singing voice. While there are a few lines about vocal quality, based on comments made by his transcription assistants (p. 112–3), the emphasis here is primarily on songs as finished objects (with careful attention to the poetic form and language of song texts) rather than on singing as process. The most intriguing part of the analysis here for me is Stobart's discussion of the market relations between the cholo artisans who construct stringed instruments and the peasant musicians who purchase and play them. Stobart argues that the apparent indigenising process in which Spanish-style stringed instruments were integrated into the seasonal cycle of music-making is not so much the result of adapting new artefacts to old ‘relic’ practices, but is rather ‘a dynamic ongoing process, deeply interwoven with market forces and a demand for shifting fashions’ (p. 86).

Part III, ‘The Music of a Year’, includes four chapters in which Stobart addresses the local variant of a phenomenon widely known in Andeanist musical ethnography, the organisation of the year into ‘musical’ seasons, with different kinds of musical instruments and song genres associated with different times of the year. Stobart methodically takes the reader through the local musical calendar, addressing aspects such as the history, construction and playing techniques of the various musical instruments used locally, as well as describing the calendrical feasts that form the context for much musical performance. While tracing a path through the musical year, Stobart also makes a number of relevant side excursions into the description and interpretation of phenomena such as the famous tinku ritual battle in the town of Macha, the important place of water in local cosmology, and beliefs about Carnival devils, including the sirinus (sirens) associated with musical enchantment.

Part IV is a single short chapter in which the author departs from the ethnographic present of 1991–1992, used in the rest of the book, to ‘intentionally destabilize’ the coherent ethnographic construction of local musical culture presented in the previous chapters. This is a daring move, and one to be applauded, though it would be more convincing if it had been reflexively attempted throughout the course of the book, instead of appearing as an epilogue.

Stobart is at his best when describing the ‘sensory explosions’ (p. 4) that constitute the calendrical feasts that are the primary context for music-making, along with drinking and other forms of ritual performance. But the vivid descriptive ethnographic writing in many places in the book – in which he is always respectful of his local interlocutors as human beings – often contrasts jarringly with the more abstract, speculative analytical passages which are frequently tinged with a latent structuralism. This structuralist tendency is toned down quite a bit here from Stobart's earlier published articles, but is still always lying just under the surface, trying to over-determine the analysis and pull the focus to abstract levels that seem detached from the immediacy of experience. In these passages, meaning often becomes less about the articulation of experience and more about the semantics of individual words, as expressed in what Stobart sees as their metaphoric potential and connections with other terms. During these excursions into etymology the burden of earlier traditions of Andeanist scholarship weighs heavily on the book, as when Stobart repeatedly draws on colonial era sources such as the 1612 dictionary of the Aymara language by Bertonio and the 1608 Quechua dictionary of González Holguín, as well as various chroniclers well known to Andeanist scholars. For me this particular way of doing Andean studies, where the scholar is beholden to these colonial-era sources – remote in both time and place from the circumstances of Stobart's field research – when explicating present-day meanings and practices, distracts from the more immediate consideration of how the words being discussed are actually used today in everyday conversation and in expressive forms such as songs.

As already alluded to, also frustrating for me is the frequent speculative analysis Stobart engages in. Stobart is careful to hedge his more speculative arguments with phrases such as ‘is suggestive of’, ‘invokes’, ‘as if’, ‘presumably’, ‘may/might be seen to be’, ‘it is as though’, ‘it is tempting to imagine’, ‘is evocative of’ and so forth. I am not arguing against interpretation, but the frequency of these caveats throughout the text makes me wonder to what extent Stobart's interlocutors would themselves make these metaphorical equivalences or agree with his interpretations. Again, since meaning-making as a kind of production itself is at the crux of Stobart's argument, perhaps more time could have been spent on local exegesis such as that reported on p. 63, where he transcribes (in the original Quechua with English translation) a conversation he had with one of his research consultants about change in musical practices over time.

The book includes an audio CD with excerpts from Stobart's field recordings of musical performances, soundscapes and Quechua storytelling, all carefully cued to the text.