Theorizing the Local Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond

Over the past four decades, the spectacular, "globalized" aspects of cultural circulation have received the majority of scholarly - and consumer - attention, particularly in the study of South Asian music. Ethnomusicologists increasingly cast their studies in transnational terms, in part to take account of these emerging, globally mediated forms and their localized counterparts. As a result, a broad range of community-based and other locally-focused performance traditions in the regions of South Asia have remained relatively unexplored. markets have fostered the development of an aesthetic based The authors of Theorizing the Local provide a challenging and compelling counter-perspective to the overwhelming attention paid to the "globalized," arguing for the sustained value of comparative microstudies which are not concerned primarily with the flow of capital and neoliberal politics. What does it mean, they ask, for musical activities to be local in an increasingly interconnected world?
What are the motivations for theoretical thought, and how are theoretical formulations instigated by the needs of performers, agents promoting regional identity, efforts to sustain or counter gender conventions, or desires to compete? To what extent can theoretical activity be localized to the very acts of making music, interacting, and composing? intriguing-often music sharing common melodic, harmonic, or Theorizing the Local offers unusual glimpses into rich musical worlds of south and west Asia, worlds which have never before been presented in a single volume. The authors cross the traditional borders of scholarship and region, exploring in unmatched detail a vast array of musical practices and significant ethnographic discoveries extending from Nepal to India, India to Sri Lanka, Pakistan to Iran. Enriched by audio and video tracks on the extensive companion website, Theorizing the Local represents an important and necessary addition to the study of South Asian musical traditions and a broader understanding of 21st century music of the world.

Chapter One - Introduction (Richard K. Wolf)
Chapter Two - Women and Kandyan dance: Negotiating gender and tradition in Sri Lanka (Susan A. Reed)
Chapter Three - Listening to the violin in South Indian classical music (Amanda Weidman)
Chapter Four - Local practice, global network: the guitar in India as a case study (Martin Clayton)
Chapter Five - Constructing the local: Migration and cultural geography in the Indian brass band trade (Gregory Booth)
Chapter Six - The princess of the musicians: R?ni Bh?ñiy?õi and the M?ngani?r of Western Rajasthan (Shubha Chaudhuri)
Chapter Seven - Music in Urban Space: Newar Buddhist processional music in the Kathmandu Valley (Gert-Matthias Wegner)
Chapter Eight - Disciple And preceptor/performer in Kerala (Rolf Groesbeck)
Chapter Nine - S?na ba s?na or "from father to son": Writing the culture of discipleship (egula Burckhardt Qureshi)
Chapter Ten - Handmade in Nepal (David Henderson)
Chapter Eleven - Modes of theorizing in Iranian Khorasan (Stephen Blum)
Chapter Twelve - Zahirok: The musical base of Baloch minstrelsy (Sabir Badalkhan)
Chapter Thirteen - Varõams and vocalizations: The special status of some musical beginnings (Richard K. Wolf)

Richard K. Wolf is Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the author of the book The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India (Permanent Black, 2005 and University of Illinois Press, 2006), which was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Humanities, and Reciting Remembrance: Resonances of Popular Islam in South Asia (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).