Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia

Book excerpt: 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.