In this article we examine the way local, national, and regional politics affect the policies and practices of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH)—a notion derived from the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage—in two detailed case studies from the Republic of Macedonia. While our conclusions are particular to our case studies, we hope that researchers in other national settings will find them useful for describing and analysing their own situations. We begin with a discussion of heritagization and recontextualization, which are inherent in ICH safeguarding processes. Next, we provide background on the external contestation of a distinct Macedonian ethnic and national identity, and the ways that UNESCO ICH safeguarding processes have been perceived and applied in Macedonia. Against that backdrop, we then describe and analyse two contrasting cases of ICH—the social dance “Kopackata” and the Galicnik Wedding—both of which illustrate how the cultural heritage concept itself can sometimes be used for national, commercial, and political ends.

I walked into the Round-Up Saloon and stood transfixed by the scene out on the dance floor. Surrounded by a wooden corral, the sleek and shining floor was filled with couples taking wide, gracefully fluid steps. Clad in immaculate cowboy hats, crisp work shirts tucked into jeans, and of course boots, the men spinning together around the floor were to me an entirely new form of queer dance. The comfortable intimacy of their bodies was unlike the bump and grind of the dance I was used to encountering at urban American gay bars, and the DJ's musical selections kept well away from pop divas and electronic dance music. At urban gay bars like Dallas' Round-Up Saloon and at other non-bar venues, queer two-step and line dancing, and country music itself, offers space for a performative queerness that counterbalances not only mainstream perceptions of country music and dance as heterosexualized and antagonistic towards other sexualities, but expands understandings of queer dance practice as well. In this article, I draw on my fieldwork in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I spent six months in 2016 and 2017 learning to two-step and line dancing with an LGBT country dance organization.

Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los Ángeles

Hoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.

Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

In nanguan, a Chinese art music tradition, musicians compose songs by setting new texts to existing tunes (known as qupai); songs that are composed based on the same tune display the relevant features of that tune but vary in its non-relevant features.2 Tunes are further grouped by musicians into tune families3(gunmen); songs that are composed based on tunes of the same tune family display the distinctive features of respective tunes but share the features of that tune family.

Ethnologists now generally accept the idea that all cultures are dynamic and ever changing (Berreman, 1968:338). It is clear, however, that the rate of change varies not only from one culture to the next, but also with respect to the different elements within that culture. In some ways, a society is rather like an octopus with its tentacles periodically stretching in different directions—each motion causing at least a slight change in the alignment of forces within it. For analytical purposes, this continuous juggling of forces and pressures can often be comprehended more readily in a series of stop-action vignettes, exactly comparable to the individual frames of a motion picture film. With this technique, it becomes possible to predict that, for instance, a jumper in mid-air will return to earth and, if one knew his velocity and trajectory, just where he would land. However, the forces operating on and within a society are not nearly as well understood as is the force of gravity and thus predictions of change in society are generally much less reliable. Nevertheless, such an examination of the operative forces and their alignments in this kind of stop-action view will undoubtedly add to our understanding of the processes of change in society.

In 2002, less than a year after releasing her first album, Afrikaans rocker Karen Zoid gained a level of notoriety then unheard of among Afrikaans female musicians. She achieved this when she enacted the overtly masculine rock ritual that Aerosmith's Joe Perry has labelled “the ultimate statement of anarchy” (Perry, quoted in Christensen 2004): she smashed her guitar. While frequently interpreted as an attention-getting strategy (which it undeniably was), Karen Zoid's performance was also an act of political positioning, locating her within the already passé tropes of international rock, but also on the margins of the Afrikaans music industry. It also, ironically, allowed her to appropriate some of the rock “authenticity” connected with this display of overt masculinity, despite the fact that her performance can be read as a deliberate (perhaps even camp) parody of this masculinity. This is because, as I will argue in this article, Zoid's legitimacy as the “voice of her generation” and a vocalizing representative of New South African identity has hung precariously off her performed masculinity, despite her destabilization of this image through a variety of queer performances. In this article, I will examine the interlinked history of South African music (with a focus on Afrikaans rock) and national identification that has created a normative masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa (1994-present). I will present Karen Zoid's performance style as an example of resistance to this norm, paying particular attention to the vocal characteristics of gendered South African sound as a site of normativity and resistance. Finally, I will consider the extent to which, in order to enact this resistance, Zoid has been obliged to perform the gendered national norm or has been interpreted in normative terms in order that audiences are able to comprehend her national identifications. By these means I aim to make visible the normally hidden gender bias that undermines South Africa's apparently representative post-apartheid nationalism.

This paper concerns the music of wedding ceremonies that I recorded and filmed in four communities in the vicinity of Delhi: the town of Gurgaon and the villages of Jharsa and Jhanjholi in the state of Haryana, and Singola village in the Delhi Government District. It concentrates primarily on songs for two ceremonies in the Hindu cycle of wedding rituals — the lagan and the ban, and also includes songs for the other rituals that took place on the day of a phera (‘the marriage itself') in the villages of a groom (Singola) and of his bride (Jhanjholi). The music for such ceremonies is always provided by women, members of the families of the bride and groom and other appropriate female members of the community. Before presenting and discussing these ceremonies and the music for them, I want to describe the socio-cultural context of marriage in India.

In the past three decades, the study of music in ancient China has expanded significantly with the discovery of numerous tombs containing musical instruments. These finds have revealed substantial information about ancient music theory and organology. One issue that has remained on the periphery, however, is the study of the musicians themselves. From the Eastern Zhou (770–221 BCE) to Tang (618–907 CE) periods, musicians fell broadly into three groups: (1) formal musicians who performed for important ritual occasions and state sacrifices; (2) informal musicians who provided entertainment for banquets and other less formal occasions; and (3) military musicians who performed in processions. Formal musicians generally specialized in yayue (refined music), the official music of the royal Zhou court. Yayue continued to be played in formal ritual settings at court long after the Zhou period. Informal and military musicians specialized in less traditional forms of music, such as suyue (“popular” or “folk” music) and foreign music. Formal and informal musicians appear in the archaeological record as early as Eastern Zhou, while military musicians appear slightly later in the Han. Of these three groups, informal musicians appear to have been most popular among elite audiences, especially between the Han (206 BCE–229 CE) and Tang periods. These musicians were often paired with lively dancers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, and jesters, indicating the entertainment—rather than formal—nature of the music they performed. As demonstrated by sculptural works and mural paintings excavated from Han through Tang tombs, the most common types of musicians outside the more formal music sectors at court were foreigners, dwarfs, idealized women, and scholarly recluses. This paper will focus on archaeological and textual evidence for the existence of these informal musicians as early as Shang (c. 1570–1070 BCE) and Eastern Zhou, and the rising popularity of such performers in the period from Han to Tang. I hope to show that the very social marginality of informal musicians is exactly what enhanced their exoticism and popular appeal among their elite audiences.

The dance is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and beautiful expressions of the Rumanian people. Its present-day forms are the product of an evolution during which it was subject to diverse influences (both internal and external) and shaped by the spiritual needs of its creators. While part of the whole realm of folk creation, the dance is in itself a most complex phenomenon. Consequently, it has for quite some time been regarded as an independent genre, and little study has been devoted to its relationship with other folkloristic elements.

For most people carrying out research in ritual and traditional dance forms, ‘modernisation’, usually understood as ‘Westernisation’, is seen as something destructive. Often rituals are studied as fairly static phenomena. Even though in our fieldwork we never see a ritual repeated in precisely the same manner, because our informants often insist on standardisation and on the possibility of exact ritual replication, we tend to look for a “proper”, archetypal form from which all other forms have deviated. As Gerd Baumann has argued (1992), from Durkheim onward much of the anthropological discourse about ritual has been based on a number of closely related assumptions:

1. 1. Rituals are seen to be symbolic performances at the core of the social identity of communities;

2. 2. They create and maintain (or transform) a society's cultural identity and social relations;

3. 3. The existence of a ritual community or congregation is assumed, whose members share a relationship to the performance, its symbols and their meanings;

4. 4. Thus, rituals are seen to be best understood as acts internal to the category or group that celebrates them or celebrates itself through them, the group being essentially concerned with itself rather than with the outside world.

A myriad of ethnomusicological studies have explored change and modernization in musical cultures across the world. However, few have explored transformational changes with capitalism as the main analytical frame. This is despite the fact that capitalism, in its various forms and phases, has arguably been the key driving force of the modem world for centuries, underpinning or shaping industrialization, nation-state formation, colonialism, rapid or intensive economic growth/crises/disparity, technological innovation, the advent of wage labour, urbanization, and global connectivity. In this article I explore capitalist transformation as a seismic shift in people's relations to and identifications with land, nature, and place, as manifest in song lyrics and videos created/performed in contemporary Tibet.

Within recent years much aboriginal song material has been gathered, mainly in Central and Northern Australia. The scientific value of this material can be readily understood; but its artistic merit has been the subject of much controversy. The present article has been written with a view to pointing out certain features of the Australian songs—features whose appreciation may enable listeners to obtain more enjoyment from aboriginal recordings. My remarks are based on my own collection, which was gathered in Central Australia; but they are true in a general sense of most Australian songs as far as we know at present.

The different aspects of the subject and the corresponding methods.

The life-history of melodies is the subject of comparative melodic research. It offers various aspects and forms of approach, and research has consequently developed in different directions and has employed a variety of methods. These are differentiated not only by nomenclature but by the emphasis laid upon special aspects of the subject-matter.

Prior to World War II, Hawaiian music claimed enthusiastic audiences throughout the world. In some countries there were local performers of Hawaiian music who had never even visited the Islands. Although that popularity has greatly diminished, it is still surprisingly alive in such places as Japan, Indonesia, Canada, England, Holland, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.1 Without exception, the most famous performers in these countries are masters of the Hawaiian steel guitar.2 In fact, the sound of the steel guitar is considered the hallmark of Hawaiian music.

Despite the fact that, in most parts of the world, music and dance are closely linked and are an integral part of the broad anthropological concept of culture, it is surprising to note that many accounts by ethnomusicologists and dance anthropologists are limited to describing either music or dance.1 As long ago as 1937, Curt Sachs wrote about universal interrelationships between the performing arts, and yet as recently as 1982 Peter Brinson noted that “There is a barrier between music and dance studies which needs urgently to be overcome” (Brinson, 1982:4).

Traditional musical instruments make useful symbols of identity because they are often unique to a particular social group and therefore serve as markers of distinction from other groups. This is true of the ekonting (see figure 1), a three-stringed plucked lute that is played almost exclusively by people of the Jola ethnic group in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. One player of the ekonting (pl. sikonting) describes the instrument much like an identification badge: “No matter where you go, if you see someone playing the ekonting, you will know that person is a Jola.” Ethnomusicological literature abounds with similar cases, where there is said to be a one-to-one relationship between a musical instrument and the social identity of the performer. However, constructivist models of social identity, emphasizing multiplicity, changeability, and relationality, complicate this apparently straightforward relationship, even if ethnomusicologists too often treat the subject of identity in contradictory ways (Rice 2007). In this paper, I approach the ekonting through sociologist Margaret Somers's (1994, 1992) paradigm of narrative identity, which emphasizes the relational and ontological qualities of narrative production. I argue that the ekonting serves not as a signifier of an a priori social identity, but instead as a site for the narrative production of Jola ethnicity. This narrative production both differentiates Jolas from—and associates them with—other regional, national, and transnational identity narratives. After an explanation of this paradigm and a contextualization of the cultural stakes, I demonstrate this argument through two vignettes describing different directions of narrative production around the ekonting.