Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

Main emphases: European explorers' accounts (from late 15th c. onwards) of non-Western peoples and cultures provided basis for development of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and provided most ethnographic information until development of anthropological fieldwork in late 19th-early 20th c. (see Fieldwork, below). Recent historical and critical work in anthropology and cultural studies has stressed influence of colonialism, but earliest ethnographies were pre-colonial, seeking information as defensive response to invasions by Mongol and Turkish armies, reflecting European weakness rather than hegemonic power. Emphasis shifted during colonial era to European superiority, although early ethnographic writings treated some non-European cultures as potentially equal competitors, or even (as in pre-19th c. writings on China) as more advanced and/or powerful than Europe. Colonial emphasis on acquisition of knowledge, including cultural and musical knowledge, among other spoils of conquest.

The Anthropology of Music

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US. (Dominican, construction of race, African-descent immigrants, ethnolinguistic identity, Spanish)* Dominican American self-definition of race in terms of ethnolinguistic heritage ‐ as “Spanish,” “Dominican,” or “Hispanic” ‐ runs counter to popular and historical US notions of race in which African-descent phenotype has preceded all other criteria (e.g. national origin, language, or religion) for social classification. African-descent race has historically been treated as equivalent to Africandescent ethnicity in the US (Mittelberg & Waters 1993), with the result that immigrants of African descent have largely merged into the African American population by the second generation (Bryce-Laporte 1972, Woldemikael 1989, Waters 1994). Unlike these other African-descent groups, Dominican Americans are successfully reversing, in many contexts, the historical precedence of African

/pdf/language-and-negotiation-of-ethnic-racial-identity-among-um4q1q2np2.pdf

Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity among Dominican Americans

Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Marta E. Savigliano. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. 289 pp., Index, illustrations.

Tango and the Political Economy of Passion

When people move across state borders, they enter not only a different labor market and political structure but also a new system of social stratification by class, race, ethnicity, and gender. Migrants bring their own cultural conceptions of their identity, which often do not coincide with the ideological constructions of the receiving societies. As a mulatto Dominican colleague told me recently, she "discovered" that she was black only when she first came to the United States; until then she had thought of herself as an india clara (literally, a light Indian) in a country whose aboriginal population was practically exterminated in the 16th century. For most Caribbean immigrants in the United States, race and color have played a crucial role in the formation of their cultural identities. Two different models of racial hegemony are juxtaposed in the process of moving from the Caribbean to the United States. On one hand, Caribbean migrantsespecially those coming from the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico-tend to use three main racial categories-black, white, and mixed-based primarily on skin color and other physical characteristics such as facial features and hair texture (Seda Bonilla, 1980). On the other hand, the dominant system of racial classification in the

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634171.pdf

Reconstructing Racial Identity Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico

Music in Latin America, an introduction

Introduction / Gerard Baehague -- Performance practice in Indian classical mu / Bonnie C. Wade -- Music in Africa : the Manding contexts / Roderic Knight Berber professional musicians in performance / Philip D. Schuyler -- America traditional fiddling : performance contexts and techniques / Linda C. Burman-Hall -- Patterns of Candomblae music performance : an Afro-Brazilian religious setting.

Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives

Examining the role of music in the construction of cultural identity and ethnicity, this study explores the relationship between music and black identity, including the changing nature of ethnicity, cultural expressions of identity and musical styles as they reflect identity.

Music and Black ethnicity : the Caribbean and South America

Rather than being ephemeral fashion-cycles, Brazilian urban popular musical expressions of today function basically-as most musics do-as a medium of communication whose significance (i.e., meaning and relevance) varies in time from one homogeneous group to another, whether the group be defined in terms of given referential generations, of philosophical or political ideologies, or of ethnic identities. As Haralambos points out in his study of soul music and blues in Northern U.S. black ghettos, "the meanings associated with black music by black Americans are distinct to that group." (Haralambos 1970:382) But the group here is not exclusively identified in racial terms but more importantly in socio-economic cultural terms. In the Brazilian context of popular music, however, the groups involved are not racially homogeneous, yet the meanings associated with their music are also distinct to those groups. This seems to be the result of a class social organization rather than of racial subdivisions. In Brazil, the general acceptance of what constitutes, culturally and ethnically, an Afro-American is not as unequivocal as in the U.S. (Harris 1970:75). Race alone cannot, therefore, be considered a valid criterion in discussing Brazilian popular music. It would appear utterly inaccurate, from a Brazilian viewpoint, to regard the repertoire under consideration here as that of Afroor white Brazilians, in spite of the fact that many stylistic features of the bossa nova samba, for example, derive from Afro-Brazilian musical traditions. Thus, it should be borne in mind that popular music in Brazil cuts across ethnic lines. Brazilian urban popular music of the last fifteen years has undergone drastic changes. The determinant factors for these changes are numerous and varied, and some of those will be briefly mentioned in this study. Since the advent of bossa nova (1958-59), the history of popular music in Brazil seems to have followed the fundamental pattern of modernization witnessed in the urban areas. The tremendous growth of urban population in the last fifteen years has made it possible to develop a diversified music market of incredible proportion for a so-called "underdeveloped" country. Moreover, the consequent emergence of a powerful urban middle class, with modernizing aspirations, has created a favorable climate for experimenting with new styles and for promoting greater competition among popular musicians. Social scientists define modern societies as being relatively secular, anthropocentric, and developing universalistic achievement and impersonal orientations. One characterization of modernization is the necessity to close the gap between

Gerard Behague

Papers

Music in Latin America, an introduction

Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives

Music and Black ethnicity : the Caribbean and South America

Bossa & Bossas: Recent Changes in Brazilian Urban Popular Music

Music in Latin America: An Introduction