In the twenty-first century, the term “kuchipudi” refers to a style of dance, a South Indian classical genre which, to the untrained eye, is indistinguishable from its better-known cousin, bharatanatyam. After India achieved Independence from the British in 1947, kuchipudi came to be known as a dance style synonymous with the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh. Kuchipudi's metonymic status reveals a broader logic of linguistic, geographically grounded identitarianism; indeed, the dance known today as kuchipudi is said to hail from a physical place called Kuchipudi, an otherwise nondescript fanning village located about fifty kilometres southeast of Vijayawadain central Andhra Pradesh (see figure 1).

Although (ethno)choreology within European scholarship maintains its continuity as a methodologically and theoretically grounded discipline, there is an ongoing need among scholars to re-evaluate its traits and achievements and (re)position it within both the social sciences and/or humanities. Sustained scholarly attention to basic questions about the nature of the field of study encourages discussion and debate about a number of issues, including the name of the discipline and whether it should specify the object of research (e.g., Lange 1981:5; Giurchescu 2007:5; Koutsouba 2008:227) or designate the “perspective” of its investigation Giurchescu and Torp 1991:1; Ivanova-Nyberg 2011:31). These ongoing dialogues also support debate on the basic epistemological and methodological orientation of “constructing dance knowledge” (Gore and Bakka 2007:93), which during recent decades has fluctuated between empirical and hermeneutic poles (Bakka and Karoblis 2010:179–84).

As a monophonic song type originating in early Aramaic Christianity, chant in the Syriac-speaking church has long fascinated music scholars. This continuously practised Levantine tradition is little understood, despite the increasingly global presence of Suryanis who strive to maintain their liturgical tradition at home and in the diaspora. Owing to multiple waves of migration, Aramaic Christians are increasingly present in Europe and the Americas. The historical home of this autochthonous population remains, however, Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean, although in steady and rapid decline. The current severity of the decline of these local communities is unprecedented in modem history due to the violent expansion of military–religious extremism under the guise of the Islamic State (IS), which has expelled Christians from large swaths of Iraq and Syria since June 2014. The long-term effects of such adverse circumstances remain unclear, but developments since 2003 have spurred attention to the cultures and musics of East Christian communities, necessitating a reassessment of the relationship between scholarship and these musical traditions.

Engaged with a discipline built on music, participant-observation, and fieldwork, ethnomusicologists position the experience of music and culture as a lens for studying the social creation of meaning. Ethnomusicologists' methodologies (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and ethnography) are collaborative social acts and defining elements of the discipline. Yet in the second edition of Shadows in the Field, a foundational reader on ethnomusicological field research, Bruno Nettl laments that “most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward whatwe are trying to find out and not as a central activity” (2008:viii). While increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists are engaging fieldwork and its theories as objects of inquiry, this area would benefit from still greater scholarly attention. In this article, we explore the methodological implications of collaborative fieldwork by analysing what happens when ethnomusicologists deliberately go into the field together.

The integration of music and dance among African people is a well-articulated phenomenon both within and outside of ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973; Hanna 1973; Nketia 1974; Stone 1998; Mans 2002; Gilman 2009; Mason 2012:5). As Ruth Stone reports, “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (1998:7). Despite the ubiquity of this conceptual packaging, African performance arts are realized in very particularized ways and contexts throughout the continent. In his study of the vimbuza healing ritual among the Tumbuka of Malawi, for example, Steven Friedson concludes that music and dance in vimbuza are not independent, but “multilayered and complexly interrelated” (1996: 131). In fact, “without drumming there would be no dancing, and without the dancing, the vimbuza [ancestral spirits] would be unable to ‘play with their children‘” (ibid.: 129). Friedson's observation goes beyond the basic acknowledgement that people who create and view dance experience it as sound too; as a practitioner, he found the very act of drumming to be “dancelike” (ibid.: 131–32). Similarly, in the specific cases of Ugandan kizino, kimandwa, maggunju, and gaze. Alfdaniels Mabingo argues that “to embody these dances is to personify the music that accompanies them. Music represents, frames and influences the corporeal bases, capabilities, performance and choreographic sensibilities of the dances” (2015: 13; see also Makubuya 1995). In both of these cases, music not only helps to define the choreographic movements, but also determines the speed and vigour of the dancers.

The first anthropological inquiries into lament, led by pioneering anthropologists Émile Durkheim (1961:442–49), Marcel Mauss (1921), and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922:239–46), focused on its socially determined nature. Lament was seen as a social duty imposed on the afflicted persons that expressed the need for social cohesion rather than a sincere feeling of personal pain. Greg Urban (1988:393), in a comparative study of ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil, reopened the question of how lament produces sociability by highlighting the way it regiments the expression of a powerful emotion such as grief. In recent decades, the individual/society dichotomy, which underlies these views on lament, has been seriously questioned in anthropology (Ingold 1996). An understanding has been developed of persons “as simultaneously containing the potential for relationships and always embedded in a matrix of relations with others” (Strathern 1996:66). In this view, lament cannot be considered a way to transform an individual expression of authentic grief into a socially regimented one, which, by being regimented, conveys a desire for sociability. Rather, this desire is the very condition that allows pain to be voiced in a manner that enhances the self in relation to the group and thus reinforces the community. As Elizabeth Tolbert poignantly states with regard to Finnish–Karelian lament: “Poised at the nexus between voice and body, self and other, the lamenter creates an intersubjective understanding of emotional pain by expressing the inexpressible, by rendering the isolation of individual mourning into an intensely communal experience” (Tolbert 2007:148).

“The one who knows the value of words”: this is a line from the most famous aşιq poem in the Azerbaijani language in which the author, Aşιq Əlǝsgǝr, describes the qualities of the ideal aşιq. Interpreted in much of the western world as a traditional bardic art, Azerbaijanis regard the art of the aşιq (pl. aşιqlar) as a high-class professional syncretic form with its own established canons, traditional forms of teaching and learning, and numerous regional traditions of performance. This article is about the aşιqlar who live and practise their arts in the Azerbaijan Republic.

Cultural brokers at national and local levels, recognizing the lucrative potential of tourism, have learned to construct commoditized cultural packages for tourist consumption. In this paper I examine one such packaging phenomenon, and ask, “What is the effect of the commoditization of culture for purposes of tourism on local communities?” This paper investigates how a traditional step dance practice in North Kerry, Ireland, was contemporized and commoditized in the 1980s by Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, with a view to informing cultural understandings of Ireland and attracting tourists. Examining the impact of cultural tourism on the development of Siamsa Tíre, I argue that Siamsa Tíre's appropriation and re-presentation ofthe local Molyneaux traditional style of step dancing produced something new and gave the Molyneaux style a new lease on life at a time when this traditional dance practice and its associated rural contexts of performance were in decline.

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.