This dissertation is about historicity. It is an inquiry into how individuals creatively layer personal and collective memories to shape socially shared musical practices. It is also about how such pasts are employed to understand and negotiate the present. To address these issues, this dissertation focuses on the reza, an annual Catholic patron saint ritual that is practiced in private homes all over the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. The religious celebration includes Catholic Church texts intoned in local melodies, samba dancing, and group feasting. Explicitly, this musical ritual plays a vital role in solidifying social relationships and affirming Catholic identity, while also providing the spiritual means to confront quotidian life. Implicitly, the reza gives participants a means of remembering their own spiritual journeys and evoking a collective Black Atlantic past. Despite the fundamental socio-religious value of this tradition, it has largely been neglected in both English- and Portuguese-language academic scholarship. Consequently, this dissertation, based on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and historical research (2008-2013), introduces the reza and, at the same time, uses it to develop a broader theoretical perspective about the way in which history plays out in contemporary musical practices.

This dissertation explores the active roles of ritual music known as xochitl sones (flower-musical pieces) or sones de costumbre (musical pieces of the tradition), in the context of la costumbre Nahua religion of eastern Mexico. This multi-sited research is based on twelve months of ethnomusicological research conducted in 2010-2011 among several Nahua towns in the municipality of Chicontepec, Veracruz. The main focus of research is the town of Ixcacuatitla located at the foothill of the Postectli Mountain, an active ceremonial center for Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua ethnic groups. By primarily looking at conceptualizations concerning the chicomexochitl ceremony offered to mountains, this study shows how ritual music articulates participation and emotional engagement in order to bring the rainfall that is essential for agricultural production. The musical repertoire consists of about 150 musical pieces that are arranged according to the events, actions, and deities represented in the ceremony. The characteristics of the musical elements and the large structure of pieces paralleling the events configures the engagement of the participating audiences in the performance of the ceremony. Over a period of days, congregations and dedicated ritual specialists gather to prepare and present large amounts of offerings including food and animal sacrifices. While all engage in the different activities, dancing together to the rhythm of the violin, jarana and huapanguera is one of the most representative aspects of participation, where emotions such as weeping and joy are offered to the Chicomexochitl deity. This dissertation argues that the relevance of music and dance in articulating such emotional involvement directly corresponds to the value attributed to participation in the system of communal reciprocity, which is a basic principle of socialization in these Nahua towns and further enables an interaction with the sacred landscape.

This dissertation explores ways in which many people in New Orleans use, experience, form emotional attachments to, and make sense of space through music. It analyzes how music intersects with geography and how the musical experiences of New Orleanians bring meaning to the built form. It examines the role of the agent in the social construction of space, and how people use music as a spatial enabler in New Orleans. It proposes that music enables people to socially construct space because it accesses the nexus of memory and emotion, operates in a greater cultural context, and is a useful tool for variable expression. In order to present varied experiences with the musical construction of space, this dissertation approaches its subject through four case studies: place attachment through the "second line" parading tradition and North Claiborne Avenue, the fixing of memories in space at the Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge, the negotiation of public space through musical performances in various contexts, and the creation and growth of a music community in the New Orleans Habitat Musicians' Village. In so doing, it illustrates that New Orleans, as a musical city, is greater than a soundscape or a cultural identity--it is the sum of myriad musical experiences that individuals in New Orleans have had as they interact with the space around them.

This study follows several groups engaged in the rawest form of grassroots organizing that are currently operating in zòn defavorize ("defavorized" zones) of metropolitan Port-au-Prince. Experiencing first-hand the difficulties of surviving in the overcrowded capital--which recently has meant enduring the 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic and flawed presidential elections--like-minded Haitians have banded together to tackle neighborhood problems by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. Such organizations include a classical music school in Cité Soleil that offers students music lessons and the chance to participate in a symphonic band as an alternative to gang involvement and drug use; a professional music theater troupe that has run intensive performance training for youth in tent cities; a hip-hop collective that has assisted U.S. deportees with integrating into Haitian society; and a rap Kreyòl group that launched a long-term project to remove trash from the streets while simultaneously releasing singles highlighting Haiti's environmental degradation. Dozens of other service-oriented cultural groups are currently active and are using music of genres ranging from rara to folkloric dance and drumming to rasin, in addition to those mentioned above, for extra-musical purposes. These groups use cultural action to address on a small scale the needs of the population that elsewhere might be met by a state with solid infrastructure. Thus, in certain contexts, cultural production provides a modest means to press for change and community development and may in fact involve efforts directed toward the reduction of violence and poverty.

The case studies I evaluate are drawn from twenty-one cumulative months of fieldwork. Ethnographic data was collected through varied research methodologies, including intensive participant observation, archival research, an extensive range of interviews conducted across a polarized class structure, and engaged ethnography research techniques. The arguments advanced in this dissertation move beyond existing scholarship concerning Haitian mizik angaje (politically and socially "engaged music"), first by employing theories connecting music and violence and second by reaching outside the field of ethnomusicology in contemplating contemporary models of grassroots development.

This dissertation is an acoustic ethnography of the state of Ceará in Northeastern Brazil, with a focus on drought and the natural environment; drought is of particular symbolic and material importance to people in Ceará. One of the central narratives of life in Ceará involves migration and return. Here, I consider the discursive construction of Ceará as a natural, rural and traditional place through processes of migration and through a recording industry that saw migrants as both consumers and icons for a changing urban and national character. However, my emphasis is on the question of return. I investigate how urbanized and nationalized constructions of Ceará--often imagined as exclusively rural and unremittingly drought-ridden--impact contemporary Ceará and its musical culture. How are sounds, musics, practices, natures, geographies, and individuals shaped by mediated representations and caricatures of those very sounds, practices, geographies and identities? Drawing from acoustic ecology (Schafer 1994), acoustemology (Feld 1996), ecomusicology (e.g., Rehding 2002; Allen 2011), and discussions of musical sustainability (Titon 2009; Turino 2009), as well as from literature on rurality, capitalism, and nostalgia (e.g., Williams 1973; Stewart 1988; Dent 2009), I discuss traditional and hegemonic knowledge in urbanized rural and ruralized urban musical and agricultural practices, including the baião and forró music of Luiz Gonzaga; I interpret soundscapes in Fortaleza, the state capital, and Orós, a small city in the interior, to discuss the political and economic control of acoustic space, especially as it relates to musician Raimundo Fagner in Orós and electronic forró in Fortaleza; I analyze two contemporary musical projects--an opera and a rock band--that posit distinct relationships between Ceará's nature and literary, historical, social, and musical worlds; and I investigate movements for cultural preservation as they address the sustainability of both nature and culture. I conclude that nostalgic representations of the sertão demonstrate the complexity and malleability of contemporary northeastern music and culture, that environmental sounds and music in Ceará are heard in ways that have been maintained through oral tradition and mediated through audio recording, and that Ceará's soundscapes are constructed through community actions and legislation, by music industries, and through conflicting subjectivities. I also suggest that discourses of musical sustainability can be complexified by the example of forró, which was originally commercial popular music but has since become traditional music.

This dissertation introduces an Andean transverse flute tradition of northern

Ecuador that has been routinely overlooked throughout a long history of scholarship published on the Otavalan region and its Kichwa–speaking inhabitants. Ethnographic data was collected through a variety of methods over the course of eight cumulative months of fieldwork in Ecuador, as well as an additional three and a half years during which I co–produced an album with flute masters from the Hatun Kotama Cultural Center and Smithsonian Folkways, consulted in the development of a living museum exhibit for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and maintained regular contact with my host family and Otavalan friends via email, social media, and telecommunications.

Although some people have dismissed the tradition as trivial or melancholic,

flutists emphasize that flauta music performs a central role in giving life to life and maintaining a cosmic balance. In order to examine how this is achieved, I base the theoretical approach of the dissertation on three central concepts. The first is the idea that relationships of all kinds are sung into being through musical performance, which Ellen Basso develops in her work with the Kalopalo of lowland South America (1981:288). In particular, I examine how these relationships between humans, their environment, and spiritual world are gendered. In doing so, I apply Kotama local scholar and yachak (one who knows) Katsa Cachiguango's concept of the pariverso (the "pair-verse" instead of "universe," describing the more common term yanantin in Andean studies) as well as Otavalan scholar Luz María De la Torre's theory of a distinct Kichwa sense of gender, which is dynamic and exists on a flexible spectrum (Cachiguango and Pontón 2010; De la Torre 2010). These three ideas inform my analysis of who plays the transverse flute and why (Chapter 3), the construction of the flutes and gendering of material culture (Chapter 4), and the gendering of sound and Kichwa musical aesthetics (Chapter 5). Finally, I consider how the contemporary revitalization efforts of flauta music, led by the Hatun Kotama Cultural Center and flute ensemble, give life to the Kichwa language and Kichwa cultural institutions (Chapter 6).

This dissertation concerns the performance of cultural heritage by female dancers on tour boats in Goa, India, at the Goa Boat Center (GBC). Tourism is the most rapidly growing industry in the former Portuguese enclave of Goa, which continues to attract an increasing number of visitors each year and has recently witnessed an influx of migrants, many of whom end up working in the tourism sector. Although the tourism industry has not yet fully capitalized on cultural tourism, government-affiliated institutions such as the GBC have begun to strategically market Goan traditions as heritage. These efforts have resulted in struggles over both the significance of Goan culture and the status of female performers in this regard. This dissertation reveals how tourism in Goa thus functions as a site for the reconfiguration of narratives on Goa, female sexuality, and womanhood more generally, both on an individual and an institutional level.

​While public discourse in India tends to depict the nation and its people as traditional, Goa is typically presented as a state characterized by a “modern” cultural openness and moral looseness, qualities that are attributed to the long-lasting Portuguese colonial influence (1510-1961). Using discourse analysis, I trace how these ideas are given new currency in popular media such as tourism advertisements and Bollywood films, which I argue help to portray travel to Goa as a rite of passage allowing young domestic tourists to explore their modern selfhood. I also show how these media, which I consider as travel narratives, have helped to engender the idea that women in Goa are sexually promiscuous, an image that strongly contrasts with the notion of female respectability central to Indian traditional modernity. This impression greatly impacts how the female tour boat dancers are perceived by visitors from elsewhere in India and by Goan society. The morally ambiguous status of the tour boat dancers is compounded by the fact that in India, lower-caste female performers have tended to be associated with prostitution.

​While the state-supported tourism industry strongly relies on the image of Goa as a pleasure periphery, the Goan government has also felt compelled to appease citizens who disapprove of this image, for example by imposing restrictions on nightlife, especially amidst an increase in sexual violence. Through ethnography, I examine how the GBC negotiates narratives on Goa and domestic tourists’ expectations in its staging of Goan culture. I argue that the GBC performances aim to strike a careful balance by presenting Goan culture as rooted in a morally guided past, while at the same time reinforcing the image of Goa as a party destination. Finally, I analyze the ways in which the female tour boat dancers navigate this complex web of meaning, as they rely on the traditional nature and heritage status of the GBC shows to emphasize their respectability as performers. I show how the GBC performances and dance clubs the women attend in their free time provide a liminal space in which they can participate in an embodied modernity. This way, I argue, the women use dance to explore gendered subjectivities that challenge patriarchal codes of womanhood.

In my first meeting with the Maya Q'anjob'al community in Los Angeles, I gained two important insights into their existence in LA: first, they were here because they had been displaced from their land by a violent civil war in which non-Indigenous Guatemalans targeted Mayan populations. Second, their establishment in Los Angeles, a city that abounds with diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic groups, allows them relative freedom to redefine ethnic boundaries that had for centuries been defined for them. In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship among three fundamental aspects of Indigenous identity politics in the twenty-first century—migration, music, and transnational media networks—and the way in which each aspect interacts with the others to continuously reproduce identity despite dramatic changes in spatial orientation. During four years of fieldwork in Los Angeles and Guatemala, I used ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and repertoire analysis to analyze the ways in which people in ethnic groups use music to construct ethnic identity in the creation of meaningful places. Specifically, I outline how Q'anjob'ales use marimba music to tie Q'anjob'al identity production to natural environments, reterritorialize Q'anjob'al identity in urban environments through musical symbolizing, regulate ethnic boundaries through musical interaction in urban audiotopias, and expand Q'anjob'al space transnationally through virtual music sharing. While geographers, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists have focused on either the "acoustic ecologies" of social space or the role of music in communicating among displaced communities, I combine both approaches, theorizing music not only in place, but also as place through its transformation of digital space in multiple locations.