ABSTRACT
While ethnography is by its very nature an anachronistic project in a rapidly shifting world of geopolitics, the author hope is that the larger questions pertaining to music and conflict posed in this book resonate well beyond its temporal frames. The centrality of expressive culture for understanding the formation of subjectivities under a protracted ethnonational conflict echoes in various conceptualizations of universality that hover over every chapter in this book. Musical performances, however, are not arguments, although arguments are often presented within and about them. The highly diverse sites of cultural production, spatial geographies, institutions, social actors, ideologies and musical genres featured in this ethnography also extend past this work’s temporal confinements. This diversity is ideational as much as it is methodological, because it aims to add a lot of grain to a context of ethnonational conflict oftentimes depicted in binary terms of dominant-subaltern, hegemony-resistance, Israel-Palestine or Jewish/Israeli-Arab/Palestinian.
