ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the issue of meanings in 'world music' practices. It aims to explore ways by which ethnographers can theoretically and methodologically address the issue of fluidity of meanings in musical practices. The chapter draws the fact that many of the so-called world musics are intentionally represented and celebrated as hybrid musics, as emerging from the process of creolisation in order to make the arguments. It argues that the specificity and processes engaged in the construction of world music have the benefit of inviting them to move beyond the quest for narratives of originary and initial subjectivities. The chapter addresses new questions that acknowledge the complexity and fluidity of meanings involved in the act of constructing and rearticulating identities through music. It focuses on mediations and agency as their points of entry to understanding what comes into play in the ways people conceive and perceive things and what, at the material level, puts alliances into motion.
