ABSTRACT
Musical performance enables communities to dramatize differences between older and new ways of living. In some situations, performers who specialize in older genres are cherished for their knowledge and wisdom, but their activities have been deplored, and at times prohibited, by advocates of newer belief systems. Musical genres exist to be orchestrated: to be combined in appropriate sequences during one type of performance; to be distributed throughout the agricultural cycle and men's and women's life cycles; and to be differentiated in ways that can distinguish a descent group, a locality, a region, a class, or a means of livelihood. Participants' identities are defined by immediate circumstances in such genres as lullabies, games, herding calls, laments for the dead, and bridal laments and other parts of marriage rituals. The real constraints exerted by national institutions produce illusions about what people who live in a given nation actually do in their daily lives.
