ABSTRACT

Creating a meta-conversation between anthropological life stories of musicians and dancers from seven distinct geographical and cultural fields has provided an exceptionally rich resource in our efforts to understand and elucidate contemporary cultural phenomena. Circulations involve musicians as well as their musics and dance practices, but they also apply to the representations and knowledge that they convey. In crossing boundaries among and between levels – social, local, regional, or national – musics and musicians acquire prestige and recognition, despite the fact that the resulting validation is also associated with contradictions and lost illusions. The ambiguous, tainted term “metissage” is thus far less useful to understanding how musics and dances circulate and become transformed than adjustments, adaptations, and negotiations, each inevitably associated with compromises, tensions, and conflicts. These processes for articulating connections and bonds are in turn tied to different forms of legitimation, each inevitably influenced by spatial and cultural displacements.