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The book offers a radically new perspective on the origins of the love song and human sexuality in an evolutionary context. By comparing different human societies and animal species, past and present, it reveals that love songs, romantic love and exclusive pair-bonds are not the original evolutionary features of Homo sapiens. One of the key findings of the book is that early humans practiced multiple-partner sexual relations, similar to our closest relatives bonobos and chimpanzees, but, with the emergence of culture and sexual taboo, their behaviour had to adjust. It contends that, since the exodus from Africa and the rise of culture, humans started to distance themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, drastically restraining their innate sexual nature. The book will appeal to both scholars and laypeople with an interest in evolutionary theory, socio-biology, anthropology, and the origins of culture.
This collection provides a comprehensive review of the current state of Georgian ethnomusicology, with the accent on historical trends. It presents a tribute to Anzor Erkomaishvili, a pivotal figure in Georgian traditional music, the author of many widely known masterpieces of Georgian traditional and church-song repertoires. The steadily increasing popularity of Georgian traditional music, among both professional ethnomusicologists and lovers of choral singing, provides an urgent need for this volume.
First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Music and arts initiatives are often praised for their capacity to aid in the rehabilitation of refugees. However, it is crucial to recognize that this celebratory view can also mask the unequal power dynamics involved in regulating forced migration. In Composing Aid, Oliver Shao turns a critical ear towards the United Nations-run Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, one of the largest and oldest encampments in the world. This politically engaged ethnography delves into various cultural practices, including hip hop shows, traditional dances, religious ceremonies, and NGO events, in an urbanized borderland area beset with precarity and inequality. How do songs intersect with the politics of belonging in a space controlled by state and humanitarian forces? Why do camp authorities support certain musical activities over others? What can performing artists teach us about the inequities of the international refugee regime? Offering a provocative contribution to ethnomusicological methods through its focus on activist research, Composing Aid elucidates the powerful role of music and the arts in reproducing, contesting, and reimagining the existing migratory order.
This volume brings together essays from different fields of the humanities and social sciences that offer a fresh look at the complexity of artistic and cultural contacts, transfers, and exchanges between Europe and the Middle East. The studies reach far beyond the geographical regions where Europe and the Middle East have met and interacted throughout their long histories, such as the eastern Mediterranean, the south Caucasus, and the Balkans. Their focus is on the variety of “contact zones” of the two worlds with specific artistic creativity, characterized by dynamic processes of movement and interchange between various cultural entities in the broadest and most complex sense of the word. The studies shed new light on diverse phenomena of the “in-between” or “liminal” spaces in art and culture, with special interest in artists and art works from ancient to modern times, from fine arts and architecture to music and video.
The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology brings together academics, artist-researchers, and practitioners to provide readers with an extensive and authoritative overview of applied musicology. Once a field that addressed music’s socio-political or performative contexts, applied musicology today encompasses study and practice in areas as diverse as psychology, ecomusicology, organology, forensic musicology, music therapy, health and well-being, and other public-oriented musicologies. These rapid advances have created a fast-changing field whose scholarship and activities tend to take place in isolation from each other. This volume addresses that shortcoming, bringing together a wide-ranging survey of current approaches. Featuring 39 authors, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology falls into five parts—Defining and Theorising Applied Musicology; Public Engagement; New Approaches and Research Methods; Representation and Inclusion; and Musicology in/for Performance—that chronicle the subject’s rich history and consider the connections that will characterise its future. The book offers an essential resource for anyone exploring applied musicology.
Familiar Strangers examines how the Soviet empire was built, and ultimately dismantled, by ethnic outsiders. Scott retells Soviet history from the perspective of the socialist state's internal Georgian diaspora, illuminating processes of mobility within Soviet borders and offering an understanding of empire that transcends the divide between colonizer and colonized.
This two-volume collection transforms our understanding of the discipline of ethnomusicology by exploring how ethnomusicologists can contribute to positive social and environmental change within institutional frameworks. The first volume focuses on ethical practice and collaboration and offers strategies for promoting institutional and methodological change.
Music plays an integral role in many facets of human life, from the biological and social to the spiritual and political. This book brings together interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies on the functions, purposes, and meanings of music in human experience.
Why is music from the past significant today and how has it been transformed to suit new values and agendas? This volume examines the globally recurrent cultural processes of revival, resurgence, restoration, and renewal. Interdisciplinary perspectives shed new light on authenticity, recontextualization, transmission, institutionalization, globalization, and post-revival legacies.