Voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category invoked in discourse about personal agency, communication and representation, and political power. This review focuses on scholarship produced since the 1990s in a variety of fields, addressing the status of the voice within Euro-Western modernity, voice as sound and embodied practice, technological mediation, and voicing. It then turns to the ways in which anthropology and related fields have framed the relationship between voice and identity, status, subjectivity, and publics. The review suggests that attending to voice in its multiple registers gives particular insight into the intimate, affective, and material/embodied dimensions of cultural life and sociopolitical identity. Questions of voice are implicated in many issues of concern to contemporary anthropology and can lend theoretical acuity to broader concepts of more general concern to social theory as well.

This article is concerned with a particular historical moment-the emergence of upper-caste women as performers of classical music on the concert stage in early-20th-century South India-and its implications for female musicians and musical practice in general in the present. In engaging with this specific historical and ethnographic moment, I seek to address broader questions about the relationship between voice, subjectivity, and agency and to ask how a consideration of music might enrich our thinking on these issues.In the early 20th century, what is now known as South Indian classical music, or Karnatic music, underwent a series of major shifts in performance context and practice. Older temple-and court-based forms of patronage ceased to be viable in the late colonial economy of South India, and toward the end of the 19th century, musicians moved in large numbers to the colonial city of Madras (now Chennai). There, music organizations, concert halls, and academies were established by an upper-caste, largely Brahmin elite that was interested in what they termed the "revival" of Karnatic music and its transformation into the "classical" music of South India. At the heart of the revival of Karnatic music was the notion that this music could take its place as a sign of tradition and Indianness alongside the trappings of an emergent middle-class modernity. Particular notions of female respectability and ideal womanhood were central to the project of defining middle-class identity, modernity, and the aims of colonial nationalism. 1 Whereas devadasis, hereditary female musicians and dancers from a variety of non-Brahmin castes, came to be regarded as prostitutes and their opportunities to perform were gradually diminished, upper-caste women were encouraged to learn, and eventually perform, music and dance. Indeed, for many Brahmin elites, the sign of the successful classicization of music and. dance in the 1920s to 1940s was the transformation of these into "arts" fit for upper-caste, middle-class "family women."Here, I am interested in the ways in which music became available to "respectable" women as a vocation and sometimes a career, as well as the particular Cultural Anthropology 18(2): 194-232. kinds of performance practice, discourse about music, and notions of ideal womanhood engendered by this newfound respectability. 2 How did classical music help constitute a private or domestic sphere at the same time as it participated in the production of a new, urban, modern public sphere? How did the literal domestication of music as a sign of bourgeois respectability-its connection to a discourse about family values-relate to music's progressive interiorization within the body? How did this interiorization, as well as the notion of the "artist" that underlay the revival of Karnatic music as the "classical" music of South India, lead to the valorization of a particular kind of voice? In addressing these questions, I identify a certain politics of voice that emerged in the moment that upper-caste women began to sing in p...

This article focuses on the social significance and the cultural politics of the body-sensorial knowledge acquired through learning music. It considers music as a means for producing particular kinds of embodied subjects, as a repetitive practice and a mode of discipline that inculcates and hones gendered and classed sensibilities. These ideas are elaborated in reflection on the author's experience of learning South Indian classical (Karnatic) music through apprenticeship, multiple pedagogical encounters, and learning to appreciate music in the company of others. [embodiment, sensorial knowledge, gender, apprenticeship, music]

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constantine v. nakassis and amanda weidman Vision, Voice, and Cinematic Presence Image 1: An Image That Couldn't Be On a hot April afternoon in 2009 in a small rural village in southern Tamil Nadu, India, the film crew with whom Costas (Nakassis) was working on the Tamil film Goa (2010, dir. Venkat Prabhu) was milling about, waiting for the next shot to begin. The assistant directors were looking for a couple of extras for the shot. The scene needed village women, so they asked the woman whose house they were using for one of the indoor locations if she would like to act. She was in her early thirties, married with two small children. Her face betrayed interest, though she was reticent and equivocated. Her husband, who came a couple of minutes later, spoke in her stead: no, she wouldn't be acting. The assistant directors, all men, seemed to understand immediately and dropped the issue, wandering off to find someone else. Costas persisted, though, and asked him, why not let her act? The husband responded tersely, motioning to the dubious moral standing of the Tamil film industry. Thinking he was talking about stereotypes about casting couches (rumors of which have long been a source of stigma for women in the industry), Costas countered that he, the husband, would be there the whole time and would know that nothing wrong would have happened. The husband responded, as if to indicate that Costas misunderstood him: it wasn't proper because she would be seen onscreen, that is, seen by anonymous and unknown others in the dark expanse of the theater. That she could be seen onscreen, in public, was enough to trigger local gossip that would impugn not just her but his honor as well. For her to be seen, for an image of her to appear, was itself an act-an act that couldn't come to pass, an image that wouldn't be. Image 2: An Invisible Audible Voice Mallika Sherawat is dancing to a heavily saturated audio track, her thin, fair body surrounded by a visually lavish set in the 2011 film Osthi (dir. Dharani). Formations of male and female dancers move in sync with her, gyrating their hips and shaking their chests. Mallika has already introduced herself as Mallika (her offscreen, personal name) in a thinly disguised description of transgressive sexual pleasure, inviting any who might dare to try her. She doesn't sing in her own voice, however, but in a voice provided by the elderly Tamil playback singer L. R. Eswari. As the verse finishes, the villain approaches, clumsily inserting himself into the dance and singing to Mallika in a high-pitched, metallic voice, only to have his fantasy interrupted by the hero (played by the actor T. R. Silambarasan, or Simbu as he is more commonly called), who announces his own arrival-"Osthi tān vantirukkān!" ("Osthi has arrived!")-and strides forward to take center stage. He tosses away a beer bottle as he begins an acrobatic show of dancing prowess, pushing the villain off to the side and twirling Mallika on his arm and then under his leg. The thick soundtrack disappear...