JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Folklore Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American Folklore. "Theorizing the Hybrid" is a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore that critically engages the metaphor of hybridity as it is currently employed in the analysis of narratives and discourses, genres and identities, material forms and performances. Authors in the fields offolklore, cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, literary history, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature reflect on the nature, value, limitations, and dangers of hybridity as both an analytic model and a social practice. Articles consider topics ranging from the premodern to the cybernetic, the biological to the political, the highly localized to the transnational. THE ARTICLES INCLUDED IN "THEORIZING THE HYBRID" were originally presented at a conference held in March 1996 at the University of Texas at Austin. The aim of the conference was to critically engage the metaphor of hybridity as it is currently employed in the analysis of a wide variety of genres, discourses, and identities. Conceived as a broadly interdisciplinary forum, the conference not only analyzed but enacted hybridity--transgressing disciplinary boundaries, juxtaposing disciplinary styles, contaminating disciplinary discourses. This issue does the same, challenging readers to follow the hybrid from gene to cyborg, stone to cassette, "root" to "route," and to consider relations among biological, discursive, aesthetic, political, and economic aspects of the social phenomena placed under the sign of hybridity.1 Hybridity Past and PresentIn 1982, Victor Turner noted that "what was once considered 'contaminated,' 'promiscuous,' 'impure' [was] becoming the focus of postmodern analytical attention" (1982:77). These words sound patent today, but they may serve as a marker. To what extent does hybridity become a sign for the impure mixings propagated by the dissolution of political, geographic, ethnic, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries? The essays in this issue inquire into the virtue of interrogating such "impurity," casting attention on subjects as diverse as Apache rock and roll, mestizo politics, Israeli Mizrahi Deborah A. Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999) music, diasporic identity, and transglobal tourist art. Is the analyst of culture "destined to simply accumulate examples of the hybrid" (Franco 1993:141)? Is this accumulation actually a latent theory? or a latent anxiety? In what sense, and in how many senses, is the apprehension of hybrid phenomena necessary for cultural analysis? The biological root of the metaphor of hybridity was the source of considerable ambivalence for many co...

How do international music festivals produce experiences of the sacred in multifaith audiences? What is their part in creating transnational communities of affect? In this article, I theorize what I call "the promise of sonic translation": the trust in the ultimate translatability of aural (as opposed to textual) codes. This promise, I assert, produces the "festive sacred," a configuration of aesthetic and embodied practices associated with festivity wherein people of different religions and nations create and cohabit an experience of the sacred through heightened attention to auditory and sense-based modes of devotion conceived as "universal." The festive sacred is a transnational (thus mobile) phenomenon inextricable from the enterprise of sacred tourism. Such festive forms not only produce a Turnerian communitas but also create new transnational categories that mediate religious sentiment and reenchant the world. [

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