Writers and scholars have often interpreted the Balinese as struggling to exist in two worlds - the traditional and the modern. Many Balinese, however, tend to see themselves as attempting to negotiate foreign culture and to manage the far-reaching transformations that have taken place in their world. Moreover, Balinese conceptions and expressions of their contemporary world are not homogenous and artists have responded in a variety of ways. The case of Sanggar Bona Alit, a studio for the teaching and performance of music and dance founded by Alit Adi Putra - musician, composer, and painter - shows how creative productions may be shaped by processes of cultural negotiation that occur at the conceptual boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, the inside and outside, and the traditional and the modern.

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Gender relations in island Southeast Asia are largely based on studies of Bali, Java and the eastern Indonesian islands and are often characterised in terms of binary opposites or complementarities. However, the issue of gender is multifaceted and goes beyond a two column representation of gender, one defined by and limited to biological divisions. Among the T'boli of the southern Philippines, complex dynamics interpenetrate masculine and feminine principles across almost all areas of cognitive, social, cultural and aesthetic domains, including music. However, gender complementarity and difference between women and men carry a degree of ambiguity and mutual inclusiveness as illustrated in the constitution and performance of the two genres associated with courting and marriage, the seguyun and the sebelang.

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This article discusses a documentation of spoken texts, sung texts, and dances of the Dagaaba, a mainly oral West African cultural group based on actual interdisciplinary linguistic and musicological field research within the group. The importance of this documentation lies in the fact that traditional oral cultures are fast disappearing among some sections of such societies in the face of a ruthless process of globalization. The article outlines the socio-cultural organization of the communities investigated, gives a succinct description of the structure of Dagaare, language of the Dagaaba, and describes the structure of bawaa, their main dance, before analyzing transcriptions of a representative sample of spoken and sung folktales with comments on the thought systems and world-views emanating from these texts.