Coplas de Todos Santos in Cochabamba: Language, Music, and Performance in Bolivian Quechua Song Dueling

Der Singstreit in humanethologischer Perspektive

“…Rhythmus, Metrum und Melodieformel geben ein formales Schema vor und erleichtern so die Improvisation des Vortrags. Solomon (1994) erläutert dies mit Bezug auf die coplas in Bolivien, die wiederum von mediterranen Traditionen abgeleitet sind: "Experienced copleros sing the short musical phrases over and over again in performance and internalize the tune and its meter. The repeated tune thus provides a rhythmic template to which lines of text are fixed not as collections of syllables, but as whole units, phrases that simply fir the well-known tune and thus automatically contain the required number of syllables.…”

Siren songs: Ritual and revolution in the Peruvian Andes

“…Nonetheless, recent scholarship on music and ritual in the Andes has shown that these traditions can also be dynamic spaces that reflect and actively take part in social change. 3 Numerous studies have explored the relationship between ritual performance and social processes as diverse as economic modernization (Romero 1990(Romero , 2001, urban migration (Turino 1993), political violence (Vasquez and Vergara 1988) and the reworking of notions of gender, identity and national belonging (Abercrombie 1992;Canepa Koch 1998;Mendoza 2000;Solomon 1994). As articulated by Zoila Mendoza, these works emphasize the "transformative" power of Andean rituals, positioning ritual performance as a "realm of experience in which central concerns of the everyday world are addressed and reworked, and in which 'arguments' are made through metaphor, metonym, and other related tropes" (2000:31).…”

Bauman's Verbal Art and the Social Organization of Attention: The Role of Reflexivity in the Aesthetics of Performance

“…Third, scholars in the tradition of symbolic anthropology (Geertz 1973;Turer 1969) have used the term reflexivity to refer to the capacity of participants in rituals or display events to creatively employ stocks of shared cultural knowledge to explore, negotiate, comment on, or transform the culture itself. Beyond these three uses of the word, the term reflexivity is also used by scholars concerned with the effect of the scholar's own historically and culturally situated subjectivity on the practice of fieldwork and ethnographic writing (see, for example, Berger 1999;Briggs 1993a;Clifford and Marcus 1986;Feld 1990;Lawless 1992;Lucy 1993;Schechner 1985:55-65;Schutz 1967:220;Solomon 1994). Such methodological reflexivity is, we believe, actually a special case of Babcock's second use of the term.…”