Beautifully organized, carefully considered, and bursting with thought-provoking original research, this book gathers eleven well-shaped essays on four major themes in the study of how culture is involved in the making of both individual and collective identities. This is a terrific collection of essays, and its introduction, as well as its intuitively sensible organization, make it accessible and useful in many different contexts.- Celia Applegate, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University.''Musical scholarship has long engaged the ways in which societies articulate the distinctions between self and other, but this volume brings a new generation of voices to reflect on a subject that is even more important in a world shaped by global processes of encounter and exchange. The perspectives of these new voices multiply as they draw upon the multiple disciplines of musical scholarship and the ancillary fields of historical, anthropological, and political inquiry. The experiences we witness in the pages of the volume reflect the roles of insiders as well as outsiders, the selfness of the local as well as the otherness of the global. The very nature of the musical realm itself comes under scrutiny, with questions posed about the centrality of music no less than the contingency of the social, the political, and the historical.''- Philip V.

Bohlman, Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago.