Music-Making, Ritual, and Gender in a Southeast Asian Hill Society

Abstract

Different modalities of music-making are different modalities for exercising social and cultural power, for shaping, challenging, and negotiating relationships of authority and domination. Who performs, who listens, who is silenced, and who may not listen are important factors in this exercise of social and symbolic power. How music-making events shape authority and power in other dimensions of social life is critical, too. Furthermore, the reach of power and authority extends into musical sound. Rhythm, pitch and scalar relationships, melodic structures, antiphony, tempo, all the formal features of performance so often abstracted to construct a music system without regard to its social genesis or dominance in a community comprise a socially constructed and sanctioned set of dispositions and memories with which persons make music (cf. Halbwachs 1980, Schutz 1977). All of which is to say that musics will be caught up inextricably in the social divisions, hierarchies, and conflicts associated with class, ethnicity, and gender. In turn, description and analysis of musical cultures and communities must at some point confront issues of social difference, power, and authority. This article will explore the ways in which music-making and gender differences mutually shape one another in a hill society in island Southeast Asia. The questions raised have to do with the role music-making plays in

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