Seize the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance - Tapa dura

"I found this work to be tremendously exhilarating, precisely because it provides such a clear window on another culture, and on the entire process by which 'we' and 'they' mutually construct our identities in the modern world."--Scott DeVeaux, University of Virginia"In my view, the book offers a terrific amount of new ethnographic material on 'pygmy' culture. It is a wonderful example of a new type of ethnographic research that is very significant for musical studies."--David Locke, Tufts University"The writing strategy is such that [readers are] realistically led through Kisliuk's fieldwork, and we learn about the BaAka slowly, as she does....Kisliuk succeeds in presenting the BaAka people she met as real, complex, multifaceted individuals."--Thomas Turino, University of Illinois

"Pygmy Music" has interested the ethnomusicological imagination in Europe and America for decades. This volume addresses the music and dance performance among the BaAka forest people of Bagandou, Central African Republic from a participatory humanistic perspective. Based on the author's ethnographic research from 1986 through 1995, it presents and analyzes songs, drum rhythms, dance movements and their social context. Theoretical issues addressed include gender relations, colonialism and social politics.