This chapter examines how musical performance is bound up with displays and exchanges ofsentiment in Vietnamese spirit possession rituals, known as len dong. It aims toshow how the expression of emotion is culturally mediated through ritual practice and musicalperformance by exploring the affective modalities of mediumship from new perspectives. I alsoconsider the ways in which emotional expressions in ritual practices are inflected by genderrelations to the environment and discuss how the exchange of sentimental relations (tinhcam) among musicians and between musicians and their audience is a highly prized idealduring mediumship rituals and many other traditional contexts for musical performance.

Deeply felt sentiments are mediated, shared, and expressed in mediumship practices in numerousways. The process of coming out as a medium, the special relationships mediums develop with certainspirits, the bodily experience of spirit possession, the enactment of ritual acts, divineutterances, and the music and dance performed during rituals are all invested with emotionalassociations and meanings. To explore these affective meanings, I examine the symbolic, bodily, andsocial aspects of ritual experience and performance and consider the religious framework ofmediumship as a complex system of affect. In this system, linkages between emotion, the environment,gender, and ethnicity are encoded in the sonic and mythical identities of the spirits. Throughexpressive musical performance and ritual practice, a range of emotions and particular environmentsin the natural world are related to the ethnicity and gendered characteristics of incarnatedspirits.

In this song from southern Poland, the women singing engage in a first-person narrative in whichthey position themselves discursively within a surrounding mountain landscape of the Tatra Mountainsby sending their voices into this land (see fig. 6.1). At the same time, depending on where they aresinging, they may or may not actually be placing themselves—through their singingvoices—physically into the hills and valleys that this text describes. What is thesignificance of this song and this singing within the experience of place? What is the relationshipbetween singer, landscape, and song? How is this affected by gender, age, and modernity? Thischapter addresses such questions in considering gendered musical performance among the Góraleof Podhale, Poland (map 6.1). By locating women's singing within its environment, thischapter aims to show how singing, place, and gendered identity coalesce. It also elaborates on theindividual experience of singing by examining one exceptional singer's negotiation ofgendered performance practice and her ongoing attachment to the landscape.

Performing the Law

After a rough drive along the dirt road leading away from the township of Galiwin'ku, innortheast Arnhem Land, we came into an outstation on the coast (see map 3.1). Some family memberswere sitting on their raised verandas in the shade. One of the three Yolngu women traveling in thecar gestured that they should go to a thick mangrove cluster close to the sea to gather shellfishand mud crabs. As they departed, I, along with another non-Aboriginal friend who also knew thefamily and had a long history in the region, took the opportunity to meet with one of the clanleaders. We walked toward the shoreline, where an inlet led around to a rocky headland along thewhite beach. After some general conversation, and in response to some questions about the genealogyof the area, he offered fragments of information about the ancestor who had traversed the promontoryin the distant past, establishing his clan rights and those of his kin there. I had already analyzeda range of song series in the region and knew something of the history of the ancestors in thearea.

The following ethnographic accounts of music and dance from Europe, Southeast Asia, andAustralasia examine how performances of gender, place, and emotion intersect. Ethnomusicology andanthropology have long recognized the connections between these aspects of performance, yet they areseldom analyzed together. Most recent studies have examined music in relation to either gender,place, or emotion. Instead of addressing each field of inquiry as an individual lens through whichto understand musical practices, our aim is to explore the ways in which the three elements overlap.Our volume proposes that the intersections of gender, place, and emotion generate an interplay ofperformative issues, rather than discrete, bounded areas of inquiry.

The studies presented here reveal how the gendered practices of music making are intimatelyshaped by performers' emotional engagements with place. In addition, because places feed intoperformers' imaginations, affecting gendered musical meanings and experiences, contributorsto this volume show how these elements of performance—gender, place, andemotion—intertwine in a “relationship of circularity.”“Circularity” in this sense refers to a multilayered approach in which each elementimplicates the others in a coconstitutive relationship. The process is examined from differentregions around the globe, as contributors address two key questions: How are aesthetic, emotional,and imagined relations between performers and places embodied musically? And in what ways is theperformance of emotion gendered across quotidian, ritual, and staged events?

The triple themes of Performing Gender, Place, and Emotion in Music demonstratehow important it is to see the connectedness of different concepts of embodiment. These culturallyvariable terms of physicality and spirituality reach both inwardly toward the most intimate of humansensations or emotion and outwardly to larger environments of place and space. These studiesdemonstrate how social mediation occurs in relation to each of the three concepts, shaping behaviorsand expectations of how music, among other things, both represents and constitutes the ways that weare embodied, emplaced, and “emotioned.”

These chapters evoked memories and stories from my own work. In Canadian studies, I had at onepoint become interested in assertions about the gender of the nation-state as well as its provincesor regions. I thought of various contested but evocative images, including a number ofnineteenth-century political cartoons depicting Canada as the demure maiden next to a matronly womanrepresenting Britain, for instance (unlike the masculinist Uncle Sam imagery of the United States).I recalled Elspeth Probyn's argument that Quebec's mode of “outsidebelonging” positions it as gay within Canadian identity constructs, an argument thatchallenges the heterosexist “broken marriage” imagery that she saw in theprereferendum period of the early 1990s. Ian McKay's contention that Nova Scotia was imagedin the mid-twentieth century as a region of hardy males whose realm was the sea also came to mind.These images and interpretations are arguably strategic and intentional assertions—notnecessarily discursive formations that are culturally reinscribed and shared by large numbers ofpeople.

In Bali the spiritual world is mapped onto the physical landscape of the island, connectingspecific emotional reactions to places based on spiritual understandings about them that begin at avery early age. One of the ways in which children learn about their world and how to perceive andreact to their island is through theatrical performance. In this chapter I describe how childrenexpress this connection to the landscape through the performance of Barong (a traditional danceperformance that depicts a mythical, masked creature). The performance embodies a complexinterrelationship among emotions associated with the Balinese spirit world, their physicalsurroundings, and their gendered participation in Balinese society (map 2.1).

The term “Barong” generally refers to a male deity within the Bali-Hindu religion,represented as a mythical beast animated by two male dancers. Barong has three manifestations: amask, a creature, and a dance. The formidable mask represents an animal, and the dancers performinside a shell covered with various layers of fur and cloth that forms his elongated body. Every 210days, during the Balinese New Year celebrations (Galungan and Kuningan), two dancers who make up thefour-legged Barong perform in villages. Accompanied by a troupe of musicians performing in a gamelanensemble, Barong roams the streets until he is invited by someone to dance outside their house orbusiness to ward off evil spirits at this auspicious time of the new year.

This chapter examines the relationships between choral singing, gender, and emotion in theLutheran Australian Aboriginal community of Hopevale, northern Queensland (map 4.1). It is based onapplied ethnomusicological research undertaken in collaboration with the Hopevale community between2004 and 2005. During this period I worked as a choral music facilitator, conducting the HopevaleCommunity Choir (see fig. 4.1) and occasionally teaching music at the Hopevale state primary school.I developed an ethnographically informed approach to choral facilitation that incorporatedHopevalian understandings of musical preferences and performance aesthetics and what it means to“sing in a choir.” Through conducting, singing, and socializing with the HopevaleCommunity Choir, I began to question how emotional responses to choral singing in Hopevale areinfluenced by gender and place. In this chapter I explore whether contemporary Lutheran choralsinging can strengthen the formation of a specifically Lutheran, Hopevalian identity or whetherchanges in musical preferences and the decline of active church-based Christian worship mean thathymnody is no longer as important in sustaining local identities as it once was.

In particular, I examine how the relative absence of young men from the community choir, and fromthe community more generally, can affect emotional responses to choral hymn singing of Hopevalianchoral singers and choir audiences. I do so through an analysis of a performance given by the almostentirely female Hopevale Community Choir in the Lotus Glen men's correctional facility inMareeba, northern Queensland.

Performing emotions holds a particular niche in the field of intimate cultural production.Inasmuch as emotions occupy both private encounters and public disclosure, their performance on thecommercial stage mixes these encounters and disclosures within processes of imaging andcommodification. Performing emotions in particular ways can be a form of branding—and thusselling—a singer or a genre in East Asia, as elsewhere. Whole swaths of song may be noted fortheir sentimentality; within particular popular music genres in East Asia individual singers may benoted for their tears. Linking tears to women follows gendered expectations in East Asia ofsentimentality and excess. Performing hyperemotions then takes on added meaning when the singer is aforeign woman. These conditions add issues of race, nation, and place to the already genderedperforming stage.

In this chapter I examine performing emotions as part of branding the career and fandom in Japanof Korean female singer Kim Yonja. Kim sings a variety of songs, but specializes inenka, a sentimental genre appealing primarily to older audiences and known in Japanas expressive of the heart and soul of the nation. To understand the ironies embedded within thecontext of a Korean female singer performing enka more fully, one needs to further unpack theiconicity of this type of song. Enka comprises a genre of popular ballad known asnaki-bushi (crying song), evoking tears through tropes of longing: departed lovers,rural hometowns, and memories of mothers.

This chapter discusses how Sámi vocal genres can be interpreted in relation to traditionalcosmologies, in particular to the goddesses. The Sámi are recognized as an indigenous peopleliving in four countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia). Such recognition is a result of theindigenous movement of the 1960s onward in which the revival of joik (a traditionalSámi vocal genre) was crucial in fostering a pan-Sámi indigenous sensibility. Althoughjoik continues to play a defining role in representing a pan-Sámi political identity, it isnot widespread across the region now known as Sápmi, the land of the Sámi (map 8.1).Among the Skolt Sámi in the eastern regions of Sápmi, the traditional vocal genre isthe leu'dd—often a narrative about an individual, which can beunderstood as a form of oral history. Leu'dd is regarded as a disappearing vocal tradition,in contrast to joik, which continues to be preserved, transformed, and recreated for moderncontexts.

Skolt Sámi have been forcibly relocated because of wars, Cold War military policy, andhydroelectric projects. Male singers have been killed by reindeer poachers, by alcohol abuse, or onmilitary frontlines. The most recent recording project, undertaken in the mid-1990s, focuses,therefore, on female singers, for whom the life histories narrated in leu'dd often involveexpressing distressing and overwhelming emotions. In discussing both joik and leu'dd toexplore gender, place, and constructions of pan-Sáminess, this chapter focuses on femalesingers, Sámi cosmologies, and Sámi feminist theorization.

This chapter examines how issues of place and gender, specific to German East Bavaria, aremediated through song imagery. Taking the arena of choral music as a locus of social and musicalproduction, I also analyze how singers' musical narratives and memories of music makingembody and reflect their emotional relationships with this region. The physical and emotionaleffects of singing raise questions about differences between male and female German choral singersas they narrate their bodily experiences of music making. I ask, how do gender roles determine maleand female experiences of singing in a choir and to what extent does singing offer an experiencecapable of transcending the constraints of gendered expectations?

This analysis is based on ethnographic research conducted with an amateur choir in East Bavariabetween 2004 and 2005. Bavaria has a distinct regional identity within Germany, characterized by itsown dialect, a conservative government, the predominance of the Catholic Church, and the strength oflocal customs and tradition. The market town of Deggendorf in East Bavaria is known as the gatewayto the Bavarian Forest. Its inhabitants express a strong sense of belonging and pride about thearea, which they refer to as Heimat (home). The concept of Heimat and theassociations it evokes are central to understanding how a sense of belonging emerges in this region.Peter Blickle asserts that Heimat is the outcome of living in small communities where“everything in the locality is known.”