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I. Theoretical Introduction
To me, the prefix "ethno," in Ethnomusicology, implies that we have the potential to delineate an indigenous way of thinking or representation, something fundamental about a cultural system, which can enhance our understanding of how music is related to the culture in which is it embedded. But it is also problematic: how do we identify and represent that ,something," that insight drawn from an indigenous world view or cultural system? How do we apply such an insight to music? Sometimes the potential to delineate an indigenous way of thinking appears to crystallize in fleeting moments, moments of clarity in this cultural evanescence, suggesting that our percipience may be intensified by studying moments of ambiguity and change.
In this case study I consider how the Kotas, a community of about 1,500 people who live in the Nilgiri hills of south India, make emotional sense of their ritual lives. Three sites of ambiguity and change interest me: 1) moment-to-moment subjective experiences as a large scale ceremony unfolds, 2) sites of historical reconfiguration in a ceremony, and 3) points of tension between categories and "reality."
There are three related theoretical problems. The first concerns how we understand and represent the potential for affective complexity in ritual music, what I call "emotional contour" and "emotional texture." The second is the problem of representing musical meaning in a cultural totality that may be understood as a unified whole in some respects but not in others. This steers my discussion to change, conflict, difference and heterogeneity, as well as "unity" as a cultural category. The third problem pertains to cultural categories themselves, the fragile intersection of genres as they are "lived" (Shelemay 1998:148) and as they are ideally represented in a ritual classification scheme.' How does music come to have affective significance through the agency of individuals who create, explicate, support, or transform their ritual economy?
Part of this analysis of meaning involves confronting how "ethnic genres" bear scrutiny as "analytical categories" (Ben-Amos 1976 [1969]): in particular how two fundamental, emic categories, "divinity" (devr) and "death" (tav), are reciprocally constituted with music. Is it possible, as Blacking suggests, to use "classifications that are socially accepted" (here divinity and death) even if they "seem to have little to do...