Description - Songs and Gifts at the Frontier by Jose S. Buenconsejo
In the search of the social meaning of song, Songs and Gifts at the Frontier connects the performativity of ritual song to important cultural domains such as political economy and history. Song, it is argued, expresses notions of sociability, personhood, and subjectivity; it is more intelligible when understood as constitutive of material practices of everyday-life and local histories. Examining the case of the Agusan Manobo song, the author demonstrates the difference between the encoded subjectivity in song that is a result of a mode of exchange where resources are distributed or shared equally to that which is attendant to the desire of possessing and accumulating them. In the former, the notion of personhood articulates a moral economy that stipulates the obligation to recognize the affinity between persons who have mutual, reciprocal relationships. In the latter, this self-other intersubjectivity is eroded due to the dominant settler hegemony and its attendant material practices and asymmetrical social relations. Jos? S.
Buenconsejo argues that song in the egalitarian moral economy is sacrificial, that is, it articulates the act of sharing in which performativity is akin to movements or flows of binding and unbinding of presences, affinity and estrangement, life and death that so characterize interpersonal relationships, nature, and social life.
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