If asked to recommend a single book that conveys the magic and connective powers of indigenous Andean music as well as exemplifies prominent themes and approaches in traditional Andean studies, I might well choose this one. Through in-depth ethnographic research, Stobart has created a rich musical calendar for the Quechua-speaking community of Kalankira in northern Potosí, Bolivia. He details the range of festivals, genres, and seasonally-associated instrumental traditions--including the charango and kitarra, julajula and siku panpipes, drums, and the pinkullu and other types of vertical flutes and whistles. At its center, the book is an investigation of the intricate articulation of music making and dance with the annual cycle of small-scale agricultural production, animal husbandry, courting, and local cosmology. It is also an investigation of musical meaning explored through participant observation of performance in conjunction with the analysis of linguistic terminology and discourse about music and dance. The “poetics” in the title applies as much to Stobart’s beautiful descriptive writing as it does to his treatment of the topic. Throughout the text the author effectively cues his descriptions to forty-eight short tracks on the accompanying CD, representing the different instruments, tunings, genres, and vocal music of Kalankira, as well as Quechua narratives, and a recording of seventy llamas mating.
The book is divided into four parts. “Part I: Creating Context” provides the thematic introduction, a chapter on major cosmological tropes and concepts, and a chapter on calendars and the power of musical sound. As elsewhere in the Andes, the different instruments, and even different stringed-instrument tunings, are tightly bound to particular functions and times of year. For example, the sound of the small ten-stringed “charango in particular was said to be likely to damage the tender plants during the rainy growing season by attracting frosts and hail” (54), but frost, and hence playing the charango, was practically necessary during the dry season to make chuño (freeze-dried potatoes). Stobart goes on to explain how a youthful act of playing the charango during the wrong season might be a rebellion against traditional authority or signal identification with mestizos whose performance is not bound by seasonal constraints (62). Thus, although much of the text is bound up with orthodoxies of belief, there are moments where the reader can glimpse individual variety as well as relations between the broader Bolivian society and the people of Kalankira.
In “Part II: Guitars and Song,” chapter 4 gives more detail about seasonality and stringed instruments and rich information about the construction, decoration, tunings, performance practices, and meaning of charangos and kitarras, which are strongly associated with courtship. Chapter 5 discusses songs of courtship and marriage, “the production of people.” Stobart delves into attitudes about gender relations, sexuality, marriage, and the roles of music in these domains as well as detailed analysis of the songs and singing style (e.g., see 120). In this chapter, as elsewhere in the book, Stobart gives a good deal of weight to female perspectives. The Andeanist theme of metaphoric connections between human, animal, and agricultural fertility and reproduction is convincingly demonstrated through the analysis of songs (e.g., 120-124).
The third part of the book is organized as a musical/ceremonial calendar taking the reader through “the main ‘musical’ seasons” of the year. Here we get detail about the wind instruments and genres, as well as information about ensemble organization, composition and sources of music, and excellent description of dance choreography and its significance. Stobart is at his best when writing about the people, music, places, and events that he has experienced. Part III contains a wealth of information about a plethora of key topics: spiritual beliefs and practices, ideas about death and ancestors, ritual battles, sirinus (sirenas), community maintenance and identity, among others, as they articulate with music making.
The writing tacks back and forth from concrete description to broad-ranging symbolic analysis of events, practices, and linguistic terms. In this book, as in so many classic Andeanist ethnographies, a cigar is rarely just a cigar. Leaps of symbolic interpretation are sometimes hard to follow or seem insufficiently documented, e.g., “whereas rainy season instruments tended to be connected with the inner earth (ukhu pacha), julajula panpipes were especially associated with ‘order’ and the sky gods.” What is the basis for this interpretation? The only thing I could find was the sentences that came immediately after: “Indeed, following the long cold night of the winter solstice in a rural community near Sacaca, I once knelt facing East with a group of julajula players to welcome the sun’s return or rebirth. As the sun popped over the horizon we played a kuwla (kulwa, copla) in its honour” (146). Even when semiotic connections are well grounded historically or ethnographically, I was often left to wonder about the extent and importance of such connections in local people’s minds. The Christmas tree can be understood as an iconic sign of “rebirth” or “life” associated with the winter solstice, but how many North Americans actually think about this when they put up their trees?
Informed by recent social theory and ethnographic work, this book is--boldly and consciously--an old-fashioned ethnography. Stobart argues for and demonstrates the value of in-depth concentration on a single rural community even though he has “a sense that fieldwork in such places has become unfashionable” (9). What was problematic for me was the degree to which normative, generalized descriptions of practice and meaning dominate the text—periodically loosing sight of actual, complicated people for the forest of symbols. The author recognizes and addresses this very problem in Part IV, comprising a single short chapter. He writes,
Rather than bringing the disparate themes and arguments of this book together into a neatly unified conclusion, this final epilogue intentionally destabilizes some of the apparent certainties of earlier chapters. Although constructed with great care and commitment, these seeming certainties are, of course, no more than ethnographic illusions; they are partial, highly subjective and woven together from disparate and often idiosyncratic sources.(271)
The sense of ethnographic illusion could have been reduced if the complex subjectivities, interpretations, and idiosyncrasies of more individuals and events in Kalankira had been more fully woven in all along. This said, I intend to use this book in my courses and recommend it warmly to students and colleagues who wish to understand the powerful integration of music making and dance with subsistence activities, senses of time, spirituality, love making, and community in the Andes and beyond.
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[Review length: 1067 words • Review posted on October 31, 2007]