An indispensable study of the music of Altai-Sayan peoples

Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.

Carole Pegg is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and senior researcher at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities.

Acknowledgments

Languages, Transliteration, Translation

Companion Website

Part One: Emplacement, Ontologies, Bodies

Introduction

1. Performative Bodies

Part Two: Sounding Middle Worlds

2. Human Communities

3. Spirit Actors, Spirit Places, Nomadic Landscapes

4. Ancestors and Archaeology

Part Three: Attuning to Upper and Lower Worlds

5. The White Way

6. With-Spirit Epic Performer

7. Shamanic Roads

Coda

Appendix

Participants

Notes

Glossary

References

Index