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Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of book, the scholarly contexts within which the research is situated, and the methods by which the research for the book was conducted. It begins by giving a brief overview of existing approaches to the study of the English folk arts (e.g. socio-historical, folkloristic) before defining the book’s key terms (folk; resurgence; and performing Englishness). The chapter goes on to explain the methods and scope of the ethnographic research on which the book has been based. It then gives a broad overview of the English folk scene, itemising the key performance contexts of music and dance. The chapter ends with a short synopsis of the book’s remaining content and structure.

This chapter focuses on the creative outputs of the contemporary English folk resurgence, looking at folk artists’ growing engagements with the cultural mainstream and examining the wide variety of ways in which English folk music and dance is thus being represented, redeveloped and reinvented. After discussing the idea of the ‘mainstream’, the chapter goes on to analyse four case studies which exhibit different kinds of engagements of English folk with popular music or dance (Seth Lakeman; Jim Moray; the English ceilidh dance scene; and the Demon Barber Roadshow). It also examines the referencing of historical popular culture (e.g. Jim Moray; Bellowhead), and art-orientated folk music acts (e.g. Morris Offspring; English Acoustic Collective). The chapter concludes by arguing that the stylistic plurality illustrated by these examples is itself a semi-unifying theme of the contemporary English folk resurgence.

The conclusion reflects on how a politics of difference and belonging—and the idea of indigenous social authenticity more broadly—is negotiated by Diné citizens. Focusing on the language fluency controversy in the most recent Navajo Presidential election with Presidential Candidate Christopher C. Deschene, I address what the stakes might be in reifying social difference through the lenses of linguistic knowledge and performance, place of residence, musical taste, and phenotype. I then examine language use and vitality in Navajo language immersion schools on the Navajo Nation. Bringing together ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology and Critical Indigenous Studies, I examine the parts of Navajo identity that are either publicly celebrated or hidden from view, and I interrogate what these categories of difference mean for those that utilize—or refuse them—today.

Chapter 6 focuses on the role of the rural miniature in the early period of Béla Bartók’s career. Bartók’s essays and letters about folk music, recording technology, and nationalism demonstrate his belief that the folk music of the countryside constituted the pure and simple expression of the Hungarian soul, and he promoted its study, transcription, and arrangement as art music. The chapter offers an extended analysis of Romanian Folk Dances, to view the relation between his ethnographic research and his composition of rural miniatures. It examines the wax cylinder recordings of the original source melodies, Bartók’s transcriptions in his anthologies, manuscript sketches of Romanian Folk Dances, and professional recordings by Zoltán Székely and Joseph Szigeti of the arrangement of the work for violin and piano.

This chapter tells the story of roots music in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and also examines the shared traditions that unite music across Hispaniola. Paul Austerlitz uses ethnomusicology to argue that music performance, dance (such as merengue), and ritual remain liberatory practices, connected to a history of spirituality and resistance that began in maroon communities during the island’s early history.

The Introduction distinguishes the modern Japanese composer from the performer-composer in the sphere of Japanese traditional music. The author situates herself in terms of experience and motivation and the book in terms of ethnomusicology. The discussion of modernity in the book is framed and affordance theory established as the analytic.

The Introduction presents theoretical perspectives on the concepts of “morality,” “ethics,” and “Afropolitanism.” This chapter elucidates the social positions and existential projects that exemplify the book’s approach to ethico-moral personhood in Bamako’s Afropolitan music culture.

Chapter 1 (re)presents the city of Bamako, emphasizing representations of urban culture that portray, inscribe, and resound the moral and ethical production of space. Drawing on Mande social thought and a Lefebvrian account of social space, this chapter explores how Bamako residents experience and express the civility and wildness of everyday urbanity.

Chapter 2 thickly describes the status and identity that is at the center of this study: the “artist” and its related social and professional mode of being, artistiya (artist-ness). It presents extended reflection on what it means to be an artist in Mali in an era of postcolonial neoliberalism and globalization.

Chapter 3 observes moral and ethical tensions of collective identity and individual subjectivity in musical performance and perception. It describes how a culturally modeled and locally salient musical aesthetics audibly signifies a dialectic social structure of collectively oriented morality and individually motivated ethics among artists and their audiences.

Chapter 4 examines the Islamic voice as a morally steeped and widely deployed discursive resource in Bamako popular music. It focuses on the inter-textual and inter-subjective references to Islamic thought and practice in three distinct, though frequently overlapping genres of vocal performance: praise song, rap, and dance band lyricism.

Chapter 5 interrogates the idea of intellectual property through the shifting politics of culture in postcolonial Mali. Beginning with widespread anxieties about the social and economic value of the arts in an era of private markets and decentralized politics, it presents a local genealogy of music copyright and its criminalized corollary, piracy.

Chapter 6 considers what it means to make “Malian” music in times of national celebration and crisis. As a mode of being that continues to shape African futures, it examines how national affiliation has been mobilized musically to promote (and contest) a variety of political agendas, global and local, elite and subaltern.

The Conclusion locates the foregoing study of Bamako’s musical art world within a broader conceptual framework, in which the Afropolitan ethics of a particular music culture may register meaningfully in other places, among other communities within an urban Africa at large.

With a final contextualizing chapter, Philip V. Bohlman interprets Herder’s 1769 sea journey as a metaphor for the writings on music and nationalism, and for his sweeping influence on the history of ideas that we attribute to modernity. Dramatically leaving his post as pastor and director of religious life for the German community of Riga, Herder embarked on a sea journey that would provide him with the new experiences that would shape his approaches to anthropology, education, philosophy, religion, the universal history of humanity, and music. The 1769 sea journey, captured in the notes of an extensive journal Herder never published, acted as an ethnomusicological epiphany that would establish the encounter with folk songs lying ahead as the foundations for understanding world music.