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Utilizing vignettes from the autobiographical production, Sadhana, this chapter examines diverse influences informing the history of kathak, the sociohistorical context in which Pandit Chitresh Das was trained, and his subsequent artistic development. At the end of the British colonial period, his parents founded Nritya Bharati, one of India’s early dance institutions; however, they determined their son would be trained in the traditional guru-disciple system of pedagogy. Pandit Das’s guru, Pandit Ram Narayan Mishra, navigated kathak’s shifting social environment by teaching women from the courtesan community and children from middle- and upper-class families. This chapter examines ideals surrounding the guru-disciple tradition, and ways Pandit Das further adapted the model provided by his own guru in response to increasingly changing contexts for dance transmission in the United States.

This chapter highlights key differences between Tokyo and Nagano which explain why the 1998 Games came to be seen as a turning point and fostered the “normalization” of disability sports in Japan. It situates the Games in their larger sociohistorical context in order to understand the differences apparent in Nagano and their consequent impacts. It also reviews how the 1998 Winter Paralympics were organized and held against a backdrop of increased attention to disability-related issues. The chapter refers to Japan's deep engagement in several international disability awareness and rights programs that linked to the United Nations. It discusses the 1990s in Japan, which was marked by significant changes in national activism, policies, and approaches related to disability.

This chapter focuses on watershed moments in the evolution of the Rastafari in order to provide sociohistorical context, to illustrate instances of disruption in their ethnogenesis, as well as to situate personal identity formation within the context of ethnogenesis. By drawing our attention to the birth and evolution of a people, the ethnogenesis approach offers us the opportunity to delve into the dynamics of collective identity formation, especially the social interactions, conflict, disruptions, and unanticipated outcomes involved. Thus, the chapter combines the focus on ethnogenesis with the concepts of “perturbation” and “self-organization,” in order to emphasize the contingency, unpredictability, and increasing complexity involved in Rastafari ethnogenesis.

This volume, the second to be published in a four-volume series, examines compositions by eight composers from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries. The introductory chapter outlines the organization of the volume and the goals of the project—to celebrate outstanding music composed by women by according it the same scholarly attention devoted to music by men; to create a critical mass of scholarship that will stimulate new analytical research and bring it into the mainstream of music theoretical discourse; and to bring to readers’ attention “new” repertoire that is rewarding to performer, listener, and scholar. Distinctions are noted between the composers, particularly in terms of the sociohistorical contexts in which they created their music. Questions of genre and scale are also discussed.