Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal

Anna Marie Stirr

Sep 2017 · Oxford University Press

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An ethnographic study of music, performance, migration, and circulation, Singing Across Divides examines how forms of love and intimacy are linked to changing conceptions of political solidarity and forms of belonging, through the lens of Nepali dohori song. The book describes dohori: improvised, dialogic singing, in which a witty repartee of exchanges is based on poetic couplets with a fixed rhyme scheme, often backed by instrumental music and accompanying dance, performed between men and women, with a primary focus on romantic love. The book tells the story of dohori's relationship with changing ideas of Nepal as a nation-state, and how different nationalist concepts of unity have incorporated marginality, in the intersectional arenas of caste, indigeneity, class, gender, and regional identity. Dohori gets at the heart of tensions around ethnic, caste, and gender difference, as it promotes potentially destabilizing musical and poetic interactions, love, sex, and marriage across these social divides. In the aftermath of Nepal's ten-year civil war, changing political realities, increased migration, and circulation of people, media and practices are redefining concepts of appropriate intimate relationships and their associated systems of exchange. Through multi-sited ethnography of performances, media production, circulation, reception, and the daily lives of performers and fans in Nepal and the UK, Singing Across Divides examines how people use dohori to challenge (and uphold) social categories, while also creating affective solidarities.

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Anna Stirr is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is an ethnomusicologist specializing in music of the Himalayan region. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and has been part of music, anthropology, and Asian Studies departments at Oxford University and Leiden University. She is a performer as well as a scholar of lok dohori, and sings and plays several instruments. She is the 2016 recipient of the Ali Miyan Prize in Folklore for her research and performance of Nepali folk music.