Conference: Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy

Cultural Sustainabilities is driven by the proposition that environmental and human sustainability are inextricably linked. Leading social scientists, humanists, and activists will convene to address the premise that reversing or ameliorating the negative impacts of human behavior on the globe’s environments is at its core a human cultural question. Topics considered include media, language, singing, fandom, indigeneity, trauma, and trash. The conference honors the work of the keynote speaker, Jeff Todd Titon.

Keynote Address by Jeff Todd Titon (Ethnomusicology, emeritus, Brown University), “Toward a Sound Ecology,” on Friday, May 25, 3:30 PM.

Free and open to the public.

EVENT SCHEDULE

Thursday, May 24

7 PM Film Screening: Powerhouse for God (57 minutes)
Followed by Q&A with Barry Dornfeld (Documentary Filmmaker) and Jeff Todd Titon (Brown University), moderated by Janet Walker (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) and Timothy J. Cooley (Music, UCSB)

Related Events: KCSB-FM & CISM Present:
Concert and Roundtable Workshop with Mark Holser, Wobbly, and Irene Moon
http://www.music.ucsb.edu/cism/news/event/321
Roundtable 2 PM, Concert 8 PM

Friday, May 25

8:30 AM Coffee and pastries (open to all attendees)

9:00 Opening Remarks, TIMOTHY J. COOLEY (Music, UCSB)

9:15-10:45 Panel 1: Thinking, Writing, Music, and Media about Sustainability
Chair: MARY HANCOCK (Anthropology and History, UCSB)

• MARY HUFFORD (Visiting Professor of Folklore, UC Berkeley)

“Dialogues All the Way Down: Conversational Genres as Matrices of Cultural and Ecological Renewal”

• AARON S. ALLEN (School of Music and Environmental & Sustainability Studies, UNCG)

“Sounding Sustainable; or, The Challenge of Sustainability”

• BARRY DORNFELD (Documentary Filmmaker, Center for Applied Research)

“Music, Media, and Mediation”

11-12:30 Panel 2: Musics, Media, and Anthropogenic Change

Chair: RAVI PARASHAR (Music Studies undergraduate, UCSB)

• DANIEL CAVICCHI (American studies, Rhode Island School of Design)

“Fandom’s Remix: Popular Music, Participation, and Sustainability”

• NANCY GUY (Ethnomusicology, UCSD)

“Garbage Truck Music and Sustainability in Contemporary Taiwan: From Cockroaches to Beethoven and Beyond”

• JOSHUA TUCKER (Ethnomusicology, Brown University)

“Sustaining Indigenous Sounds: Music Broadcasting and Cultural Vitalization in Highland Peru”

12:30-1:30 Lunch, Crowell Reading Room (open to all attendees)

1:30-3:00 Panel 3: Responding to Anthropogenic Change

Chair: DAVID N. PELLOW (Environmental Studies, UCSB)

• JENNIFER POST, virtual presentation (Ethnomusicology, University of Arizona)

“Climate Change, Mobile Pastoralism, and Cultural Heritage in Western Mongolia”

• MARK F. DEWITT (Ethnomusicology, University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

“Singing for La Mêche Perdue: Reconciling Economic, Environmental, and Cultural Imperatives in Louisiana”

• SUSAN HURLEY-GLOWA (Ethnomusicology, UT Rio Grande Valley)

“Alaska Native Ways of Knowing and the Sustenance of Musical Communities in an Ailing Petrostate”

3-3:30 Coffee Break, Crowell Reading Room (open to all attendees)

3:30-4:45 Keynote Address

• JEFF TODD TITON (Ethnomusicology, Brown, emeritus)

“Toward a Sound Ecology”

4:45-6:00 Reception (open to all attendees)

Saturday, May 26

9:30-11:30 Panel 4: Voice, Trauma, Resilience, and Advocacy

Chair: NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM (Theater and Dance, UCSB)

• JEFFREY A. SUMMIT (Ethnomusicology, Tufts University)

“Digital Technology, Chanting Torah, and the Sustainability of Tradition”

• ROSHAN SAMTANI (Ethnomusicology, University Studies Abroad Consortium, Stanford University, Madrid)

“The Fiesta de la Buleria of Jerez de La Frontera: Music, Identity, and the Construction of Heritage”

• MARGARITA MAZO (Cognitive Ethnomusicology, Ohio State, emerita)

“Lament in the Heart. Literally”

• MICHELLE KISLIUK (Ethnomusicology and Performance Studies, UVa)

“Singing in a State of Emergency: Storytelling and Listening as Medium and Message”

11:45 Concluding Remarks and Discussion

Chair: ALEXANDER KARVELAS (Ethnomusicology graduate student, UCSB)

• TIMOTHY J. COOLEY (Music, UCSB)
• RUTH HELLIER-TINOCO (Performing Arts, UCSB)

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“Performing Sustainability,” Installation by UCSB undergraduate students
facilitated by RUTH HELLIER-TINOCO (Performing Arts, UCSB)

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Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, College of Letters & Science, Humanities and Fine Arts, The Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, and the Departments of Music, Environmental Studies, and Film & Media Studies.

Conference Organizers

TIMOTHY J. COOLEY, Ethnomusicology, UCSB
RUTH HELLIER-TINOCO (Performing Arts, UCSB)

Collaborators

MARY HANCOCK, Anthropology and History, UCSB
ALEXANDER KARVELAS, Ethnomusicolgy, UCSB
DAVID PELLOW, Environmental Studies, UCSB
JANET WALKER, Film and Media Studies, UCSB

Participant Biographies

Aaron S. Allen is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is also the director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he received the Ph.D. from Harvard with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Italian reception of Beethoven. His B.A. in music and B.S. in environmental studies are from Tulane University.  He is co-editor with Kevin Dawe of the collection Current Directions in Ecomusicology (Routledge 2016).

Ninotchka Bennahum is Professor of Theater and Dance at UCSB. Her areas of teaching and research include Dance Studies and Performance Studies, corporeality, embodiment and feminist historiographies of flamenco, ballet and contemporary performance. She is the author of two books: Antonia Mercé, ‘La Argentina: Flamenco & the Spanish Avant-Garde (2000), and Carmen, a Gypsy Geography (2013), She has co-authored two global dance anthologies and co-curated three exhibitions with accompanying books. In 2017, she was awarded the Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center. In 2018, she was named a Research Fellow at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Daniel Cavicchi is Associate Provost for Research|Global|Practice at Rhode Island School of Design. He is author of Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum and Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans, and co-editor of My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life. His public work has included curricula for Experience Music Project and PBS; Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom, the inaugural special exhibit for the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles; and the Witness Tree Project, a history and design curriculum with the National Park Service.

Timothy J. Cooley is Professor of Ethnomusicology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He teaches courses on vernacular and popular musics in Central European and the USA. His edited volume, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 1997 and 2nd edition 2008), is a standard text for students of ethnomusicology. His second book, Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians (Indiana 2005), won the 2006 Orbis Prize for Polish Studies. Cooley’s most recent book, Surfing about Music (UC Press 2014), considers how surfers musically express their ideas about surfing, and how surfing as a sport and lifestyle is represented in popular culture.

Mark F. DeWitt is author of Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). He holds the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he directs an undergraduate curriculum and degree program in traditional music, especially Cajun and Creole French music. He completed his doctoral studies at U.C. Berkeley in ethnomusicology, and as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he majored in urban planning, concentrating in energy and environmental policy.

Barry Dornfeld is an organizational consultant, an ethnographer of communication, and a documentary filmmaker with a long-standing interest in music and expressive culture. His documentary work includes: “Eatala: A Life in Klezmer,” “Gandy Dancers,” portraying the expressive culture and history of African-American railroad workers in the US, and broadcast nationally on PBS, and “Powerhouse for God,” made with Jeff Titon and Tom Rankin. A principal at CFAR, Inc., he consults on organizational culture, change, and collaboration. Barry has a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, and has published articles and a book about social capital, digital media and public television. His most recent book, The Moment You Can’t Ignore, co-authored with Mal O’Connor, was published by PublicAffairs Books in 2014.

Nancy Guy is an ethnomusicologist whose broad interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese operas), music and politics, and the ecocritical study of music. Her first book Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005) won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and was also named an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2006” by Choice. Guy’s second book, The Magic of Beverly Sills, focuses on the artistry and appeal of the beloved American coloratura soprano, and was published by University of Illinois Press in 2015. Guy is a Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Mary Hancock is a cultural anthropologist and historian of modern South Asia, with a special interest in urban South India. At UCSB, she holds joint appointments in the departments of Anthropology and History. Her first book, Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (Westview, 1999) dealt with gender, class and nationalism. Her more recent book, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai (Indiana, 2008), explores issues of public memory, the state, and urban space, historically and in the present-day. Her new research involves the study of evangelical Christian media and its role in missionary practice.

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (PhD) is a scholar-creative artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She focuses on experimental performance-making, the politics~poetics of performance in Mexico, embodied vocality and community arts, engaging disciplines of performance studies, ethnomusicology and music studies, critical dance and theatre studies, history and feminist studies. Publications include: Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance; Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity; and Performing palimpsest bodies & postmemory theatre experiments in Mexico (forthcoming, Intellect). She is editor of the multidisciplinary journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos.

Mary Hufford has worked over the past three decades in government, academic, and non-profit sectors. As folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (1982-2002) she led regional team fieldwork projects in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the southern West Virginia coalfields. From 2002-2012, she served on the graduate faculty of folklore and folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, directing the Center for Folklore and Ethnography from 2002 to 2008. She holds an appointment as Senior Research Scientist with the Appalachian Studies Program of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society and a Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, editor of Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Culture, and numerous monographs and articles on folklore and the environment. For a complete list of her downloadable publications go to: http://vt.academia.edu/MaryHufford

Susan Hurley-Glowa is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Brown University. In 2007, she moved to Alaska with her family, where she taught music and played horn in local ensembles. In 2011, she began teaching musicology and applied horn at the University of Texas Brownsville, now UTRGV. Since then, she commutes between Texas and Alaska. Her research interests include Luso African, Latin American, and Alaskan music cultures. She has published numerous articles and a documentary film on Cape Verdean music cultures, and hosts a radio show on 88FM, Rio Grande Valley Public Radio.

Alexander Karvelas is a graduate student of ethnomusicology at the University of Califorinia, Santa Barbara. He focuses on the intersections of music, sound, and environment, approaching the study of sound as both shaped by and shaping human relationships with more-than-human forms. His research is guided by his experience in and commitment to sustainable agriculture, permaculture, and rewilding projects as well as by his musical practices.

Michelle Kisliuk, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. Integrating theory and practice, her research specializations include the music, dance, daily life, and cultural politics of forest people (BaAka) in the Central African Republic. Her essays have appeared in collections including Theorizing Sound Writing (Wesleyan University Press), Teaching Performance Studies (University of Southern Illinois Press), Performing Ethnomusicology (University of California Press) Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press), and Music and Gender (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press) won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award.

Margarita Mazo, Professor Emerita at the Ohio State University, is internationally known for her research and publications on Russian music. She published widely on music making in Russian villages, music in cognate communities in Russia and the U.S., emotion and vocal expression, lament as coping in grief, and also on Igor Stravinsky. She is currently completing a project in cognitive ethnomusicology on the interaction of cultural experience and affective heart responses to laments. She is the founder of the programs in ethnomusicology and cognitive ethnomusicology at the Ohio State University. Prior to OSU she taught at Harvard University and St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Ravi Parashar is a undergraduate music studies student at UCSB. He has worked with several start-up companies in the fields of biological and engineering sciences. He is the current COO of Abitcus Institute LLC, a company focusing on UAV and Blockchain technologies. Ravi is graduating this quarter and will be consulting for a UAV company.

David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His teaching and research focus on environmental and ecological justice in the U.S. and globally. He has served on the Boards of Directors for the Center for Urban Transformation, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers.

Jennifer C. Post is an ethnomusicologist with recent research experience in the music and musical instruments of Central Asia and the Turkic world. Her current fieldwork in Mongolia considers the impact of social, economic and ecological change on musical production of Mongolian Kazakh mobile pastoral herders. Published and forthcoming articles address music in connection with repatriation, traditional ecological knowledge, cultural and biological sustainability, and musical instrument production and use. She has taught at Middlebury College in Vermont and the New Zealand School of Music and is currently Lecturer at the School of Music, University of Arizona and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

Roshan Samtani is an ethnomusicologist specializing in flamenco history and guitar performance. He earned a Ph.D at Brown University (Rhode Island, U.S.A.). He currently teaches the history of flamenco at the University Studies Abroad Consortium (Madrid) and has recently completed a book entitled Exploring Music and Society: Understanding Flamenco.

Jeffrey A. Summit, Ph.D. holds the appointment of Research Professor in the Department of Music and Judaic Studies at Tufts University, where he also serves as rabbi and Neubauer Executive Director of Tufts Hillel. He is the author of The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship (OUP) and Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (OUP, forthcoming 2016). His CD Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) was nominated for a GRAMMY award. His CD with video Delicious Peace: Coffee, Music and Interfaith Harmony in Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) was awarded Best World Music CD by the Independent Music Awards.

Jeff Todd Titon is emeritus professor of ethnomusicology at Brown University, a Fellow of the American Folklore Society, and part-time resident of Maine. Several of his scholarly essays may be found at https://brown.academia.edu/JeffToddTiton. He is recognized for developing and practicing collaborative ethnographic field research based in reciprocity and friendship. He was the first to propose that musical cultures could be understood as ecosystems (Worlds of Music 1984) and has more recently developed an ecological approach to cultural and musical sustainability.

Joshua Tucker is Dean’s Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, and the author of Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru. His work, which has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focuses largely on the social politics of popular music in Latin America. His current research centers on the intersection between indigenous activism, acoustic ecology, and instrument making among Quechua-speaking musicians in the southern Andes.

Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A specialist in documentary film, trauma and memory, and media and environment, her six books include Trauma Cinema (University of California Press, 2005), Documentary Testimonies: (with Bhaskar Sarkar, Routledge, 2010), and, most recently, Sustainable Media (with Nicole Starosielski, Routledge, 2016). She co-founded the Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and last May co-organized with three colleagues, several dozen UCSB stakeholders, and members of the local Chumash community a four day event entitled Water Is Life: Standing with Standing Rock, https://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/research/democracy/water-life-standing-standing-rock/. With several other UC Santa Barbara colleagues, Walker is the recipient of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant for a yearlong project with many campus and public events to be held in 2018-19. Her current research involves the development of a spatial analytic for the study of documentary film and other geolocational technologies in the context of environmental justice.

Presenter Abstracts

AARON S. ALLEN
Sounding Sustainable; or, The Challenge of Sustainability
This critique of sustainability is intended to improve cultural sustainability advocacy in ecomusicology, sound studies, and music. The idea of sustainability is expanded in four ways: first, by acknowledging the challenge of sustainability, getting past basic meanings of “endure,” and using sustainability more robustly in its meanings of “change”; second, by arguing for the foundational role of nature / environmental studies; third, by understanding sustainability as a lens rather than a goal, noun, or verb; and fourth, by arguing for aesthetics as an important addition to three-part sustainability theories. Through the lens of a change-oriented, environment-based sustainability, music and sound studies scholars can demonstrate how listeners and musicians value sounds and therefore cultural actions that exist in ethically charged contexts.

DANIEL CAVICCHI
Fandom’s Remix: Popular Music, Participation, and Sustainability
Environmentalists rarely talk about popular culture, associating it more with the excesses of “throwaway living” than with sustainability’s custodial sensibilities. There is some truth to this skepticism. However, that doesn’t mean that the popular can never be associated with sustainable living. This chapter explores the complexities of fan culture, which resituates capitalist consumption to sustain other kinds of meaningful connection and attachment. Through collecting and tourism, fans extend musical encounter; with concert-going and narrative, fans create communal sensibility. Combined with participatory media practices that provide alternatives to the established music business, fandom reframes popular culture’s potential in sustainability debates.

MARK F. DEWITT
Singing for la mêche perdue: Reconciling Economic, Environmental, and Cultural Imperatives in Louisiana
This chapter examines protest songs written in response to two environmental crises, the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the long-term coastal erosion of Louisiana’s wetlands. It concludes that these songs have been ineffective in changing attitudes and behaviors deleterious to the environment and proposes some reasons why this might be so, including self-censorship, the substantial financial and social capital of the oil industry in the region, and (like other case studies in this volume) a disconnect between cultural sustainability and environmental sustainability. Songwriters employ various perspectives including empathy for wildlife, environmental justice for workers and residents whose lives and health have been affected, and one in protest on behalf of the oil industry.

BARRY DORNFELD
Music, Media, and Mediation
This chapter considers ethnomusicology’s relationship to media as a fundamental tool for cultural representation. It draws a circuitous line from Robert Flaherty’s encounter with the Inuit people through Titon’s work on American cultural communities to indigenous media makers’ mediated performances, exploring how ethnomusicologists and ethnographic filmmakers embrace media’s power to document, analyze, distribute, and sustain musical experience across culture and through time. These mediators work between the worlds of academic scholarship and the public sphere, and navigate the duality of face-to-face experience in real time against the capturing of musical culture in enduring and accessible ethnographic media in an increasingly mediated world.

NANCY GUY
Garbage Truck Music and Sustainability in Contemporary Taiwan: From Cockroaches to Beethoven and Beyond
Garbage in Taiwan is at the center of a musical assemblage that resonates beyond the waste collection soundscape. Taiwanese garbage trucks are musical: Badarzewska’s Maiden’s Prayer or Beethoven’s Für Elise announce the brigade’s arrival at designated times and pick up locations. Neighbors stream into the street for a turn at depositing their presorted waste into the proper receptacles. Taiwan’s semi-tropical climate combined with a densely situated human population, and the presence of well established rat and cockroach populations, combine to make garbage management a matter of daily urgency. This chapter takes Taiwan’s pop music, primarily Mandopop, from the early 1980s through the mid 2010s as evidence of ways in which everyday practices aimed at dealing sustainably with household waste have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities.

MARY HUFFORD
Dialogues All the Way Down: Conversational Genres as Matrices of Cultural and Ecological Renewal
Aldo Leopold’s notion of the land ethic remains one of the clearest articulations of culture as the driver of ecological sustainability. Noting that ecological field sciences have long relied on communication with members of host communities, this chapter argues that what is needed is reflexive participation in the forms of communication that constitute and renew places. Using examples of speech genres drawn from story-dominated conversations among participants in a community-based science monitoring project, this chapter shows that conversational genres are interactional routines that function in multiple ways. Lending ourselves to such interactional routines, we consent to our initiation into worlds in common for which we may now co-exist, often well beyond the duration of conversations that are anything but beside the point.

SUSAN HURLEY-GLOWA
Alaska Native Ways of Knowing and the Sustenance of Musical Communities in an Ailing Petrostate
Alaskans are experiencing rapid economic, cultural, and ecological change as a result of declining oil revenue and anthropogenic climate change. This chapter compares the relative resilience of the Fairbanks Festival of Native Arts, an annual indigenous arts celebration, and the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, a Western art music ensemble housed at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The Festival of Native Arts has thrived since the 1970s by sustaining Alaska Native traditions while embracing new performance ideas, a resilience strategy with deep cultural roots based in indigenous knowledge. In contrast, the Western art music ensemble’s high level of specialization, cost, declining audience, and colonial legacy call its future into question, particularly when viewed from the perspective of cultural equity and the distribution of limited resources.

MICHELLE KISLIUK
Singing in a State of Emergency: Storytelling and Listening as Medium and Message
This essay seeks new ways to dismantle barriers between areas of study, practice, and politics, seeking the language and the spaces of imagination within which we can take action. Looking at polyphonic, poly-social musical practices developed by BaAka from Central African Republic, this essay asks how these practices matter to our collective future. What key role might nonfiction poetic narrative storytelling play in spreading knowledge of ecologically sustainable cultural practices? BaAka people have developed sustainable practices, knowing how to sing, dance, and live with the forest and with each other. This essay asks how what they know might be shared through stories about learning and about living, challenging the ever-expanding borders between previously separated realms of personal and intersocial life, the creative, and the scholarly.

MARGARITA MAZO
Lament in the Heart. Literally
This chapter considers the funeral lament as an integral part of larger adaptive process regulating emotions. Sustainability of the lament is understood here in the spirit of Jeff Titon’s pioneering approach to sustainability of music cultures. For centuries, the lament retained its capacity to change not only in response to extremely emotional situations and life transformations, but also as a direct channel of their productive management. Ethnographic studies of the lament demonstrate its role both in expressing emotions of grief and in mobilizing social support. By juxtaposing earlier ethnographic studies with new empirical research on the affective heart responses to lament, this chapter offers insight into the lament’s role in preventing the physical and cognitive breakdown of the grief-stricken body and thus in sustaining human life.

JENNIFER C. POST
Climate Change, Mobile Pastoralism, and Cultural Heritage in Western Mongolia
This chapter addresses the impact of climate change on the cultural production of Kazakh mobile pastoral herders in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia. It highlights the body of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) that herders express in their music, instruments, textiles, and heritage actions such as work patterns and social gatherings. Extreme weather events, loss of water sources, and desertification have deeply impacted herders and this is expressed in their cultural forms. The study engages with rangeland and climate science and draws on the author’s fieldwork with Kazakh herders in Mongolia.

ROSHAN SAMTANI
The Fiesta de la Buleria of Jerez de La Frontera: Music, Identity, and the Construction of Heritage
The construction of cultural heritage, together with its maintenance, sustainability, and adaptation, is an area of perennial interest to social scientists. This chapter documents and describes the Fiesta de La Buleria, an annual event celebrated in the city of Jerez de La Frontera, Spain. The fiesta, an invented tradition that commenced in 1967, is dedicated to the buleria, a highly-cherished song-form in the flamenco repertoire. Drawing on perspectives from semiotics, the chapter addresses the question of how musical sounds signify, essential to an understanding of the construction of meaning, and thus to a deeper comprehension of music and identity. In the course of the discussion, this chapter employs the fiesta as a framework to illustrate how the environment, expressive culture, identity, and economics felicitously come together through adaptive management, thereby fostering the sustainability of an eco-system of culture.

JEFFREY A. SUMMIT
Digital Technology, Chanting Torah, and the Sustainability of Tradition
This chapter examines strategies where individual Jews employ digital technology to sustain and transmit musical traditions of Torah and haftarah trope, a core element of contemporary Jewish worship. While these examples focus more on personal agency than institutional sustainability, they underscore new approaches to integrating meaningful ritual into the lives of these liberal Jews. Even as certain contemporary Jews have moved away from traditional structures of learning and authority—synagogues, religious schools, rabbis, and cantors—they have developed and supported innovative means to transmit the music performance of biblical chant used in bar/bat mitzvah celebrations in a way that sustains traditional rituals while empowering their personal style of Jewish expression and identity.

JEFF TODD TITON
Toward a Sound Ecology
The problem of sustainability won’t be solved by science and engineering alone, nor by ethics or economics. Problem and solution both rest on how the environment, including its living beings, is experienced and known. Sound-worlds offer an opportunity to experience the presence of an intersubjective connection among beings, one that differs from our usual experiences with objects and texts. Sound connections, visceral as well as metaphorical, reveal a sound ontology and epistemology that can lead to social and eco-justice, sound economies, sustainable communities, and a sound ecology, based in the interdependence of all beings.

JOSHUA TUCKER
Sustaining Indigenous Sounds: Music Broadcasting and Cultural Vitalization in Highland Peru
What now might now be dubbed “cultural sustainability” has long been part and parcel of university life throughout Latin America where such institutions have been pivotal in preserving and shaping peripheral or threatened musical traditions. This chapter describes the work of a Peruvian organization called the Centro de Capacitación Campesino (Center for Peasant Training), which was instrumental in the musical life of rural-indigenous communities around the Andean city of Ayacucho in two distinct moments: first in the 1980s when the CCC was founded at Ayacucho’s national university amid the Shining Path’s war against the Peruvian state; the second moment came after 2000 when community-based Radio Quispillaccta made old CCC recordings the centerpiece of its broadcasts and a symbol of indigenous ecological rationality.