Nuttall, Denise

As Hindustani music (North Indian classical) and the performance of tabla moves outside of its South Asian origins the underlying aesthetic, rasa, and the structure of the musical system travels across and between musical and cultural borders informing and shaping the performative context. To what extent does the rasa concept, referred to as a ‘tasting’ experience, dominant in the arts of India, affect the global art of tabla? Often overlooked by scholars, and confused with the process of bhava (emotion) by performers, the concept and application of rasa continues to be the dominant aesthetic principle in what we have come to know globally as tabla soloing. I argue that it is in the phenomenological experience of music training and music making that we find a possible connection between the practice of rasa and the embodiment of bhava (performer emotion).

The phenomenon of following a guru, or a learned master of spiritual or other tradi- tions, is on the rise in india. it is not unusual for a disciple to negotiate between one or more learned masters in either single or multiple traditions. While these masters ground their teachings within traditional indigenous knowledge systems, they are also drawing on non-indian traditions from elsewhere in the global community. Whereas,once,gurus would impart information to their disciples intensely by living side by side, today the global guru is constantly on the move, crossing international borders and establishing relations with large numbers of students. -- FROM THE PUBLISHER.

This dissertation is an ethnography about the men and women who take up the practice and performance of a Hindustani (North Indian) drum called tabla, as a way of life. Learning tabla means that percussionists must find a guru, a learned master of the tradition who will guide them in their life long study of this instrument. The relationships formed between gurus and disciples are distinctively different in kind from teacher-student relations in Western knowledge systems. The guru-disciple tradition is a very specific, culturally dependent mode of learning originating from the Indian Brahmanical tradition of religious study. Discipleship is a form of apprenticeship which offers no easy translation, philosophically, culturally or spiritually. My ethnography and analysis of tabla as a way of life is presented from my own situated perspective as a tabla disciple of two tabla masters, Ustad Alia Rakha Khan, his son Ustad Zakir Hussain and as a visiting tabla enthusiast with another teacher of tabla, Ritesh Das. I offer a multi-local ethnography which centres on tabla communities based in Bombay, India, Toronto, Ontario, Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington and the Bay Area of California. As tabla travels around the globe, outside of India, the learning and teaching of this tradition changes somewhat in its new environments. However, learning to play tabla whether in Indian or diaspora cultures necessitates adopting Indian ways of knowing, learning and being. For those musicians of non-Indian ethnicity who become dedicated to this art form learning tabla also means learning to embody Indian cultural ways of doing and knowing. I posit that learning the cultural, as in learning tabla, begins in the body and the embodied mind. Knowing through and with the body requires re-conceptualizing anthropological concepts of culture, memory and tradition. Grounding an analytic concept of the body in the emerging critical Anthropology of the Body and the Anthropology of the Senses allows for an examination of the social as something more than cognitive and language based.

"What happens when anthropologists lose themselves during fieldwork while attempting to understand divergent cultures? When they stray from rigorous agendas and are forced to confront radically unexpected or unexplained experiences? In Extraordinary Anthropology leading ethnographers from across the globe discuss the importance of the deeply personal and emotionally volatile "ecstatic" side of fieldwork. Anthropologists who have worked in communities in Central America, North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia share their intimate experiences of tranformations in the field through details of significant dreams, haunting visions, and their own conflicting emotional tensions. Their experiences demonstrate the necessary fluidity of research agendas, the value of going beyond an accepted (and safe) cultural and academic vantage point, and the inevitability of wrestling with tension and unhappiness when faced with irreconcilable cultural and psychological dichotomies. The contributors explore ways in which conventional research methods can be adapted to creatively engage the intellectual, ethical, and practical dimensions of these dislocations and capitalize on them. Unsettling and revealing, Extraordinary Anthropology will spark debate and reflection among anthropologists for years to come." --Provided by publisher.

Cultural anthropology has privileged the concept of experience over that of performance, and as ethnographers, we have also privileged the ethnographic text and inscription over the act(s) of fieldwork or the "performances" of ethnography. Although we have made some improvements toward a different kind of anthropology, one that is embodied, the investigations of the body and performance have ultimately remained on the margins of the discipline. Drawing from my ethnographic participant fieldwork with North Indian tabla players and the teaching of ethnomusicology labs at an American university, I argue for a turn to what Sarah Pink (2009) has called sensory ethnography.