Dedicated to the late Gerard Béhague, this anthology offers perspectives on the evolving legacy of performance ethnography in socio-musical analysis and reflects the heritage but also contemporary trajectories of Béhague's scholarly concerns. Prefaced by an essay outlining key developments in the ethnography of performance paradigm, the volume's seven case studies portray snapshots of musical life in representative communities of the Americas, including the southwestern and Pacific United States, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, and Ecuador. These studies pose anthropological inquiries into the ontology of performance practice, the social power of poetic performativity, and the experience and embodiment of sound in place.

Introduction, Donna A. Buchanan; Part I Genres, Histories, and Discourses of Power Performed; Chapter 1 The Teatro Bufo: Cuban Blackface Theater of the Nineteenth Century, Robin Moore; Chapter 2 La Música Nacional: A Metaphor for Contrasting Views of Ecuadorian National Identity, Ketty Wong; Chapter 3 Conserve, Adapt, and Reconverge: Rationalizing a Template in Hawai'i Puerto Rican Musical Performance, Ted Solís; Part II Performing Practice: Style and the Politics of Subjectivity; Chapter 4 Transformation in Communion: Toward an Aesthetic of Improvisation, Tim Brace; Chapter 5 Feminine Flowers among the Thistles: Gendered Boundaries of Performance in Chilean Canto a lo poeta, Emily Pinkerton; Part III Situated Events and Performance Politics: Fiesta, Festival, Stage, and Street; Chapter 6, Michelle Wibbelsman; Chapter 7 Performing Indigeneity: Poetics and Politics of Music Festivals in Highland Bolivia, Thomas Solomon;