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Preface While it is certainly an honor to have one’s articles published in a collection such as this, the preparation of this manuscript has also resulted in a curious moment for me. In assembling these articles for publication, I have had to go back over the past forty years of my life, to revel again in excitement and hope, to sigh over missed opportunities, to reconnect with the work of old friends and colleagues—some of whom have passed on—to lament upon awkward arguments or turns of phrase, and to reflect upon shared progress and continuing challenges. Though written for others, this book has also allowed me to reconnect with my earlier self—always a worthwhile experience. Although I am hopeful that scholars in other fields will read and use this work, its primary focus, orientation, and perspective is that of ethnomusicology —that music discipline I love and that I define here as a close, yet sometimes contentious, marriage between music and anthropology. Central to this endeavor is fieldwork. Although far from perfect, fieldwork—the face-to-face talking, laughing, listening, crying, eating, musicking, and all the rest—is still, for me, the best and most direct way to learn about others and their musics, and I privilege it here over other methods of learning and documenting. More than anything else, though, this collection presents my understandings and interpretations of disciplinary and social intersections that have characterized music and gender studies over the past four decades. Of course, ethnomusicology has changed considerably since I entered the field in the 1970s: other disciplines, such as cultural studies, literary criticism, women’s studies, and poststructural and postcolonial studies, among many others, have entered the picture and have reframed our discussions, causing us to xiv Preface rethink basic concepts such as music, man, woman, gender, and fieldwork. Many of these changes are reflected in the essays in this volume, which represents my knowledge and my understandings of these intersections and of their impact on ethnomusicology. Thus, this book is neither complete nor exhaustive in its scope—but it is true to my own experience, and, I hope, some of it will be true to yours. ...

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