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3 Both In and Between Women’s Musical Roles in Ritual Life “Both In and Between” continues with the comparative approach seen in chapter 2, concentrating on women’s musical performances in three very different ritual contexts: the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher culture I examined for my dissertation, shamanistic practices in Korea, and the Iroquois Longhouse tradition. I was, like many in the early 1990s, attempting to see if any universals existed across different gendered and musical cultures. Each of these three case studies seemed to present major differences in women’s and men’s social contexts, gender interactions, and resulting musical activity. In Lubavitcher culture, men’s musical activities were far more highly valued than those of women; indeed, they were seen as necessary for a communication with the divine. Women and men were separated from each other during musical performances, due to powerful beliefs in women’s inherent sexuality and in men’s aggressiveness, so men were never to hear or see women singing or to perform with them. In Korea women who exhibited certain psychological traits became shamans, able to summon up and speak in the language of protective spirits. Often called upon to help a struggling person or household, many shamans became well-known, powerful, and sometimes wealthy, musical-religious specialists, even using male members of their families (their husbands, sons, and so on) as their assistants (Kendall 1985; Harvey 1980). However, such shamans were also feared, and they and their families often suffered extreme discrimination within their own communities . The Iroquois, those who followed the Longhouse tradition, seemed to regard men’s and women’s musical performances as equally necessary for a ritual’s efficacy. And although performances tended to be separate, there were no restrictions placed on either side concerning hearing or witnessing ritual performances (Shimony 1980). Both In and Between 45 Using Sherry Ortner’s work (1974), I suggested that these three different cultural systems, like the ones Ortner discussed, saw women as existing both in and between nature and culture. I then elaborated upon this model, adding music into the mix, defining music in these contexts as meaningful sound that also acted as intermediary—between humans and spirits. Thus, I reasoned , if both women and music were conceptualized as intermediate—that is, in between binaries—they shared a powerful symbolic ambiguity. When women performed music, especially within ritual contexts, the combined power of their gender and musical performance in this context created the potential for chaos or social destruction; women (i.e., their material bodies and sexualities) and their music (even their speaking voices) must therefore be somehow separated from those of men or restricted in some way. Thus, this article explores the idea of the believed-to-be-destructive power in female performance and suggests a possible answer to why women (far more than men) have been, and continue to be, constrained within musical performance cross-culturally. * * * Women’s position in many of the world’s religions presents a paradox. On the one hand, codified versions of ritual practices often stress a female or feminine principle, one of equal value and weight, acting in harmony with a male counterpart. In many societies, especially those of Asia, female deities, often highly polarized as all good or all evil, have tremendous power equal to or perhaps exceeding that of males. If codified religious systems have the function of interpreting and validating the social and cosmic order, and of providing prescriptions for appropriate social interaction, then it would appear from this tendency to valorize the feminine that women, like men, would, even at the everyday, on-the-ground level of culture, have equal participation in social and ritual life. Yet, despite this conceptual framework, in the vast majority of cases, women ’s actual involvement in ritual, especially as music specialists, is severely limited, and women’s rituals are often described as relegated to the home or as peripheral to the mainstream. Understanding why this is so may lie in examining more of what occupies the space or gap between a culturally constructed, overarching theory that presents the idealized and generalized concept of male and female—often enacted ritually—and the everyday social reality of women and men, whose relationships and interdependencies are enacted on a daily, often changeable basis. Within this gap lie ideologies that provide frameworks for such interactions, ideologies that are often contradictory to more idealized concepts. This paper explores the notion that women and the music they perform can be seen as...

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