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Michelle Bigenho's dazzling new book probes the fascinating, unexpected story of Japan's romance with Andean music. Her ethnography tacks between Bolivia and Japan, and illuminates an economy of music, livelihood, and attraction that Bigenho triangulates through her own research as an anthropologist and a mistress herself of the Andean fiddle. Her smart, sophisticated analysis speaks to debates about indigeneity, music and performance, and the dialectics of history, desire, and globalization in a multipolar world. It's a book as adroit, intricate, and sometimes very moving as the lilting Andean folk melodies that Bigenho and her Bolivian bandmates played so many nights as they toured across the island. --Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last Wild Indian

""Michelle Bigenho's dazzling new book probes the fascinating, unexpected story of Japan's romance with Andean music. Her ethnography tacks between Bolivia and Japan, and illuminates an economy of music, livelihood, and attraction that Bigenho triangulates through her own research as an anthropologist and a mistress herself of the Andean fiddle. Her smart, sophisticated analysis speaks to debates about indigeneity, music and performance, and the dialectics of history, desire, and globalization in a multipolar world. It's a book as adroit, intricate, and sometimes very moving as the lilting Andean folk melodies that Bigenho and her Bolivian bandmates played so many nights as they toured across the island."" Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last ""--Wild"" Indian ""Michelle Bigenho does a brilliant job of combing the Japanese literature (in English), integrating theory, and pushing her own theoretical contribution. The creativity and analytic perspective of the approach makes the work add considerably to existing literature. To the ethnomusicological literature, Bigenho adds theoretical rigor and broad perspectives such as race projects, nationhood, and the ethnographic project. To the race literature, she adds a new transnational perspective that is grounded in performance.""--Christine Yano, author of Airborne Dreams: ""Nisei"" Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways ""Michelle Bigenho's second monograph has seven well-linked and fluid chapters. The author masters a personal and self-reflexive narrative, yet maintains theoretical rigour, making this not only a helpful addition to anthropological and ethnomusicological literature, but also a book appealing to the non-specialized reader. Bigenho, as an anthropologist and violinist, takes the reader on an ethnographic journey of music performance through her own participation in a three-month tour of Japan with Bolivian folkloric group Musica de Maestros. This inter-area study allowed her to use participant observation and interviews with Japanese and Bolivian musicians to explore an 'intercultural nexus' (p. 8) drawing on imagined identities, indigeneity, and race thinking. She examines the Japanese musicians' desire to learn and perform Bolivian music, a desire rooted in imagined similarities of ritual, language, music (pentatonic scales), and, above all, the feeling of a shared common race and blood with indigenous Andeans."" - Fiorella Montero, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 405-441 2013

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Michelle Bigenho is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hampshire College. She is the author of Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance.

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