Overview

An indispensable study of the music of Altai-Sayan peoples Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.

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An original and fascinating exploration of music and place among a range of closely linked societies of the Altai, Khakas, and Tyva/Tuva republics in Inner Asia. The author shows how senses of place and movement are actually generated by the sensory qualities of performance practices. Pegg explains how every aspect of the landscape and cosmology is musical, as humans are 'eager to connect sonically' with these forces and with their ancestors. --Piers Vitebsky, author of Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos

"""An original and fascinating exploration of music and place among a range of closely linked societies of the Altai, Khakas, and Tyva/Tuva republics in Inner Asia. The author shows how senses of place and movement are actually generated by the sensory qualities of performance practices. Pegg explains how every aspect of the landscape and cosmology is musical, as humans are 'eager to connect sonically' with these forces and with their ancestors.""--Piers Vitebsky, author of Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos"

Author Information

Carole Pegg is an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and senior researcher at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities.

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