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Key Words globalization, world music, music industry, hybridity, migrancy
Abstract Often music is used as a metaphor of global social and cultural processes; it also constitutes an enduring process by and through which people interact within and across cultures. The review explores these processes with reference to an anthropological and ethnomusicological account of globalization that has gathered pace over the last decade. It outlines some of the main ethnographic and historical modes of engagement with persistent neoliberal and other music industry-inspired global myth making (particularly that associated with world music), and argues for an approach to musical globalization that contextualizes those genres, styles, and practices that circulate across cultural borders in specific institutional sites and histories.
INTRODUCTION
The diverse musics prominent in the mass-mediated spaces of urban Western Europe and North America over the last two decades have challenged habits of thinking about global modernity in terms of westernization, modernization, urbanization, and "cultural gray-out" (Lomax 1968). The critical challenge has been complicated by the more expansive claims emanating from the music industry and music press about world music, anxious, in the late 1980s, to inject energy into record sales and attentive to newly exploitable markets outside their traditional zones of operation. World music, according to these claims, testified to a radically new political moment and more equitable cultural relations between the West and the rest. Defining the proper relationship between the critical agenda and the rhetoric of those promoting global music commerce has been a major issue. The problem is not, of course, exclusive to the study of music (see Appadurai 2002, Ferguson 2002, Tsing 2002).
Globalization implies notions of change and social transformation. The critical questions have been, For whom, For whose benefit, How, and When? Some researchers consider such questions within a relatively recent time frame. Small media technologies^sup 1^ permit easy dissemination of and access to previously unknown, remote, or socially exclusive musical styles (Manuel 1993). The accelerated transnational movements of people, capital, commodities, and information energized and crossfertilized music making in the diasporas in the major urban centers of Western Europe and North America and elsewhere (Slobin 2003). The permeability of nationstate borders partially erased by regionalization focused attention on border zones as encounter and creativity sites (Simonett 2001)....