Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 258-284). / This study has, by way of ethnographic investigation, compared the Bemba ubwinga ceremonies performed in Lusaka and the Copperbelt during the pre-colonial era and the white wedding ceremonies performed during the post-independence era. It has further investigated the nature and existence of Bemba IKS. This study employed qualitative research methods involving extensive fieldwork in Lusaka and the Copperbelt. Apart from audio-visual recordings and analysing 25 marriage ceremonies, individual and focus group interviews were conducted with participants of wedding ceremonies and a sample of research participants from various age groups. Participant observation was used to collect data, while the interviews served as a means to clarify information about ubwinga ceremonies.

Includes bibliographical references (p.235-263). / The performing arts (a combination of music, dance and dramatisation) in the church in Kenya have not received much scholarly attention. These performing arts as adopted by Christian dance groups in Kenya have not been fully accepted into Christian circles because of the indigenous and popular music influences that govern them. This study therefore sets out to determine the educational role that the performing arts in the church in Nairobi play as demonstrated by a Nairobi Christian dance group, the Maximum Miracle Melodies.

This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the Jews and Mappila Muslims on the Malabar coast of Kerala, India. These two communities arose out of transoceanic migrations and interactions over the longue durée, and in reconstructing their past, this work aims to uncover traces of their links to each other and to others across the seas. This is a part of a larger project, Re-Centring AfroAsia, which seeks to trace human and musical migrations between 700-1500CE. Previous studies, apart from suffering from colonial biases, have tended to focus on a single religion, a single community, or a single discipline, with the aesthetic fields remaining largely untapped as a source. This work combines diverse sources and methodologies – using a musical archive, restudies, field interviews, field recordings, as well as a range of secondary sources, and crosses over multiple fields of study. The field research threw up certain inadequacies in the existing secondary literature, which this dissertation has attempted to untangle: 1) Ideas and reform movements of the twentieth century have affected the interpretation of past cultural practices in Malabar. This is true of studies of both Jews and Mappila Muslims. 2) The role of Sufism and Sufi tariqats in the propagation of Islam in Malabar has been historically underplayed in the literature. The influence of Jewish mystics on the Malabari Jewish community is also rarely identified as such. 3) While the Mappilas' links with Arab nations are known, their Tamil roots are relatively understudied. The latter emerged in my restudy of the archival music selection. 4) A minority of elite Jews in Kerala seem to have taken over the historical narrative of the entire group, skewing almost all secondary literature right from the early colonial period into the twentieth century. It is apparent that the Malabari Jews have been denied a voice in most of these works, and so my field work with the Jews primarily focused on this subgroup.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Marc Perlman. The CD's listed as accompanying this dissertation did not accompany the dissertation. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-322).

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Hatsune Miku is a celebrity; she is also a virtual singer with no real entity. The phenomenon of her success in Japan and abroad provides the starting point for this report, which examines the different forms of collaborative creativity that grow out of social energy arising from a collective interest in the dazzling Vocaloid characters and VOCALOID singing synthesis technology. From an outside observer's perspective, the feverish reception of this anime character may be found to be uncanny. How can this "unreal" thing possess such affective power? By attaching themselves to a non-real object, are Japanese otaku (nerds) exhibiting pathological tendencies? Or has their frequent exposure to anime and manga predisposed them to be emotionally receptive to virtual characters in way that neophytes lack the experience to understand? Taking a cue from Bruno Latour, this report confronts these questions by opening the malfunctional social black box of otaku group formation. I try to understand how the meaning of otaku is made stable through a social explanation, and why the VOCALOID fandom is distinct from ordinary people. In contrast to the technological determinism and socially determined use of technology, I apply Actor-Network-Theory's theoretical and ethnomethodological perspectives to the VOCALOID community constituted from sociotechnical networks. Based on a position of ANT that each actor interacts with other actors (human and nonhuman) that constitute the network, this report looks at the particular media platforms and their infrastructures that allow the distribution and circulation of songs and videos. I then provide my ethnographic account based on a local VOCALOID event in Hong Kong in an attempt to understand how fans are recruited to the network, and what their motivations to collaborate, create, and share are. Making the connections evident, I conclude that the stereotypical social theory is somewhat unessential to our understanding of social relations. / text

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