Journal articles on the topic 'Vocal music Sri Lanka'

In Sri Lanka, the various groups of Tamils are jointly the largest minority group who migrated from different places of South India and in different time periods. South Indian music is widely appreciated and learnt by both the Sinhala including by large parts of the Tamil minority spread over Sri Lanka. Although a number of Sinhala people prefer and practice North Indian music geographically, and probably culturally, they are much closer to South India than to North India. Some historical sources report that Sinhalese are descendants of North Indians who are believed to be Aryans who migrated from Persia to the Northern part of India in the 13th century and later. Therefore, some scholarly authorities believe that the Sinhalese ‘naturally’ prefer North Indian music as they also continue the suggested Aryan heritage. Nevertheless, some other sources reveal that the North Indian music was spread in Sri Lanka during the British rule with the coming of the Parsi Theatre (Bombay theatre), which largely promoted Hindustani raga-based compositions. This paper explores selected literature and opinions of some interviewees and discusses what could be the reasons for preferences of North Indian music by the Sinhalese. The interviewees were chosen according to their professional profile and willingness to participate in this research. As a result, this paper will offer insights through analysing various opinions and statements made by a number of interviewees. The research also considered some theories which may relate to the case whether Hindustani classical music is due to these reasons a dominating minority culture or a rather self-imposed musical ideology. The latter would establish an aesthetic hierarchy, which is not reflected in the cultural reality of Sri Lanka. This is a new research scrutinizing a long-term situation of performing arts education in this country taking mainly interviews as a departing point.

The Sri Lankan Ministry of National Coexistence, Dialogue, and Official Languages published the work “People of Sri Lanka” in 2017. In this comprehensive publication, 21 invited Sri Lankan scholars introduced 19 different people’s groups to public readers in English, mainly targeted at a growing number of foreign visitors in need of understanding the cultural diversity Sri Lanka has to offer. This paper will observe the presentation of these different groups of people, the role music and allied arts play in this context. Considering the non-scholarly design of the publication, a discussion of the role of music and allied arts has to be supplemented through additional analyses based on sources mentioned by the 21 participating scholars and their fragmented application of available knowledge. In result, this paper might help improve the way facts about groups of people, the way of grouping people, and the way of presenting these groupings are displayed to the world beyond South Asia. This fieldwork and literature guided investigation should also lead to suggestions for ethical principles in teaching and presenting of culturally different music practices within Sri Lanka, thus adding an example for other case studies.

The presence of Sri Lanka's indigenous Vedda minority is subject to continuous shrinking due to imposed views of modernity, including political decisions, sociocultural circumstances, technological and other issues. Could the collaborative work on strengthening communal and individual self-perceptions and attitudes towards heritage and identity issues benefit the endangered community?

ABSTRACTThe spread of Protestant Christianity to Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the early modern period involved large-scale translation projects and, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the publication of metrical psalms in languages spoken by local communities: Portuguese, Malay, Tamil and Sinhala. Selected psalms from the Genevan Psalter, as well as complete versions, were translated and published in South and Southeast Asia on several occasions in the eighteenth century, representing the earliest printing of Western staff notation in Jakarta and Colombo. These psalters were issued in numerous editions, and some were prefaced with a short explanation of the musical scale. Christian communities in Indonesia and Sri Lanka appear to have used the psalters regularly in religious devotions and services. This article explores the processes involved in the translation, production and distribution of these psalters, considering musical and cultural aspects of their adoption into local communities.

This article aims to study the ethnomusicological characteristics/expressions of a ritual drama in Sri Lanka that has lacked comprehensive research conducted about it so far; the Maraa-Ipaddima (Killing and Resurrection) ritual drama. This ritual drama is performed in reverence to the Goddess Pattini, who holds a special place in Sri Lankan culture and society for personal and social well-being such as fertility, health, and protection. The study employs a qualitative research method using both primary and secondary sources. The data has been collected through field observations, structured and semi-structured interviews, case study analysis, and literature reviewing. Study outcomes show that the ethnomusicological aspects of the ritual drama are expressed through kavi (poetic verses) sung while performing drama, traditional musical instruments, costumes, dance, and harmony. The study helped to understand the ethnomusicological expression of ritual drama performed, and it is also evident that the musical expressions performed in the ritual drama also work as a treatment in the collective healing of people (catharsis).

Medical ethnomusicology, a new growing sub-field of ethnomusicology takes into consideration on an equal basis music, medicine/healing and culture. This article focuses on a complex of cultural beliefs intertwined with the arts and crafts, in a multileyered bali healing ritual, which aims to restore wellbeing of individuals and communities in the South Asian country Sri Lanka.

The early Siva community identify the Singing is the easiest way to pray to God and reaching his salvation. From the earliest times in the Saiva tradition, the Nayanmars and Alvars who descended from Karaikkalammaiyar, followed this way and dissolved with the power of God not only this, with the help of history of Saiva we can understand, these Nayanmars and Alvars were not only practice this style of praying in their own life, as well as they insist the community to follow this method of their religious life also. In the Saiva tradition, those who greet the Lord with music are known by the special name of 'Oduvars'. This Oduvar tradition, which originated from Karaikkalammaiyar in the history of Sivasim, has continued in Hindu temples in Sri Lanka up to now. As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, history has maintained a close relationship with Tamil Nadu for a long time in culture, religion, customs and many other social contexts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that even though Sri Lanka has been under foreign rule for a long time, it is the work of these readers to preserve Sivasim and Tamilism and pass it on to the next generation. This article describes the work done by the Oduvars in Jaffna, the place where Saivism flourished in Sri Lanka.

Western consciousness of Sri Lanka tends to be limited to bracketing the secessionist ‘Tamil Tigers’ among the ‘terrorist threats’ facing the world community. In truth, tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of Sri Lanka go back two millennia, and Syed Jamil Ahmed argues here that the conflict is reflected in the myths of origin of both communities and the rituals through which they are still re-enacted. He believes that one of these, the ritual of Devol Māduā, offers a possible resolution to the problematic relationship between religious and moral law, or dharma, and the pragmatics of statecraft in Sri Lanka. After examining the historical context of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the myths of origin associated with the three key deities in the ritual, he offers an episode-by-episode description of the event, and goes on to suggest that the function of the ritual in Sinhalese–Buddhist society is revealing in terms of the dialectics of pacifism and violence that Buddhism faces in Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā’ in NTQ 74, and his full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

Purpose - The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the impact of teaching Oriental Music using Blended Learning (BL) approach for the students of senior secondary level in Sri Lanka specifically focusing on their achievement on required competencies of Oriental Music at Ordinary Level. The study analyzes the academic performance of students with detailed comparison of BL environment and traditional learning environment. Authors propose the application of BL approach to teach Oriental Music and study its impact on improvement of students’ competency. The study conducted with the application of a mixed instructional design model of objectivist and constructivist approaches for the design of the blended learning course in a student centred learning environment. Methodology - The study was directed by using true experimental study design with pretest and posttest control groups. BL was applied to the experimental group and the traditional instruction method was applied to control group. 9 schools from Colombo district were randomly selected for the experimental and control groups covering all the three existing school types of Sri Lanka. The study group consisted of 360 students of Grade 10 and Grade 11 who has been studying Oriental Music as a subject for General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level. To analyze the data Descriptive statistics, Paired samples t test, Independent samples t test were utilized. Findings - The findings of the experiment indicated that students who has studied Oriental Music under BL strategy showed a significant improvement in their music academic performances after the intervention. The mean post-test of the experimental group was 71.75 which is significantly higher than the mean control group which was 52.07. The mean difference was 19.68 1.91. Hence, there is a statistically significant increase in the performance of students who studied Oriental Music under blended learning. Thus, it is clearly evident that the blended instruction was effective. Significance - This study indicated a positive platform to mould and cater the entire teaching learning process by introducing BL strategy to Sri Lankan secondary education system and fulfilled an existing research gap by utilizing BL to teach highly traditional abstract art. Results of the study contributes to the curriculum designing field with novel ideas to adapt blended instructions to teach secondary level students effectively.

Purpose - The purpose of this experimental study is to investigate the impact of teaching Oriental Music using Blended Learning (BL) approach for the students of senior secondary level in Sri Lanka specifically focusing on their achievement on required competencies of Oriental Music at Ordinary Level. The study analyzes the academic performance of students with detailed comparison of BL environment and traditional learning environment. Authors propose the application of BL approach to teach Oriental Music and study its impact on improvement of students’ competency. The study conducted with the application of a mixed instructional design model of objectivist and constructivist approaches for the design of the blended learning course in a student centred learning environment. Methodology - The study was directed by using true experimental study design with pretest and posttest control groups. BL was applied to the experimental group and the traditional instruction method was applied to control group. 9 schools from Colombo district were randomly selected for the experimental and control groups covering all the three existing school types of Sri Lanka. The study group consisted of 360 students of Grade 10 and Grade 11 who has been studying Oriental Music as a subject for General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level. To analyze the data Descriptive statistics, Paired samples t test, Independent samples t test were utilized. Findings - The findings of the experiment indicated that students who has studied Oriental Music under BL strategy showed a significant improvement in their music academic performances after the intervention. The mean post-test of the experimental group was 71.75 which is significantly higher than the mean control group which was 52.07. The mean difference was 19.68 1.91. Hence, there is a statistically significant increase in the performance of students who studied Oriental Music under blended learning. Thus, it is clearly evident that the blended instruction was effective. Significance - This study indicated a positive platform to mould and cater the entire teaching learning process by introducing BL strategy to Sri Lankan secondary education system and fulfilled an existing research gap by utilizing BL to teach highly traditional abstract art. Results of the study contributes to the curriculum designing field with novel ideas to adapt blended instructions to teach secondary level students effectively.

This article presents findings from the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation (SLNMC, 2009-2018) launched immediately after a twenty-four year long civil war in Sri Lanka. The project responded to a stated need of rebuilding a fractured society and re-establishing relations between Sinhala and Tamil populations of the island. The SLNMC comprised school concerts and public concerts, music education, heritage documentation and digitalization, in addition to skill training for musicians and technicians, festival organizers and other actors in cultural life. The article offers a critical phenomenological approach to the concept of harmony, where both phenomena of musical and socio-cultural harmony are displayed and discussed in relation to each other. I set out to investigate whether harmony in the SLNMC was a taken for granted, ´dead metaphor´ or an actual creative and impactful tool for implementing musical activities in a post-war context. Theoretically, my point of departure is Howell’s conceptual investigation of harmony in multicultural musical projects (Howell, 2018) and specifically in the South-Asia context (Howell, 2019). I have combined elements from her framework with Sykes (2011 and 2018a) as well as insights from my own research data to present a schema of three musical and three socio-cultural definitions of harmony paired and discussed in relation to each other. In conclusion, I argue that attention to various types of musical and socio-cultural harmony can cast new light on existing art for reconciliation-practices as well as generate fresh and fertile views on how to conceive, implement and assess such initiatives in the future.

Music preference is being influenced by various sociological factors. This study was undertaken to investigate music preferences across five different socio-economic classes in selected urban and suburban areas of Sri Lanka. Ten music tracks representing the correspondent musical genres were selected. The single most preferred and the weighted hedonic mean score for the genres in each class were obtained as upper class: jazz, upper middle class: nature music, middle class: popular instrumental, working class: popular instrumental and poor class: rock. The interaction between socio-economic classes and genres was significant (p<0.05). Compelling associations for folk, jazz, and popular instrumental genres were found with the upper-middle class while the upper class has shown a significant association for popular instrumental music. Despite the socio-economic status, the highest preference and the highest weighted hedonic mean score were recorded with popular instrumental. Thus, understanding music preference behaviour is vital for music education and research.

This article explores the ways in which arts experiences in conflicted and territorialized settings may invite a heightened engagement with space, and what this suggests about creative experiences as a vehicle for transforming space and the (re)construction of one’s presence and place in the world. Presenting ethnographic data from two youth music projects established after the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sri Lanka and argued from the perspective of musician-practitioner-researchers, the authors examine how musical interaction, improvisation, and performance creation enabled processes of exploring, reconfiguring, and expanding the participants’ identities and sense of place in the surrounding world. Using Tia DeNora’s conceptualization of “music asylum,” the article shows how strategies of removal and refurnishing created creative and safe spaces in which alternative lives and more complex identities could be rehearsed and conflict narratives could be revised, fostering a temporary transformation of space that is captured in metaphors like bubble, refuge, and sanctuary.

Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean located to the south of India and separated from Indian subcontinent by a small straight. The island has been one of the major tourist attractions since antiquity. End of the protracted civil war is a blessing for the recent surge of tourist arrival and the rapid expansion of tourism facilities on the island. Although small, the island is rich in religious and cultural diversity with an immense attraction to the tourist. Buddhism is the main religion of the overwhelming majority of people even though Hinduism, Christianity and Islam are practiced side by side by several followers. The rich cultural heritage rotating around the religious practices, tolerance and beliefs ranges from historical monuments and ancient cities through meditation, yoga, folk music and dances, festivities, ceremonies and rituals. Special sites with multi-religious attractions reflect the diversity and uniqueness of a rich culture. North Central province is rich in religious and cultural resources than any other province in Sri Lanka. Only a small fraction of these vast resources has been utilized by the tourism industry so far. The promotion of the religious and cultural tourism products in the province will open new avenues for tourists as well as many people of the province.

Competition related anxiety is a major psychological issue among athletes and this study estimates the prevalence of competition related anxiety, its associated factors and coping strategies used, among school athletes in Sri Lanka. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 330 athletes. Two-stage simple random sampling was used. Competition related anxiety level was determined by Sport Competition Anxiety Test for adults (SCAT-A). Prevalence of ‘high’ level of sport competition related anxiety was 19.4% and it was significantly associated with individual sports, fear of failure, experience of past defeat, and poor support received from parents/friends. Listening to music, goal setting, positive self-talk and meditation were positive coping strategies used by athletes. The main negative coping strategy was being angry. High competition related anxiety prevalent in about 1/5th of school athletes was influenced by several factors related to the sport event. Psychological support incorporated into routine physical training sessions is recommended.

Abstract Vocal alarm calls are important to the vigilance and likely the organization of mixed-species flocks, but community-wide studies of alarm calling in flocks are lacking. We investigated which species alarm-call, and the characteristics of their calls, in a large flock system of a Sri Lankan rainforest. We recorded naturally elicited alarm calls during several attacks by Accipiter hawks and while following flocks for 10 h. We then artificially elicited alarms by throwing a stick to the side of the flock, in a total of 70 trials at 30 flock sites. The Orange-billed Babbler (Turdoides rufescens) was the most frequent caller to both the artificial and natural stimuli, followed by the Greater Racket-tailed Drongo (Dicrurus paradiseus). Several other species also called, and multiple species often called to the same stimulus (in 23 trials, and in all of the hawk attacks). The species differed in their rapidity of response and in their sensitivity to different natural stimuli. Calls of the gregarious babbler usually provided a first, unreliable warning of an incoming threat, whereas later calls of other species emphasized the seriousness of the threat. We suggest that birds in mixed-species flocks may be particularly aware of aerial predators for two reasons: (1) a “numbers effect,” whereby nongregarious species are more aware of predators when surrounded by large numbers of other species; and (2) an “information effect,” whereby species differ in the information available in their alarm calls, leading to an accumulation of information in a mixed-species flock. Llamadas de Alarma en Bandadas Mixtas de Aves en Sri Lanka

In this article, I juxtapose the ways the “father of modern Sinhala drama,” John De Silva, and the Sinhala language reformer, Munidasa Cumaratunga, utilized music for different nationalist projects. First, I explore how De Silva created musicals that articulated Arya-Sinhala nationalism to support the Buddhist Revival. Second, I investigate how Cumaratunga, who spearheaded the Hela-Sinhala movement, asserted that genuine Sinhala song should be rid of North Indian influence but full of lyrics composed in “pure” Sinhala. The purpose of this comparison is to critique Partha Chatterjee's notion of the inner domain. Chatterjee focused on Bengali cultural nationalism and its complex relation to Western hegemony. He considered Bengal, the metropolis of the British Raj, to be representative of colonized nations. This article reveals that elsewhere in South Asia—Sri Lanka—one cultural movement sought to define the nation not in relation to the West but in opposition to North India.

Sri Lanka has a precious traditional drum music culture that is mainly based on traditional drums. At present, this drum culture is in decline due to a lack of talented drum players. As a result, many Buddhist temples are facing a serious and tragic problem. This article presents the design and implementation of a robotic system named ThamRobot contains two robotic arms that were designed to play pre-programmed three drum tunes of the Thammattama correctly and efficiently like a drum player without any intervention of a human. In the research, nine major characteristics factors of the Thammattama such as music notes, drum locations, approximate stress, frequencies, pitch, drum type, number of sticks, playing technique, distance from stick to drum face were identified. The entire system is comprised of four main modules named motion module, user-operation module, processing module, power supply module. Finally, the system has been tested in a laboratory environment and encouraging results were obtained.

Several species of birds vocally imitate sounds associated with danger. Two anecdotal studies suggest that such ‘danger mimicry’ increases during nesting, but such a relationship has not been quantitatively demonstrated. Sri Lanka drongos (Dicrurus paradiseus lophorhinus) are known to imitate predators and other species’ mobbing and alarm calls in alarm contexts. Here we investigated whether drongos vary their production of danger mimicry in different nesting stages (building, incubation, nests with hatchlings, fledglings still outside of mixed-species flocks), and when foraging away from young in mixed-species flocks. We recorded drongos over two breeding seasons at 14 different nesting trees, used year-after-year. We found that of all the types of danger mimicry, imitation of predators was the most common and exclusive to drongos that had young offspring. Such predator mimicry was observed at a higher rate during the hatchling and fledgling stages compared to incubation or flocks. Danger mimicry did not, however, increase during this stage in isolation: drongo species-specific alarm calls also increased, and the close connection between these two types of calls did not appear to change. Although it is possible that the association between danger mimicry and species-specific alarm calls could help young birds learn sounds associated with danger, the performance of this behaviour does not seem exclusive enough to interactions between adult drongos and their offspring to meet functional definitions of teaching.

Background: Advanced level is a challenging examination due to the limitation of University entrance opportunities leading to high level of stress. Several issues have affected them irrespective of the stream of study, for which they tend to adapt different coping strategies. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the level of stress, factors associated with stress and coping strategies among advanced level (A/L) students attending tuition classes in selected Educational zone, Sri Lanka.Methods: A descriptive cross- sectional study was conducted among 364 A/L students aged between 17-20 years attending a selected tuition class. Self-administered questionnaire was used with 35 item coping strategy check list and DASS-21, both tools were pretested and validated in Sri Lanka. Data was analysed using SPSS 15.0 software.Results: Vastness of the A/L curriculum was a significant stress factor between males and females (p=0.001). Stress of getting lower grades and poor time management were higher among females (p=0.027, p=0.003). Males reported change in sexual habits (p=0.003) and alcohol /cigarette use (p=0.001). Lack of vacation and fear of academic failure were the most common physical and emotional stressors respectively. Seeking advice from a trusted person, being with others, blaming themselves for the situation, engaging in religious activities, listening to music, constantly thinking about the problem and crying to self were common coping strategies adopted by females. Immediate problem solving and consuming alcohol/ drugs were common coping strategies by males.Conclusions: Males had more social and physical stress associated factors whereas females had academic and emotional stressors. Different methods of coping strategies were adopted by males and females.

This article positions Pablo Neruda's poetry collection Residence on Earth I (written between 1925–1931 and published in 1933) as a ‘text in transit’ that allows us to trace the development of transnational modernist networks through the text's protracted physical journey from British colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Madrid, and from José Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente (The Western Review) to T. S. Eliot's The Criterion. By mapping the text's diasporic movement, I seek to reinterpret its complex composition process as part of an anti-imperialist commitment that proposes a form of aesthetic solidarity with artistic modernism in Ceylon, on the one hand, and as a vehicle through which to interrogate the reception and categorisation of Latin American writers and their cultural institutions in a British periodical such as The Criterion, on the other. I conclude with an examination of Neruda's idiosyncratic Spanish translation of Joyce's Chamber Music, which was published in the Buenos Aires little magazine Poesía in 1933, positing that this translation exercise takes to further lengths his decolonising views by giving new momentum to the long-standing question of Hiberno-Latin American relations.

If performance rituals are memories in action, what happens to them when a people no longer need to remember – or it is deemed politically undesirable for them to do so? In the following article, Syed Jamil Ahmed explores the annual performance in the Sikkimese monastery of Pemayangtse, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, of the ritual of Pang Lhabsol (‘Worship of the Witness Deity’), and specifically of the Pangtoed 'Cham, performed on the final, eighth day in homage and gratitude to the mountain. He examines the complex web of political changes over many centuries which have affected the purpose and enactment of the ritual, and finally offers a detailed account of a single day's performance, in 1999, when the ritual was losing some of its dignity and many of its former trappings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jatra’ in NTQ74, and on ‘The Ritual of Devol Medua: Problematizing Dharma in the Ethnic Conflicts of Sri Lanka’ in NTQ76. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

- K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Sumatera. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1995, xliii + 201 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Jawa, Bali dan Sri Lanka. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1995, xxxvii + 213 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di Indonesia Timur. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1996, xxx + 103 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Borneo. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1990, xxviii + 100 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - Freek L. Bakker, Samuel Wälty, Kintamani; Dorf, Land und Rituale; Entwicklung und institutioneller Wandel in einer Bergregion auf Bali. Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997, xii + 352 pp. - René van den Berg, Linda Barsel, The verb morphology of Mori, Sulawesi. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1994, x + 139 pp. [Pacific Linguistics Series B-111.] - Martin van Bruinessen, Darul Aqsha, Islam in Indonesia; A survey of events and developments from 1988 to March 1993. Jakarta: INIS, 1995, 535 pp., Dick van der Meij, Johan Hendrik Meuleman (eds.) - Martin van Bruinessen, Niels Mulder, Inside Indonesian society; Cultural change in Java. Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996, 240 pp. [Previously published Bangkok, Duang Kamol, 1994.] - Matthew Isaac Cohen, Craig A, Lockard, Dance of life; Popular music and politics in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998, xix + 390 pp. - Will Derks, Tenas Effendy, Bujang Tan Domang; Sastra lisan orang Petalangan. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Benteng Budaya/Ecole Francaise d’Extrême Orient/The Toyota Foundation, 1997, 818 pp. [Al Azhar and Henri Chambert-Loir (eds).] - Will Derks, Philip Yampolsky, Music from the forests of Riau and Mentawai. Recorded and compiled by Philip Yampolsky; annotated by Hanefi, Ashley Turner, and Philip Yampolsky. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1995. [Music of Indonesia 7SF; CD 40423.] - Will Derks, Philip Yampolsky, Melayu music of Sumatra and the Riau Islands: Zapin, Mak Yong, Mendu, Ronggeng. Recorded, compiled , and annotated by Philip Yampolsky. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1996. [Music of Indonesia 11 SF; CD 40427.] - Rens Heringa, Roy W. Hamilton, Gift of the cotton maiden; Textiles of Flores and the Solor Islands. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1994, 287 pp. - Bernice de Jong Boers, Willemijn de Jong, Geschlechtersymmetrie in einer Brautpreisgesellschaft; Die Stoffproduzentinnen der Lio in Indonesien. Berlin: Reimer, 1998, 341 pp. - C. de Jonge, A.Th. Boone, Bekering en beschaving; De agogische activititeiten van het Nederlandsch Zendelinggenootschap in Oost-Java (1840-1865). Zoetermeer: Boekencenturm, 1997, xiv + 222 pp. - Nico Kaptein, Peter G. Riddell, Islam; Essays on scripture, thought and society; A Festschrift in honour of Anthony H. Johns. Leiden: Brill, 1997, xliii + 361 pp., Tony Street (eds.) - Hugo Klooster, Janny de Jong, Niet-westerse geschiedenis; Benaderingen en thema’s. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1998, 185 pp., Gé Prince, Hugo s’Jacob (eds.) - Jean Robert Opgenort, L. Smits, The J.C. Anceaux collection of wordlists of Irian Jaya languages, B: Non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages (Part I). Leiden/Jakarta: Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden/Irian Jaya Studies Interdisciplinary Research Programme (IRIS), 1994, vi + 281 pp. [Irian Jaya Source Materials 9 (Series B No. 3).], C.L. Voorhoeve (eds) (eds.) - Pim Schoorl, Albert Hahl, Gouverneursjahre in Neuguinea. Edited by Wilfried Wagner. Hamburg: Abera Verlag Meyer, 1997, xxxi + 230 pp. - Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, Dieuwke Wendelaar Bonga, Eight prison camps; A Dutch family in Japanese Java. Athens, Ohio: University Center for International Studies, 1996, xii + 219 pp. - Freek Colombijn, Anthony J. Whitten, The ecology of Sumatra. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1987 [First edition 1984], xxiii + 583 pp., photographs, figures, tables, index., Sengli J. Damanik, Jazanul Anwar (eds.) - David Henley, Anthony J. Whitten, The ecology of Sulawesi. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1987, xxi + 777 pp., Muslimin Mustafa, Gregory S. Henderson (eds.) - Peter Boomgaard, Tony Whitten, The ecology of Java and Bali. [Singapore]: Periplus Editions, 1996, xxiii + 969 pp. [The Ecology of Indonesia Series 2.], Roehayat Emon Soeriaatmadja, Surya A. Afiff (eds.) - Han Knapen, Kathy MacKinnon, The ecology of Kalimantan. [Singapore]: Periplus Editions, 1996, xxiv + 802 pp., tables, figures, boxes, index. [The Ecology of Indonesia Series 3.], Gusti Hatta, Hakimah Halim (eds.) - Bernice de Jong Boers, Manon Ossewiejer, Kathryn A. Monk, The ecology of Nusa Tenggara and Maluku. [Singapore]: Periplus Editions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, xvii + 966 pages, tables, figures, boxes, annexes, appendixes, index. [The Ecology of Indonesia Series 5.], Yance de Fretes, Gayatri Reksodiharjo-Lilley (eds.) - Freek Colombijn, Tomas Tomascik, The ecology of the Indonesian seas [2 volumes]. Hong Kong: Periplus, 1997, xiv + vi + 1388 pp., photographs, figures, tables, indexes. [The Ecology of Indonesia Series 7-8.], Anmarie Janice Mah, Anugerah Nontji (eds.)

This edition is the first issue of Dewa Ruci’s Journal, in which all articles are in English. We deliberately changed the language of publication to English to facilitate information delivery to a wider audience. We realize that English is the official language for many countries rather than other languages in this world. The number of people who have literacy awareness and need scientific information about visual and performing arts regarding the archipelago’s cultural arts is also quite large.The decision to change the language of publication to English does not mean that we do not have nationalism or are not in love with the Indonesian language. This change is necessary to foster the intensity of scientific interaction among writers who are not limited to Indonesia’s territory alone. We desire that the scientific ideas outlined in Dewa Ruci’s Journal are read by intellectual circles of the arts internationally. We also want to express our scientific greetings to art experts from countries in New Zealand, the USA, Australia, Europe, especially Britain, and other English-speaking countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Canada. Of course, a change in English will also benefit intellectuals from countries that have acquired English as a second language, such as Malaysia, Brunei, Israel, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. In essence, Dewa Ruci’s Journal editor wants to invite writers to greet the scientific community at large.We are grateful that six writers can greet the international community through their articles. The first is Tunjung Atmadi and Ika Yuni Purnama, who wrote an article entitled “Material Ergonomics on Application of Wooden Floors in the Interior of the Workspace Office.” This article discusses office interiors that are devoted to workspaces. The purpose of this study is to share knowledge about how to take advantage of space-forming elements in the interior design of a workspace by utilizing wooden floors like parquet. The focus is on choosing the use of wood by paying attention to the elements in its application. This research result has a significant meaning in the aesthetics, comfort, and safety of wooden floors in the workspace’s interior and its advantages and disadvantages.The second writer who had the opportunity to greet the Dewa Ruci Journal audience was intellectuals with diverse expertise, namely Taufiq Akbar, Dendi Pratama, Sarwanto, and Sunardi. Together they wrote an article entitled “Visual Adaptation: From Comics to Superhero Creation of Wayang.” This article discusses the fusion and mixing of wayang as a traditional culture with comics and films as contemporary culture products. This melting and mixing have given birth to new wayang creations with sources adapted from the superhero character “Avenger,” which they now call the Avenger Wayang Kreasi. According to them, Wayang Kreasi Avenger’s making maintains technical knowledge of the art of wayang kulit. It introduces young people who are not familiar with wayang kulit about the technique of carving sungging by displaying the attributes in the purwa skin for Wayang Kreasi Avenger. This creativity is an attempt to stimulate and show people’s love for the potential influence of traditional cultural heritage and its interaction with the potential of contemporary culture.The next authors are Sriyadi and RM Pramutomo, with an article entitled “Presentation Style of Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun Dance in Pura Mangkunegaran.” This article reveals a repertoire of Yogyakarta-style dance in Mangkunegaran, Surakarta, namely the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun. The presence of this dance in Mangkunegaran occurred during the reign of Mangkunegara VII. However, the basic character of the Mangkunegaran style dance has a significant difference from the Yogyakarta style. This paper aims to examine the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance’s presentation style in Mangkunegaran to determine the formation of its presentation technique. The shape of the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance style in Mangkunegaran did not occur in an event but was a process. The presentation style’s formation is due to a problem in the inheritance system that has undergone significant changes. These problems arise from social, political, cultural, and economic conditions. The responses to these problems have shaped the Bedhaya Bedhah Madiun dance's distinctive features in Mangkunegaran, although not all of them have been positive.Hasbi wrote an article entitled “Sappo: Sulapa Eppa Walasuji as the Ideas of Creation Three Dimensional Painting.” This article reveals Hasbi’s creative process design in creating three-dimensional works of art, named Sappo. He got his inspiration from the ancient manuscripts written in Lontara, namely the manuscripts written in the traditional script of the Bugis-Makassar people on palm leaves, which they still keep until now. Sappo for the Bugis community is a fence that limits (surrounds, isolates) the land and houses. Sappo’s function is to protect herself, her family, and her people. Sulapa Eppa means four sides, is a mystical manifestation, the classical belief of the Bugis-Makassar people, which symbolizes the composition of the universe, wind-fire-water-earth. Walasuji is a kind of bamboo fence in rhombus rituals. Eppa Walasuji’s Sulapa is Hasbi’s concept in creating Sappo in the form of three-dimensional paintings. The idea is a symbolic expression borrowing the Lontara tradition's idiom to create a symbolic effect called Sappo.Mahdi Bahar and his friends wrote an article entitled “Transformation of Krinok to Bungo Krinok Music: The Innovation Certainty and Digital-Virtual Contribution for Cultural Advancement.” Together, they have made innovations to preserve Krinok music, one of Jambi’s traditional music themes, into new music that they call Bungo Krinok. He said that innovation is a necessity for the development of folk music. In innovating, they take advantage of digital technology. They realize this music’s existence as a cultural wealth that has great potential for developing and advancing art. The musical system, melodic contours, musical grammar, and distinctive interval patterns have formed krinok music’s character. This innovation has given birth to new music as a transformation from Jambi folk music called “Bungo Krinok” music.Finally, Luqman Wahyudi and Sri Hesti Heriwati. They both wrote an article entitled “Social Criticism About the 2019 Election Campaign on the Comic Strip Gump n Hell.” They explained that in 2019 there was an interesting phenomenon regarding the use of comic strips as a means of social criticism, especially in the Indonesian Presidential Election Campaign. The title of the comic is Gump n Hell by Errik Irwan Wibowo. The comic strip was published and viral on social media, describing the political events that took place. In this study, they took three samples of the comic strip Gump n Hell related to the moment of the 2019 election to analyze their meaning. From the results of this study, there is an implicit meaning in the comic strip of pop culture icons' use to represent political figures in the form of parodies.That is the essence of the issue of Volume 16 Number 1 (April Edition), 2021. Hopefully, the knowledge that has been present in this publication can spur the growth of visual and performing art science in international networks, both in the science of art creation and in scientific research of art in general. We hope that the development of visual and performing art science can reveal the various meanings behind various facts and phenomena of art life. Therefore, the growth of international networks is an indispensable need.Thank you.

When the Sri Lankan performing art was analysed, a clear-cut difference in gender-typed participation in dancing, singing, playing music, and the traditional rituals (such as Shanthi karma) can be identified. Furthermore, this research has found that gender roles in performance have evolved through time. It can be seen how the existence of -Hindu- Buddhist practices from Vijaya’s arrival to Sri Lanka in 543 BCE to the period of Portuguese who conquered Sri Lanka in 1505 CE takes a new facet in the colonial period and the post-colonial period blending with the European concepts. It can be analysed as follows, First, the changes occurred in masculinity, femininity, or the concepts of Tandava, and Lasya, then the rituals relating to concepts of Divinity in the pre-colonial period, then the changing constructs and perspectives regarding gender performances in the colonial period and the gender shifts and gender synthesis in the post-colonial period.

The angguk is one among many types ofthe selawatan genre, it is an Indonesian traditional Islamic liturgical music. While the selawatan is normally perfomed by a group of men, the angguk includes a group of female dancers as the accompaniment to the selawatan musicians. This additional accompaniment accommodates the transformation form, from music to perfoming art. This study focuses on the analysis of structure and aesthetics of the performance ofthe “Sri Lestari” female angguk group in the Pripih village,at Kulon Progo district. The art was performed by young female dancers who were dressed in colorful costumesto attract the attention of audience. This study concludes that the performing art has been influenced by other type of the selawatan elements, such as the dolalak, which originated from Purworejo, Central Java. The angguk music which is very simple and monotous as the result of subsequent repetition with only little variations, is the verse reading effect of the pantun, which is a typical of traditional letter’s vocal arts. Whilethe pantun characterizes general musical structure, the instrumentation, rhythmic, and the tempo of the music, gives the essence of aesthetic meaning toward the genre. The dance has been used to enhance the performing aesthetics to invite the attention of the audience. Keywords: Angguk, selawatan, aesthetics.

The angguk is one among many types ofthe selawatan genre, it is an Indonesian traditional Islamic liturgical music. While the selawatan is normally perfomed by a group of men, the angguk includes a group of female dancers as the accompaniment to the selawatan musicians. This additional accompaniment accommodates the transformation form, from music to perfoming art. This study focuses on the analysis of structure and aesthetics of the performance ofthe “Sri Lestari” female angguk group in the Pripih village,at Kulon Progo district. The art was performed by young female dancers who were dressed in colorful costumesto attract the attention of audience. This study concludes that the performing art has been influenced by other type of the selawatan elements, such as the dolalak, which originated from Purworejo, Central Java. The angguk music which is very simple and monotous as the result of subsequent repetition with only little variations, is the verse reading effect of the pantun, which is a typical of traditional letter’s vocal arts. Whilethe pantun characterizes general musical structure, the instrumentation, rhythmic, and the tempo of the music, gives the essence of aesthetic meaning toward the genre. The dance has been used to enhance the performing aesthetics to invite the attention of the audience.Keywords: Angguk, selawatan, aesthetics.

This study was conducted to document the effect of age, gender and vowel type on vowel space area in Sinhala language. Three groups of participants were employed. Group 1 included 20 children, Group 2 included 20 adults and Group 3 consisted of 20 elderly subjects. All the subjects spoke the dialect of central province of Sri Lanka. Words consisting of three Sinhala short vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ in were recorded. Formant frequencies of vowels were extracted and vowel space area was constructed. The results showed that the formant frequencies were significantly higher for children compared with those of adults. Female subjects had significantly higher formant frequency values than male subjects. Effect of vowel types were also significant on the formant frequencies and vowel space area. Sinhala also follows universal criteria of resonance characteristics and vocal tract constriction. Keywords: vowel space area, formant frequencies, Sinhala, vowel articulation

As music educators around the globe continue to work in blended environments, it is important to explore how pedagogical approaches can be adapted and reimagined in ways that enhance teaching and learning in this changing educational landscape. In this study, the authors drew on elements of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to teach three culturally diverse songs to pre-service teachers at a Spanish university. Acting as culture bearers and tertiary music educators, they selected and taught songs from three different geographic locations (South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United States). Utilizing a descriptive case study design, the authors discuss their pedagogical approach and argue a Four Step Flip method (Asynchronous, Synchronous, Face-to-Face, and Hybrid Feedback) can be effectively applied and adopted in online music teaching and learning settings. This model prioritizes the culture bearers’ involvement in the learning process from start to finish while allowing students ample space to merge unfamiliar cultural perspectives with their own. The authors also contend building collaborative networks that extend beyond national borders can enhance understanding and appreciation of different genres, cultures, and languages in music classrooms.

Arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea) rhizome flour is a good gluten-free substitute for wheat flour. To evaluate the influence of colour on replacing wheat flour with arrowroot flour, the colour attributes of arrowroot flour from five different Provinces (Western, North-Western, Southern, Sabaragamuwa, and Uva) were compared with the colour of standard wheat flour. Using the colour of wheat flour as a standard, the colours of arrowroot flour samples were determined using a colourimeter (PCE-CSM 2, United States). Flour samples were examined for L* (lightness), a* (redness), b* (yellowness), and ΔE (colour deviation). Yellowness was significantly distinct, although lightness and redness were not statistically different. There were negative moderate correlations between L* and a* (-0.791; P < 0.05) and L* and b* (-0.831; P < 0.05). While there were some slight variations in the colour characteristics among different arrowroot flour samples, their colours were highly close to the colour of wheat flour.

Helen Harrison in her opening editorial in issue number 2 of the IASA Journal notes, “...on no account should we be complacent about the Journal or other IASA publications, ideas for change are always welcome and material for inclusion even more so.” She was contemplating the state of the Journal on the heels of its transformation from the Phonographic Bulletin (1971–1993) to the IASA Journal (1993–present). The name had changed, but Harrison took the role of editor with ideas for additional improvements to the structure, content, operation, and aesthetics of the Journal; and she found herself also faced with the task of developing a new reputation for the newly minted IASA Journal. That was 26 years ago, and the IASA Journal has now been the IASA Journal longer than it was the Phonographic Bulletin. The transformation, we can say, was a success. Today, in 2018, as editor, I face a similar challenge: whether to transform the IASA Journal to an e-Journal, and whether to push for an open access model for content in the IASA Journal. These are two slightly independent changes that I am proposing for the Journal, and both have a variety of options associated with them. The IASA Journal as an e-Journal When we think about the IASA Journal as an electronic journal, we can consider it with or without a printed version. At one extreme, we can imagine an online platform that serves as the only access point to IASA Journal publications. Such a platform can provide a variety of discovery and access options for IASA Journal content, including text-based search, author indexes, online reading via PDF or HTML, syndication for subscribers, and API access for data aggregators, among others. We can also imagine these online access options with additional options for printed issues, either “on-demand” or in small batches. At the opposite extreme, we could imagine the same full print scenario we have today with the addition of an online access point with the options I mention above (although, this option, of course, requires the greatest cost to the organization). These are the types of options we are considering as we develop a strategy for moving the IASA Journal to an online home. The IASA Journal as an Open Access Journal A related question, once the Journal has an e-Journal access point, is whether the content of the IASA Journal should remain closed to the World, open only to IASA members and subscribers, for five years after its publication. This has been, and still is, the policy of the IASA Journal. But, should it be? Does such a policy support the central mission of IASA, as stated in its constitution, “to promote, encourage, and support the development of best professional standards and practice in all countries through communication, cooperation, advocacy, promulgation, dissemination, training and/or education, amongst public or private archives or libraries, institutions, businesses, organisations and associations which share these purposes?” Could we, as an organization, do better to disseminate the writings in the Journal to the global audiovisual archives community? Could we, instead of using the content as bait for membership, rather use the content as a shared resource that enriches IASA’s network and entices new members to the organization? Launching an e-Journal does not require IASA to provide Open Access to the content; it merely offers the opportunity, and because of that, I think it valuable to have the conversation. So, these are the types of access questions that we are also considering as we develop a strategy for the IASA Journal online platform. If you, as a IASA member or subscriber, have thoughts on these topics, please feel free to reach out to me at editor@iasa-web.org. I am eager to hear from you. The Issue at Hand This issue, our third peer-reviewed issue, features a wide variety of topics important to the audiovisual archives communities today, including digital preservation, born-digital video, contemporary memories, diversification of the archive(s), repatriation of colonial and radio collections, and building stronger connections between archives and users of archival collections. The issue commences with three profiles highlighting the human labor that underlies all archives and archival collections. In Ghana, Judith Opoku-Boateng interviews J. H. Kwabena Nketia about his work recording the songs and interviews that would become the cross-cultural foundation for the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana. In Australia, Melinda Barrie talks with sound scholar Robyn Holmes about her lifelong passion to dissemination and document Australian music. And, in Italy, Ettore Pacetti and Daniela Floris discuss the pioneering fieldwork of the Italian ethnomusicologist, Diego Carpitella, and how his efforts laid the seeds for the current project of the Audiovisual Archives at RAI Teche to bring Italian cultural heritage to a worldwide audience. Paul Conway and Kelly Askew, both of the University of Michigan, provide a glimpse into efforts to organize, describe, and “re-broadcast” content from Voice of America’s radio program Music Time in Africa to new audiences. Conway and Askew contextualize the issues associated with providing access to cultural heritage resources, and conclude with a proposal for a proactive strategy for online dissemination. Approaching the topic of repatriation of cultural heritage from another angle, Diane Thram, from the International Library of African Music in South Africa, articulates the effort that she and her colleagues undertook to hand-deliver (or, digitally return) recorded copies of performances to musicians across the African continent. Beginning with Uganda, and then Kenya, Thram and colleagues located performers and descendents from recordings made by Hugh Tracey and coordinated visits to return and re-study the music and performances that had been recorded more than 50 years ago with musicians in these locales. Together, these two articles offer a thorough glimpse into the theory and practice of post-colonial archival practice. Reformulating a talk that was delivered at this year’s IASA conference in Berlin, Gisa Jähnichen of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China, along with colleagues Ahmad Faudzi Musib (Malaysia), Thongbang Homsombat (Laos), Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegooda (Sri Lanka), and Xiao Mei (China), take a close look at the successes and failures they see in the small-scale audiovisual archives where they work in China, Malaysia, Laos, and Sri Lanka. The work of these authors lays a foundation for conversations about how to ensure that audiovisual archives maintain living networks and continue to develop capacity within and outside of the archives themselves. If smaller archives in Asia are to sustain themselves in the digital present, what are the key issues that must be addressed? And, what can archives in other regions of the world learn from this study? The remaining articles in this issue move from questions of the management of archives, to technical questions about the digital infrastructures and digital formats that we are facing in audiovisual archives today. Silvester Stöger, from NOA in Austria, looks at the needs of broadcast archives with regard to production and preservation workflows, describing the values of an archive asset management system that can integrate with other business systems in a broadcast environment. Iain Richardson, from Vcodex, Ltd. in the UK, illustrates the lossy process of data reduction as a compression technique in digital video, offering insight into quantitative and qualitative methods to compare quality in digital video objects. From the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Valerie Love describes the changes that the acquisition of born-digital content, specifically oral history content, has brought to the archive’s standard operating procedures. Wrapping up this issue, Ariane Gervásio, from the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Archives, challenges readers to re-imagine the concept of personal memories in today’s transmedia world, where traditional concepts of content and media—e.g., a song exists as a single recording in a single place—must be understood as a multifarious entity, perhaps existing initially as a video posted to one web platform, yet then interacted with by users in another web platform, leaving a complex trail of engagement that ultimately constitutes the object that will be collected by an archive. Are we, as audiovisual archivists, ready to conceive of contemporary born-digital content in this way? Do we have a choice? I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the contents of this Issue, as well as on the future of the IASA Journal. Bertram Lyons, CAIASA Editor

By the 12th century, coffee was extensively cultivated in Yemen, and qawha and cahveh, hot beverages made from roast and ground coffee beans, became popular in the Islamic world over the next 300 years. Commercial production of coffee outside Yemen started in Sri Lanka in the 1660s, Java in the 1700s, and Latin America in 1715, and this production has associations with histories of colonial expansion and slavery. Introduced to Europe in the 17th century, coffee was described by Robert Burton in the section of his 1628 Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to medicines as “an intoxicant, a euphoric, a social and physical stimulant, and a digestive aid” (quoted in Weinberg and Bealer xii). Today, more than 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed each year. Coffee is also an ingredient in a series of iconic dishes such as tiramisu and, with chocolate, makes up the classic mocha mix. Coffee production is widespread in tropical and sub-tropical countries and it is the second largest traded world commodity; second only to oil and petroleum. The World Bank estimates that more than 500 million people throughout the world depend on coffee for their livelihoods, and 25 million of these are coffee farmers. Unfortunately, these farmers typically live and work in substandard conditions and receive only a small percentage of the final price that their coffee is sold for. The majority of coffee farmers are women and they face additional challenges, frequently suffering from abuse, neglect, and poverty, and unable to gain economic, social, or political power in either their family’s coffee businesses or their communities. Some farm coffee under enslaved or indentured conditions, although Fair Trade regimes are offering some lessening of inequalities. At the opposite end of the scale, a small, but growing, number of high-end producers market gourmet sustainable coffee from small-scale, environmentally-aware farming operations. For many in the West today, however, coffee is not about the facts of its production; coffee is all about consumption, and is now interwoven into our contemporary cultural and social habits. Caffeine, found in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of the coffee tree, is an addictive psychoactive substance, but has overcome resistance and disapproval around the world and is now unregulated and freely available, without licence. Our gastronomic sophistication is reflected in which coffee, brewing method, and location of consumption is chosen; our fast-paced lifestyles in the range of coffee-to-go options we have; and our capitalist orientation in the business opportunities this popularity has offered to small entrepreneurs and multinational franchise chains alike. Cafés and the meeting, mingling, discussions, and relaxing that occur there while drinking coffee, are a contemporary topic of reflection and scholarship, as are the similarities and differences between the contemporary café and its earlier incarnations, including, of course, the Enlightenment coffee house. As may be expected from a commodity which has such a place in our lives, coffee is represented in many ways in the media—including in advertising, movies, novels, poetry, songs and, of course, in culinary writing, including cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers. There are specialist journals and popular serials dedicated to expounding and exploring the fine grain detail of its production and consumption, and food historians have written multiple biographies of coffee’s place in our world. So ubiquitous, indeed, is coffee, that as a named colour, it popularly features in fashion, interior design, home wares, and other products. This issue of M/C Journal invited contributors to consider coffee from any relevant angle that makes a contribution to our understanding of coffee and its place in culture and/or the media, and the result is a valuable array of illuminating articles from a diverse range of perspectives. It is for this reason that we chose an image of coffee cherries for the front cover of this issue. Co-editor Jill Adams has worked in the coffee industry for over ten years and has a superb collection of coffee images that ranges from farmers in Papua New Guinea to artfully shot compositions of antique coffee brewing equipment. In making our choice, however, we felt that Spencer Franks’s image of ripe coffee cherries at the Skybury Coffee Plantation in Far North Queensland, Australia, encapsulates the “fruitful” nature of the response to our call for articles for this issue. While most are familiar, moreover, with the dark, glossy appearance and other sensual qualities of roasted coffee beans, fewer have any occasion to contemplate just how lovely the coffee tree is as a plant. Each author has utilised the idea of “coffee” as a powerful springboard into a fascinating range of areas, showing just how inseparable coffee is from so many parts of our daily lives—even scholarly enquiry. In our first feature article, Susie Khamis profiles and interrogates the Nespresso brand, and how it points to the growing individualisation of coffee consumption, whereby the social aspect of cafés gives way to a more self-centred consumer experience. This feature valuably contrasts the way Starbucks has marketed itself as a social hub with the Nespresso boutique experience—which as Khamis explains—is not a café, but rather a club, a trademarked, branded space, predicated on highly knowledgeable and, therefore, privileged patrons. Coffee drinking is also associated with both sobriety and hangover cures, with cigarettes, late nights, and music. Our second feature, by Jon Stewart, looks at how coffee has become interwoven into our lives and imaginations through the music that we listen to—from jazz to blues to musical theatre numbers. It examines the influence of coffee as subject for performers and songwriters in three areas: coffee and courtship rituals, the stimulating effects of caffeine, and the politics of coffee consumption, claiming that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of other drugs and ubiquitous consumer goods that are often more readily associated with popular music. Diana Noyce looks at the short-lived temperance movement in Australia, the opulent architecture of the coffee palaces built in that era, what was actually drunk in them, and their fates as the temperance movement passed into history. Emma Felton lyrically investigates how “going for a coffee” is less about coffee and more about how we connect with others in a mobile world, when flexible work hours are increasingly the norm and more people are living alone than any other period in history. Felton also introducess a theme that other writers also engage with: that the café also plays a role in the development of civil discourse and civility, and plays an important role in the development of cosmopolitan civil societies. Ireland-based Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire surveys Dublin—that tea drinking city—and both the history of coffee houses and the enduring coffee culture it possesses; a coffee culture that seems well assured through a remarkable win for Ireland in the 2008 World Barista Championships. China has also always been strongly associated with tea drinking but Adel Wang introduces readers to the emerging, and unique, café and coffee culture of that country, as well as some of the proprietors who are bringing about this cultural change. Australia, also once a significant consumer of tea, shifted to a preference for coffee over a twenty year period that began with the arrival of American Servicemen in Australia during World War II. Jill Adams looks at the rise of coffee during that time, and the efforts made by the tea industry to halt its market growth. These strong links between tea and coffee are reflected in Duncan Barnes, Danielle Fusco, and Lelia Green’s thought-provoking study of how coffee is marketed in Bangladesh, another tea drinking country. Ray Oldenberg’s influential concept of the “third place” is referred to by many authors in this collection, but Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken focus on this idea. By using a study of how Polish composer, Krzysztof Penderecki, worked in his local café from 9 in the morning to noon each day, this article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. Donna Lee Brien brings us back to the domestic space with her article on how the popular media of cookery books and magazines portray how coffee was used in Australian cooking at mid-century, in the process, tracing how tiramisu triumphed over the trifle. By exploring the currently fashionable practice of “direct trade” between roasters and coffee growers Sophie Sunderland offers a fresh perspective on coffee production by powerfully arguing that feeling (“affect”) is central to the way in which coffee is produced, represented and consumed in Western mass culture. Sunderland thus brings the issue full circle and back to Khamis’s discussion, for there is much feeling mobilised in the marketing of Nespresso. We would like to thank all the contributors and our generous and erudite peer reviewers for their work in the process of putting together this issue. We would also like to specially thank Spencer Franks for permission to use his image of coffee cherries as our cover image. We would lastly like to thank you the general editors of M/C Journal for selecting this theme for the journal this year.References Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001.Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K Bealer. The World of Caffeine. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. Sep. 2016 <http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/cave-temples-dunhuang-buddhist-art-chinas-silk-road>.Stromberg, Joseph. “Video: Take a Virtual 3D Journey to Visit China's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Smithsonian, December 2012. Sep. 2016 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/video-take-a-virtual-3d-journey-to-visit-chinas-caves-of-the-thousand-buddhas-150897910/?no-ist>.Tian, Qing. “Recent Trends in Buddhist Music Research in China.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3 (1994): 63–72.Tuohy, Sue M.C. “Imagining the Chinese Tradition: The Case of Hua’er Songs, Festivals, and Scholarship.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 1988.Wade, Bonnie C. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Wong, Isabel K.F. “From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. Eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 37–55.Wu, Chengen. Journey to the West. Tranlsated by W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003.Wu, David Y.H. “Chinese National Dance and the Discourse of Nationalization in Chinese Anthropology.” The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia. Eds. Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco, and J.S. Eades. New York: Berghahn, 2004. 198–207.Xuanzang. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Hamburg: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research, 1997.Yung, Bell, Evelyn S. Rawski, and Rubie S. Watson, eds. Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.