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Using Indian classical music as a site of transparency, the authors critically examine how the fields of ethnomusicology and performance studies approach performance. Responding to the (dis)placement of music scholarship within the framework of virtuosity, the authors treat generational frictions that exist between their disciplines not as oppositional or antagonistic, but as opportunities to maximize scholarly engagement between both fields. The authors propose decentering music scholarship from traditional milieux of authority, in an effort to contextualize imperfect participatory performances of multiculturally emplaced subjects and scholars. This essay is concluded with some pragmatic directions that come out of the critiques highlighted therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of ‘localness’ within the subculture of electronic music tourism in Goa, India. Localness as observed through the affective lenses of familiarity, affinity and belonging, emerges as a performative expression of group cohesion, suggesting that the ‘local’, like the ‘nomad’, occupies a transient and shifting relationship with physical and ideological space. Ethnographic observations and thick descriptions articulate a composite of ‘localness’ in the tourist landscape, showing the various ways in which localness emerges as a cultivated affect, tradable commodity and, most significantly, as an ethnographic methodology. The article concludes by arguing that ‘localness’, while being employed by tourists and locals within the political economy of a subculture, also enables a nomadic subjectivity for the ethnographer, whose work is to traverse familiar and unfamiliar research environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]