Objectives

FY2001
North American musicological research on South Asian music and performing arts during the 1980s saw a shift from the musicology methods that had prevailed previously to research that emphasized an anthropological perspective. Since that time, such research has incorporated interests in a wide variety of issues related to gender, historicity, culture production, and diasporas. Nevertheless, in Japan even until now we cannot say that scholarly interchanges between researchers with a background in musicology and anthropologists with an interest in music and the performing arts have been adequate. Consequently such research has stagnated. In this joint research, by mutually investigating using the research methods and methodology of all members, we aim to set a new course that will fuse musicology with cultural anthropology. This work should also reconfirm the special characteristics of South Asian music and performing arts for Japan, and establish a process for us to search for possibilities for a unique research perspective.