"World music" emerged as a commercial and musical category in the 1980s, but in some sense music has always been global. Through the metaphor of encounters, Music and Globalization explores the dynamics that enable or hinder cross-cultural communication through music. In the stories told by the contributors, we meet well-known players such as David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Ry Cooder, Fela Kuti, and Gilberto Gil, but also lesser-known characters such as the Senegalese Afro-Cuban singer Laba Sosseh and Raramuri fiddle players from northwest Mexico. This collection demonstrates that careful historical and ethnographic analysis of global music can show us how globalization operates and what, if anything, we as consumers have to do with it.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rethinking Globalization through Music / Bob W. White

Part 1. Structured Encounters
1. The Musical Heritage of Slavery: From Creolization to "World Music" / Denis-Constant Martin
2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: "World Music" and the Commodification of Religious Experience / Steven Feld
3. A Place in the World: Globalization, Music, and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Vanuatu / Philip Hayward
4. Musicality and Environmentalism in the Rediscovery of Eldorado: An Anthropology of the Raoni-Sting Encounter / Rafael José de Menezes Bastos

Part 2. Mediated Encounters
5. "Beautiful Blue": Rarámuri Violin Music in a Cross-Border Space / Daniel Noveck
6. World Music Producers and the Cuban Frontier / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
7. Trovador of the Black Atlantic: Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban Music / Richard M. Shain

Part 3. Imagined Encounters
8. Slave Ship on the Infosea: Contaminating the System of Circulation / Barbara Browning
9. World Music Today / Timothy D. Taylor
10. The Promise of World Music: Strategies for Non-Essentialist Listening / Bob W. White

Index
Contributors