Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

Through shared music, people claim and bring to life diverse, overlapping, and situational identities. Music has special resonance for indigenous peoples making valiant efforts to keep their languages, spirituality, and rituals alive, and for post-Soviet groups proclaiming state-level national identities. The articles featured here represent varied approaches to this issue. Ethnonational identities vie with other kinds of expressions of self-worth and beauty. Music both transcends ethnic boundaries and stimulates ethnic identity. Three of the four articles in this issue came to me as original manuscripts sent by their authors within the past year, beginning with the delightful unsolicited article by Oksana Dobzhanskaia. The book chapter by the dean of ethnomusicologists, Eduard Alekseev, is a classic I have long wanted to publicize in English. The theme of music and identity has been chosen to complement our recent issue (vol. 54, no. 3) “Art, Identity, and Ethnicity.” The lead article, by ethnomusicologist and veteran fieldworker Oksana Eduardovna Dobzhanskaya, plunges us into the archaic world of music as natural sound, the building blocks of early music, which have implications for common circumpolar shamanic cultural roots. The cultural-linguistic group highlighted in the article are Samodeic speakers, once called infelicitously in the literature and by linguists “Samoyedic [literally Self-Eater].” They are the West Siberian Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, and Sel’kup in Dobzhanskaya’s text. The Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia, vol. 55, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–6. © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1061-1959 (print)/ISSN 1558-092X (online) DOI: 10.1080/10611959.2016.1274951