Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

This book explains every bit of our traditions and customs that our community lives with, But mainly our Weddings which are a very very complex events.

I would like to thank Jane C Sugarman strongly on a great peice of work done which included years of research, On behalf of all the prespa community in Australia ,Thank You Very Much


Singing at weddings connected to honor and patriarchy   February 11, 2003
Robert S. Newman (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

If you want my advice, take the first chapter of this book very lightly. Get the background information on the Prespa Albanian community in southern Macedonia and how they have emigrated to North America, Australia and parts of western Europe, but unless you're an extremely serious student of anthropology, skip the array of references to Foucault, Bourdieu, and other "heavies". You don't need them. They're in there to show intellectual dexterity and because when you write a Ph.D thesis you do need stuff like that. I dreaded reaching Chapter 8, entitled "Emergent Subjectivities" thinking it would be more jargon and barely-relevant theories. When I got there, I was happy and relieved to find that it was about "cultural change in a new environment" and well worth reading. That is what I would say about this whole book. It is a really excellent ethnography in the modern style. Sugarman takes weddings and the songs performed at them and reads the whole as a "text" in which Prespa Albanians are saying something to themselves about life, about their `world view'. Their identity is learned, maintained, and even transformed through the medium of song. While many authors claim that they are going to present such a "text" in their studies, many fall short. I felt that Sugarman succeeds. There are a number of useful photographs, the texts and notes of many songs, and a CD. Some tracks of the CD are like amateur wedding videos, but illustrative nonetheless. A few can be listened to with pleasure by anyone with a love of Balkan music.

Prespa Albanian social life conforms to strict patterns, a web of mutual obligations not tossed aside lightly. Your status depends on how you fulfill your social obligations. Until recently, visiting and gregarious behavior dominated social life. Weddings were the crown jewels in this pattern, so Prespa behavior at weddings presented meaningful patterns in their most intense form. The "order" or arrangement of behavior found there---in greeting, seating, food served, dress, modest (female) or exuberant (male) attitudes, rituals undertaken, and most especially, the singing of a vast repertoire of songs in polyphonic mode---establishes social identity. "Honorable behavior on the part of all household members is the precondition for membership in the moral community". [p.197] This is hardly unique to the Balkans, but Sugarman examines the central identities of Prespa life---patrilineal household, gender, generations, plus kin and friends---and how the underlying core values of honor and moral order are connected to music. She links the whole system to ideas of honor found throughout the eastern Mediterranean. ENGENDERING SONG is thus a work of ethnomusicology that strongly connects intellectual traditions of mainstream anthropology with the realm of a specific musical culture. By the time Sugarman writes that singing has "served the community as an activity that integrates and embodies their various understandings of `honor' perhaps more succinctly than any other." [p.225] that "to participate in wedding singing is to engage in a process of `engendering'" [p.253] and "singing is for Prespare the discourse par excellence of patriarchy." [p.282] we fully understand what she is talking about. In diaspora, economic status has begun to replace honor as the basis of social relations. The process is laid out very clearly.

ENGENDERING SONG presents an extremely thorough, convincing picture of a particular community. While the detail may be far more than you want to know, I recommend you read it not only for any love of Albanian culture, but as an example of an excellent study in ethnomusicology.


good detail   December 31, 2002
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Interesting book on a small community. This book is well written and moves well. This is not for a person just wanting to breeze through some basic information about Albanians. For a person interested in research about the balkans and looking for greater detail this book is a good buy.


great book   May 25, 2007
Sylvia Lik (Long Island, NY)
being an albanian, id say this book is dead on. albanian weddings are great, but wierd for sure..people would be shocked to know thats a wedding not a huge party.