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People in many societies intuitively recognize the emotional power of music in their personal, family, and community life. If ethnomusicologists have come to agree on anything over the last decade it is that music is a key resource for realizing personal and collective identities which, in turn, are crucial for social, political, and economic participation. These observations are integrally related, and they form the basis of the central question for musicology: "Why music?"
Like the habitus, identities are at once individual and social; they are the affective intersection of life experiences variably salient in any given instance. Identity is comprised of what we know best about our relations to self, others, and the world, and yet is often constituted of the things we are least able to talk about. Identity is grounded in multiple ways of knowing with affective and direct experiential knowledge often being paramount. The crucial link between identity formation and arts like music lies in the specific semiotic character of these activities which make them particularly affective and direct ways of knowing.
Recent scholars of ethnomusicology have succeeded in illustrating the intimate interfaces of sound structures, social structures, and identity (e.g. Seeger 1980, 1986; Pena 1985; Feld 1988; Pacini Hernandez 1995; Sugarman 1997). It seems to me that the challenge for the next generation is to develop a theory of music in relation to what is usually called "emotion"our inadequate gloss for that mammoth realm of human experience that falls outside language-based thinking and communication. Such a theory is necessary if we are to move beyond mere description of the central roles music and dance play in collective events ranging from spirit possession ceremonies, mass nationalist rallies, and weddings, to the teen dances taking place on a Friday night.
My purpose in this paper is to begin sketching a theory of music, emotion, and identity based on the semiotics of the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). The semiotic tools discussed are applicable to all expressive practices; here I will focus on music, dance, and propositional language with the understanding that other expressive media have their own unique qualities and capacities and require some separate analysis and application. Initially, Peircian semiotic theory is daunting for the amount of new terminology...