126
generally negative light in hip-hop.
However, with the rise of Senator Obama
to President Obama hip-hop gained an ally
in the White House. Jeffries dissects
Obamas presidency and its place in hip-
hop, and vice versa, with a fine-toothed
comb on all sides. At the time of writing
this review, less than a year remains in
President Obamas final term in office. The
American presidential election machine is
in full throttle, and the pundits predic-
tions that were made at the time this collec-
tion was published have been obliterated.
Jeffries hesitates before making any predic-
tions about Obamas hip-hop sensitivities
affecting other parts of the American politi-
cal sphere, particularly as the demograph-
ics of the American vote become younger
and browner. He writes,
It is tempting to look at the current land-
scape and conclude that hip-hop-fueled
moral panic appeals will soon disappear,
not only due to demographic shifts in
the electorate, but because hip-hop styles
and sensibilities suffuse across all forms
of consumer culture. It is equally tempt-
ing to look at the Obama model and con-
servatives attempt to copy it, and predict
that hip-hop will be further incorporated
into mainstream politics in the current
election cycles. But such predictions are
faulty, because they rely on a static,
monolithic notion of hip-hop culture.
The unpredictability of hip-hops future
political location is not a sign of weak-
ness or of insignificance. It is a testament
to the power of hip-hop as a form of com-
munication and cultural toolkit for exam-
ining and shaping the world. (p. 324)
The death of scholar Adam Krims was a
great loss for hip-hop scholarship and its
community, but his legacy and influence
are alive and well in the Cambridge Com-
panion to Hip-Hop. The multidisciplinary ap-
proach of the study offers insight into is-
sues in hip-hop that a purely traditional
musicological methodology could not pro-
vide. It is a worthy addition to hip-hop
scholarship, while firmly pushing bound-
aries of inquiry, and is successful in its in-
tent to complement the seminal pieces of
hip-hop literature.
Brandi A. Neal
Coastal Carolina University
Notes, September 2016
Hopi Katsina Songs. Edited by Emory
Sekaquaptewa, Kenneth C. Hill, and
Dorothy K. Washburn. Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 2015. [xi,
421 p. ISBN 9780803262881. $65.]
Hopi transcriptions (with English
translations), appendices, bibliogra-
phy, index.
Emory Sekaquaptewa (19282007) was a
Hopi linguist, anthropologist, and tribal
judge who dedicated much of his life to
preserving Hopi culture and language.
Among his numerous contributions as re-
searcher, educator, and steward of Hopi
knowledge, the most well-known is the Hopi
Dictionary Project, for which he served as
Cultural Editor. The project was a decade-
long initiative funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities under-
taken in partnership with the University of
Arizona, which culminated with the land-
mark publication of the Hopi Dictionary =
Hopikwa lavytutuveni: a HopiEnglish dictio-
nary of the Third Mesa dialect with an
EnglishHopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi
grammar (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1998). Hopi Dictionary, a systematic
compendium of Third Mesa dialect, fea-
tures some 30,000 entries and a sketch of
Hopi grammar, and has since been
adopted by the Hopi people as the stan-
dard guide for teaching the language. Hopi
Katsina Songs, edited by Sekaquaptewa
along with Kenneth C. Hill and Dorothy K.
Washburn, is a crucial extension of the
Hopi Dictionary Project (which Hill also
edited) that will remain valuable for schol-
ars working with the rich heritage of
archived Hopi songs. Like the Dictionary,
the present volume is not meant, as the edi-
tors themselves indicate, to be read down
from front to back (p. 38); instead, it pre-
sents 150 songs drawn from seven separate
archival collections, annotated individually
with word-by-word translations (done by
Sekaquaptewa, who also contributed 25
songs) and explanatory comments (pro-
vided by Washburn) illuminating each
songs metaphorical meanings as they re-
late to larger themes in Hopi cosmology. As
such, folklorists and ethnomusicologists
will find in this book an important textual
guide to accompany extant archival record-
ings of Hopi katsina songs found in a num-
ber of individual and public collections.
Book Reviews
To a broader readership, this book will
provide an attractive point of entry into un-
derstanding the value systems and objects
that comprise Hopi cultural patrimony
katsina songs are, in essence, oral texts that
describe the core beliefs of the Hopi life-
way and how they should be followed
(p. 19). Katsinas (also commonly known as
kachinas) are perfect life-promoting
spirit beings who, in Hopi belief, travel
from their homes, from the four cardinal
directions in the Fifth World in the form of
clouds or rain, to Hopi villages in the pres-
ent (Fourth) World (p. 1). Their appear-
ances at festivals, gatherings, and ritual
dances align with key times in the cultiva-
tion cycle of corn, and the songs them-
selves, as the present volume so richly de-
tails, delineate myriad aspects of the
metaphors that connect contemporary
Hopi culture to the past.
The songs in the book are taken from
recordings that span the first half of the
twentieth century, in addition to those con-
tributed by Sekaquaptewa himself. The ear-
liest recorded katsina songs, from the
Natalie Curtis Burlin collection, date from
1903. Sekaquaptewa attempted to translate
recordings made in the 1890s by Jesse
Walter Fewkes, but the degraded sound
quality of those examples prevented any
meaningful translation. The most recent
recordings, made by ethnomusicologist
George List, date from 1960. In sum, the
main goal of katsina songs is to instill and
reinforce a positive, productive, and moral
community-based lifeway. Corn, as is well
known, is the key metaphor to Hopi life. It
forms the subject of many of the songs tran-
scribed here, and the various aspects of its
progenitive, sustaining propertiesas well
as the important lessons in morals and
ethics embodied in the corn lifewayare
voiced evocatively and sensually in
Sekaquaptewas translations.
The editors, in anticipating any possible
charges of impropriety for disseminating or
reproducing culturally-sensitive or re-
stricted material, make the disclaimer right
away that katsina song are, by and large,
public texts, not limited to Hopi audiences.
Indeed, they are relevant for all hu-
mankind (p. 1), although it is doubtful
that such universality will be found in the
subtle, beautiful, and multilayered nuances
of the song texts. Without the explanations
following each of the translationsthe util-
127
ity of which cannot be overstatedthe
songs themselves are, in their unsounded
depictions in text, fragmentary, revealing
the symbological complexities of rain, corn,
and other elemental properties, image by
image. Ambiguity, as the editors note, helps
distinguish metaphor from the rigid associ-
ations of symbolism in the Western sense,
so there is no direct correlation of verbal/
oral image to a specific code, value, or epis-
temological object (p. 26). For example,
song 69, Angaktsntawi (one of the many
dozen Long-Hair katsina songs found in
each of the collections) in its entirety trans-
lates as:
We,
we have been prepared
over there in the southeast at Weenima.
There we adorned ourselves with the
corn maidens of the different kinds
and with the different kinds of the rain
lines.
From there we have come in dance to
you.
(Vocables.)
(Words in some other language, perhaps
Zuni.)
(Vocables.) (pp. 16768)
This is one of the more succinct mes-
sages to listeners whose fulsome interpre-
tation relies on a lifelong participation in
Hopi life that allows for a parsing of regu-
lar and particularly meaningful song words
(p. 23). Since each song, its translation,
and its annotation by Washburn are pre-
sented as discrete texts, there is perhaps a
slight impasse that generalist readers will
have to navigate in gleaning a more mean-
ingful understanding of how they collec-
tively articulate Hopi worldviews.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Hopi
Katsina Songsi.e. its versatile multiuse for-
mat outlined in the relatively autonomous
nature of each of its sections: introduction;
song translations, organized by collection
and katsina type; and appendices dealing
with linguistic comments, compound words
in the songs, and a general glossarymight
also be one of its weaknesses. It is a book
whose intended readership never quite
comes into focus. Ethnomusicologists will
find this to be a handy reference manual
for drawing connections between song style
and lyrical content, given that the sample
base is substantial; they may, however, take
issue with the lack of information about
128
who sang which song, what the conditions
of inscription to wax or tape were, and
most importantly, what the omissions are in
repeated vocable sections (Sekaquaptewa
purposely left that out). The kinds of par-
ticularities that typify the sometimes tense
encounters between ethnographer/field
recordist and singer are glossed here, and
these would absolutely be points of
methodological focus for researchers
especially pertaining to, for example, songs
from Helen Roberts collection, which were
made somewhere, sometime during the
1920s (pp. 3435). Equally, save for the
brief note on transcription and translation
issues found on pages 34447 as part of the
considerable appendices, music researchers
may not find themselves spending much
time reading the final third of the book.
Linguistic anthropologists, on the other
hand, will perhaps find less use in the con-
cise exposition of the book, which master-
fully introduces, in just 35 pages, key tenets
of Hopi culture, and instead gravitate to-
ward the glossary, or each songs word-by-
word breakdown.
Despite the handful of quibbles listed
above, this book is unquestionably a mas-
sive accomplishment, and its merit as a win-
dow into the beauty of Hopi language can
be immediately discerned by leafing
through the songs, lingering on Seka-
quaptewas fluid translations line by line,
just as the editors intend. The biggest im-
pediment to making full use of the exten-
sive recordings of Hopi song comes with
the seemingly intractable divide of linguis-
tic competency amongst contemporary
scholars. Hopi Katsina Songs commendably
bridges that gap, as every song is presented
as a case study, in microcosm, of Third
Mesa speech, syntax, and its conversable
equivalent in English. As part of Seka-
quaptewas lifelong effort to provide tools
for the revitalization of the language (p.
334), the book complements not only the
Hopi Dictionary, but also his recent (and
posthumous) articles about katsina songs
with Maria Glowacka (The Metaphorical
Dimensions of Hopi Ethics, Journal of the
Southwest 51, no. 2 [Summer 2009]: 165
85) and Dorothy Washburn (They Go Along
Singing : Reconstructing the Hopi Past from
Ritual Metaphors in Song and Image,
American Antiquity 69, no. 3 [ July 2004]:
45786). In the spirit Sekaquaptewa in-
Notes, September 2016
tended, the volume is not meant to be a
critical interpretation of the song texts
such would be qa hopi (not Hopi, p. xi)
but for Hopi youth wanting to understand
katsina songs in a deeper historical context
as heritage language learners, it will remain
a critical text for generations to come.
Jeremy Strachan
Ryerson University
The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-
Three Discussions. By Bruno Nettl. 3d
ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2015. [xiii, 560 p. ISBN
9780252039287 (hardcover), $95;
ISBN 9780252080821 (paperback),
$30; ISBN 9780252097331 (e-book),
various.] Bibliography, index.
Bruno Nettls The Study of Ethnomusi-
cology: Thirty-Three Discussions (2015) is a re-
vised edition of The Study of Ethnomusicology:
Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (2005), which
was an updated version of his 1983 The
Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues
and Concepts. Popularly known as The Red
Book, the text has thirty-three essays that
Nettl no longer refers to as concepts and is-
sues, but rather as discussions. This edition
is substantively revised, presenting closely-
and well-edited versions of previously pre-
sented chapters with updates to reflect re-
cent developments and concerns in the
field. Most chapters are refashioned from
the previous edition; a few have entirely
new information. The Study, regardless of
the edition, is a standard introductory text
in many ethnomusicology courses on the
history and development of the discipline.
It is an amazing repository of information
recounted from texts and other sources, as
well as from Nettls own work and personal
interpretations of events, relationships,
ideas, directions, and experiences over the
course of the history of the discipline.
Nettls third excursion in The Study of
Ethnomusicology divides the manuscript into
six parts. The first five parts are revised, re-
worked, updated, and reorganized from
the previous editions four parts. The sixth
part has new materials. While the number
of chapters in each section is unevenly dis-
tributed, they hold together well in their
units: Part I has three chapters, Parts II, III,