Conclusion

This book has offered a series of historical and ethnographic perspectives about the concept of folk music in the Indian Himalayas. After exploring a range of performers and performances, it should be evident why I have not offered a single definition of folk music. Folk music is best understood as a multidimensional concept that has been instrumentalized by a range of individuals and communities for various political and economic ends. I have examined a century’s worth of engagements with the folk concept as the outcome of two intertwined processes, one revivalist (turning dying folk into living folk) and the other rhizophonic (separating the folk sound from the folk body). Although each of these processes has been discussed to some extent in scholarship concerning invented traditions, music revivals, and modernist reformism, they have not previously been theorized as processes inherent to folklorization....