The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India

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A black cow leads the Kota people to the Nilgiri Hills and, with its hoof, indicates where to found each village. The black cow' footprint is a moral center of gravity, an important place for music-making, dancing, and other rituals. Places such as this, and moments in time, serve as physical and moral "anchors." In exploring "at a variety of cultural and social levels, this book demonstrates that musical processes participate in some of the same forms of cultural and social production as do performances of ritual, agriculture, time reckoning, and everyday movements and speech. The common denominator is a set of spatiotemporal forms and representations, which serve as maps or traces of the processes by which communities constitute their group identity and individual subjectivities. This book is targeted towards ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, scholars of religion and Asian Studies, and those interested in spacetime theories, the Nilgiris, and groups hitherto classified as tribal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard K. Wolf

Richard K. Wolf is the Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Music Department at Harvard University. He has devoted his professional career as an ethno-musicologist to the study of South Asia's diverse musical traditions, ranging from the folk, tribal and classical musics to South India to the ritual drumming traditions of Pakistan, Wolf, a disciple of Ranganayaki Rajagopalan, also teaches and Performs the South Indian classical vina.