| This dissertation is a transdisciplinary study of play and performance among indigenous Miskitu children living on Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Methodological and analytical tools of ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology are fused with the conceptual framework of interculturality, as it has developed in indigenous education movements and the social sciences in Latin America. Interculturality, as a descriptive term and an applied project, highlights the interdependence of social groups and the ways that boundaries are continually constructed within and between them. In this framework, expressive practices such as music, movement, language, and dress are not pre-given foundations of cultural difference, but rather the dialogic tools through which differences are enacted in historically shaped fields of interlocution.; It is in everyday social interaction that children begin the lifelong processes of affiliation and differentiation in various contexts of belonging. These processes are foregrounded in a multi-ethnic, multilingual community such as Corn Island, which has undergone dramatic economic and social changes in the past twenty five years, and where the boundaries between social groups are contested and redrawn in ongoing struggles over material and symbolic resources. The core of the dissertation is based on transcriptions and analyses of Miskitu children's informal peer-group activities on Corn Island, organized around the genres of spirit narratives, vocal play, song games, and pretend play. The study also includes an analysis of formal rituals and staged performances in the institutional domains of children's learning, especially schools, churches, and civic events, which help connect the intimate particularities of the family and the peer group to larger histories and political structures. Recurring themes include the centrality of aesthetic modalities of expression in intercultural communication, the relations between children's expressive practices and communications media, and the gendering of various modes of social belonging. In both formal and informal contexts of children's interaction, complex, multi-layered, and continually emergent subjectivities are forged in the intercultural practices of border-making and border-crossing. |
