New Books in Anthropology27 Feb 2023

Dan DiPiero, "Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (U Michigan Press, 2022) offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term. Dan DiPiero is a musician and Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Ithaca College, soon-to-be Assistant Professor of Music Studies, UMKC Conservatory. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

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Episoder(1000)

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference

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5 Sep 56min

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

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4 Sep 58min

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

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4 Sep 55min

Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)

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3 Sep 26min

Linguistic Unease in Healthcare

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2 Sep 39min

Elizabeth Anne Davis, "Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing" (Duke UP, 2023)

In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civi...

2 Sep 1h 6min

Karin Barber, "Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early Yoruba Print Culture in Lagos, 1910–1930" (Ohio UP, 2026)

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31 Aug 43min

An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals with Matthew Engelke

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28 Aug 54min