Contextual Theory, or Theorizing between the Discursive and the Material

How can ethnography and music theory and analysis richly inform one another? One way is to incorporate the words and concepts used by high-level practitioners to build a theoretical scaffolding—to build an analytic framework that stems directly from those words and concepts. This essay develops three theoretical concept-spaces from key words used by the samba and Candomblé communities in Brazil: ritmo, balanço, and circularidade. Rather than attempting to practice “analytic ventriloquism” by suggesting that practitioners thematize their own practices in the ways developed here, it carefully uses these words as entry points into a constellation of original, creative theoretical positions.