Bridging South America and the United States in black music research.

Just as the idea of a "Latin America" as a symbolic construction of general identity is politically problematic, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of musical boundaries and borders within it is equally perplexing. Latin-American scholars have insisted upon setting boundaries of musical traditions according to the existing social stratification at a given time and space. greatest in quantity have perceived those traditions in a four-part original of stratification: "primitive" traditional indigenous communities, folk-rural-peasant collections urban popular mestizo groups, and dominating elite urban clusters The basic difficulties with of that kind a criterion of classification are that stratification is not fixed and stable and that sociocultural or ethnic