Playing the body: female versus male elements in Aceh’s sitting song-dances with body percussion

This chapter illustrates, this is not only reflected in music; rather, music serves as a means to perform Sama Dilaut cultural identity beyond geographic frames of reference. This importance given to movement across interstices as the primary space in which cultural change takes place calls for an exploration of the usefulness of spatial theory in the analysis of musical transformation. The analysis of social and cultural space has grown into a key topic in contemporary scholarship. Social change, power, cultural resistance and many more aspects of societal dynamics have been analysed against the theorizing provided by the 'new cultural geography'. But cultural transformation is happening between spaces, in the spaces that happen to connect other spaces. Sama Dilaut music, too, both vocal and instrumental, has undergone significant transformations in the course of roughly the last century, which to some extent can be retraced.