| Abstract
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Music was the site through which I explored the social, cultural, and expressive life of a Muslim minority group in the Philippines, the Magindanao. Their diverse musical genres served as loci through which I examined how local and global influences play a role in shaping Magindanaon cultural production and musical praxis. These five common but distinct musical genres are kulintang (gong-drum) music, dayunday (songduel) performances, "Moro" songs about the separatist rebellion, unaccompanied folksongs, and Indonesian Islamic-themed karaoke videos (qasidah and sholawat). Influences in each genre I investigated flow through metropoles, between margins, with and without the movement of people, and through the exchange of commercially available media. Muslim Filipinos, including the Magindanao, are commonly regarded as more "traditional" than the larger Christian Filipino population, that is, they are believed to resist modern cultural influences, especially from the West. Contrary to this, I found that many genres of Magindanaon music reveal a variety of influences including American folksongs and rock, Indonesian karaoke, Arabic music, and Filipino popular music. I traced some of these diverse influences from their homeland in Mindanao, in migrant communities in Manila, and by way of overseas contract workers from the Middle East. Their music has also inspired cultural performances by Filipino Americans in the United States. The transformative processes of localization and innovation are most evident in Magindanaon musical expressions. I borrow Arjun Appadurai's notion of ethnoscapes as a way to understand how diverse and sometimes seemingly incongruous influences are localized into Magindanaon music. These examples of Magindanaon forms that indigenize foreign influences lead me to argue that the Magindanao, like the hispanicized lowland Christian Filipinos, have a long tradition of localizing outside elements and transforming them into unique expressions. The examples I analyze overturn prevailing beliefs about how Muslim cultures of the Philippines are more insular or inwardly focused than lowland Christian culture---assumptions that drive debates about the authenticity of some Philippine cultures and not others. By doing so, I call into question simple binarisms created between distinctions such as "Christian" and "Muslim," or "traditional" and "modern."
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