performing passions: aesthetics and politics in an occasionally egalitarian community

This article examines nondiscursive features of a range of performance genres in Bhatgaon, a rural Fiji Indian village. These genres are located within a local social aesthetics, one combining aesthetic, ethnopsychological, and social notions and underlying verbal and musical performances alike. Considering such events in terms of their formal features as defined and evaluated by local people makes possible an audience‐focused view of performance and its efficacy. ethnography of speaking, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, ethnopsychology, overseas Indians