Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music

gists have come to agree on anything over the last decade it is that music is a key resource for realizing personal and collective identities which, in turn, are crucial for social, political, and economic participation. These observations are integrally related, and they form the basis of the central question for musicology: Why music? Like the habitus, identities are at once individual and social; they are the affective intersection of life experiences variably salient in any given instance. Identity is comprised of what we know best about our relations to self, others, and the world, and yet is often constituted of the things we are least able to talk about. Identity is grounded in multiple ways of knowing with affective and direct experiential knowledge often being paramount. The crucial link between identity formation and arts like music lies in the specific semiotic character of these activities which make them particularly affective and direct ways of knowing. Recent scholars of ethnomusicology have succeeded in illustrating the