ABSTRACT
The very idea of a contest might seem inimical to cultivating community. However, music competitions are curiously egalitarian: They offer lesser musicians space and time on stage that they might not otherwise have because we need someone for the eventual victors to have beaten. The sporting aspect offers its own interest and often provides an anchor for a broadly based festival. Quite a variety of events draw like-interested populations out of the impersonal crowding of modern life and provide weekend communities that claim affiliation with one or another attractively reimagined past. The two case studies explored in this essay, which can stand for dozens more, document a Native American powwow in Mississippi and a fiddle contest in Northern Alabama.
