Music is at the heart of both self-expression and interpersonal communication.
It is a bearer of identity as much as it is a way of interacting with other people, near and far. Such are the general hypotheses that inspired the production of this special edition of Ethnologies. Readers will perhaps be interested to know that this issue marks the end of a research project that we initiated a few years ago on the highly topical question of the expression of identity in the context of globalization. If there is a single conclusion that emerges from these works, it is that current processes of globalization by no means annihilate 'local' dynamics of the expression of identity. They do, however, play a part in bringing their meanings up to date.