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She Plays the Pipe
Galician Female Bagpipers in the Production of Local Tradition and Gender Identity
INTRODUCTION
In the extreme northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia has remained for centuries isolated from its neighboring communities, due to its rough terrain and underdeveloped communications systems. As a result, progress and modernity arrived there later, allowing the survival of interesting cultural practices, including some anachronistic remnants and demographic constrictions, although not necessarily deterrents of the contemporary emergence of female pipers studied in this chapter. In fact, the gender marker was reified in unique ways around the instrument assumed as soul par excellence of the Galician ...