In the search of the social meaning of song, Songs and Gifts at the Frontier connects the performativity of ritual song to important cultural domains such as political economy and history. Song, it is argued, expresses notions of sociability, personhood, and subjectivity; it is more intelligible when understood as constitutive of material practices of everyday-life and local histories.
José S. Buenconsejo argues that song in the egalitarian moral economy is sacrificial, that is, it articulates the act of sharing in which performativity is akin to movements or flows of binding and unbinding of presences, affinity and estrangement, life and death that so characterize interpersonal relationships, nature and social life.