Collective singing is not decoration laid on top of a community; it is one of the things that makes the community exist. When people sing together in a shared space, a scattered set of separate households becomes, for that time, a single village, and silence gives way to shared euphoria.
Becoming a full social person can be something done through performance, not only something that happens with age. In an initiation ceremony, learning and performing the right songs is part of how a boy is remade as a socialized adult with a recognized place.
Ceremonial singing helps form how a people think about time, space and who they are. Who sings what, in what manner, to which audience, at which place and moment, is patterned by the social order, and that patterning teaches people how their world is arranged.
Music does not stop at ritual; a people can carry it into conflicts with outsiders who threaten their land. Singing and performance kept serving as a way to assert identity and press their case against cattle ranchers and soybean farmers.