Anthropology of Music Research Paper

1. Music As Culture And The Mediation Of Social Process

Ethnomusicologists in the past have tended to treat music as somehow separate from culture, almost as a thing in itself. They assumed that culture was separated into different spheres such as politics, economics etc., each of which could be brought into some sort of relationship with music. According to one approach inspired by British social anthropology, ethnomusicology was the ‘study of music in culture’ (Merriam 1964) with culture being little more than some illdefined social context and music having the function of somehow maintaining the coherence of society. Another approach, modeled on the ideas of Ruth Benedict among others, saw each society as being constructed around a fundamental principle or pattern which was then imparted to various cultural realms such as religion, art, music, etc. Thus, Charles Keil, in a classic study of African music, found among the Tiv of Nigeria an ‘expressive grid’ that manifested itself in the circles, patterns, and structures of Tiv handicrafts, architecture, and song (Keil 1979).

More recently, scholars have begun to study music as culture. Influenced by the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz and what has been called the ‘interpretive turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, researchers are increasingly thinking about music not so much as a secondary reflection of a more essential social structure or reality than itself being a social activity mediating other social processes. Instead of gaining its meaning by somehow becoming part of a context, music itself is a context through which other forms of activity, equally primary, achieve meaning (Herndon and McLeod 1981).

This new direction had two major consequences for the anthropological study of music. The first is that music makers and their music become dynamic forces, actively intervening in the shaping of cultures that are no longer seen as more or less coherent totalities or realities. The focus on culture as a heterogeneous field of conflicting forces shifts the attention from music as a product, a static expression of collective identity—as in ‘the music of the Zulu,’ ‘music in village X,’ etc.—to music as a process, as a mediating agent in the overall process of cultural negotiation. Or, as prominent British ethnomusicologist John Blacking put it, music was not only ‘humanly organized sound,’ but also ‘soundly organized humanity’ (Blacking 1973).

The second consequence concerns the nature of scholarly discourse and knowledge about ‘other’ musics. For the reformulated, critical disciplines truth could no longer be something that was be found from a neutral and distanced position. Following Edward Said’s argument in his seminal book Orientalism (1979) the point of scholarship is not to deliver the ‘true’ Other. Difference can no longer denote the distance between cultures such as the West and the Orient, just as it no longer refers back to an overarching scholarly (presumably Western and objective) frame of reference. Rather, difference, in the new disciplines, means the interplay of a multitude of competing and juxtaposed discourses. An example of this approach is Martin Stokes’s study of Turkish arabesk music (1992). This style of music popular with the marginalized urban masses is more than the result of the stylistic development of Turkish folk music. It is part of a ‘cultural field’ in which different musical styles are best understood as ‘different ways of talking about music’ ( p. 50).

2. Music As Discourse And The Nature Of Musical Meaning

The third consequence, finally, of the ‘interpretive turn’ in ethnomusicology is the idea that musical meaning is no longer seen as being intrinsic to its sonic structure—a viewpoint still prevalent in musicology. Rather musical meaning, like the meaning of a novel or a poem, materializes only in the act of experiencing music. Like a ‘text’ a piece of music must be ‘read.’ And just like the meanings of a written text are the result of a multiplicity of discourses that include the author’s own voice, the meanings of a musical performance are constantly changing and emergent, depending on the social structures and power relationships they help to define. The shift in musical scholarship from structural analysis to the interpretation of music as discourse occurred parallel to another significant development in anthropology and sociology in the 1970s: the emergence of theories and ethnographies of performance. On the basis of Erving Goffman’s work and Dell Hymes’s pioneering essays on the ethnography of speaking, anthropologists like Victor Turner, Richard Bauman, and James Fernandez began to examine the way in which performance contexts, events and genres shaped communication and social action.

They were followed by numerous ethnomusicologists for whom the question of music’s meanings and affective power became intimately tied to its real ‘life,’ its relations with other forms of behavior and expressive culture, the interaction between performers and their audiences, as well as the unpredictability and often improvisatory, playful nature of music making. But whereas scholars such as Turner stressed the communal, ordering functions of performance, researchers are now more interested in the potential of musical performance for prompting change and resistance.

In line with these developments, scholars have also increasingly turned to the human body as the primary site for the construction of musical meaning. While earlier studies were based on a notion of the body as a biological given and, hence, stressed the physiological aspects of music making, recent studies posit the body as a cultural phenomenon, no less susceptible to and dependent on meanings than other spheres of human practice (Muller 1999). In this light, future research will increasingly have to concentrate on specifically musical processes of socialization and the formation of selves.

3. Music And Identity

The waning appeal of discourses that take stable notions of music and culture for granted have led scholars to re-examine the relationship between identity and music in a new, rather more skeptical light. Ironically, it is because of the fact that the growing isolation of the individual in modern society has generated new forms of collective identification—new nations, ‘neo-tribes’ and new religions—that the time-honored interest in nationalism and ethnicity as the chief bases for music making has experienced something of a revival.

Of all the articulations of identity currently studied by music scholars the modern nation-state and various types of nationalist discourse have probably commanded the most attention. Although studies of small-scale, mostly rural communities remain important locales for the ethnographic study of music, it is the links between the nation-state, nationalism, and the various contestations and entanglements with the nation that have become the object of the most sustained scrutiny undertaken to date. A rich literature on the new popular musics of the ‘Third World’—and to a lesser degree on the advanced countries of the West—demonstrates how musical practices often disrupt the putatively homogeneous times and spaces of the nation-state, but at other times exist quite comfortably alongside nationalist agendas. In most cases, however, both positions blend into each other, often producing new exoticisms and articulations of racial or ethnic exclusivity. Israeli rock influenced by Arabic music, for instance, celebrates an ‘other’ quite blatantly at odds with the images of backwardness that the Israeli majority projects of the Palestinian minority, yet at the same time takes a stable ‘oriental’ identity as its reference point (Regev 1986). Conversely, some musics have also been shown to lend themselves to more pliant forms of identity. This is perhaps more typical of the conflicted relationship between the nation-state, nationalist ideology and cultural practices in diasporic communities. Thus, the music of black Americans is a product of the slaves’ encounter with the West and at the same time it has emerged in opposition to modernity (Gilroy 1993). It may thus serve as a model for what Gilroy calls anti- antiessentialism, a critique of the oppressive history and racial injuries of the ‘host’ country that refuses to let go of memories of collective identity even where it resists grounding them in a direct genealogy rooted in the African past.

In some contexts, the nation-state may also come to the rescue of cultural diversity. Tanzania, for instance, is one of several countries that have tried successfully to promote ‘national’ musics by reserving some 85 percent of the music content on its national broadcasting service for local music products. But here, as in many other cases, the definition of what counts as representative of Tanzanian culture rested in the hands of the Swahili-speaking minority dominating the state apparatus (Wallis and Malm 1992, pp. 113–14).

Race and ethnicity are perhaps the second most studied forms of identity in ethnomusicology today. Deeply intertwined with nationalism, but also often standing in opposition to nationalist discourses, racial and ethnic identities are frequently seen to be most effectively asserted in the symbolic domain, such as in music. There are many reasons for this close nexus between ethnicity and music, but one of them is the fact that assertions of racial pride are voiced from marginalized social groups whose access to other power bases such as economic wealth is limited.

Processes of class formation, by contrast, and the musical components of class consciousness have lost a great deal of their former appeal, primarily because the evidence gathered does not sustain the Marxist notion of a material base determining a suprastructure of ideology and culture. This lack of evidence was particularly pronounced in those areas where workingclass cultures with pristinely defined contours failed to develop as in much of the ‘Third World,’ or where they were about to disintegrate as was the case in most of the advanced economies of post-World War II Europe and North America. By contrast, recent years have seen a growing interest in the formation of somewhat fuzzier identities and the permeation of cultures considered to have once been ‘premodern’ with bourgeois values and practices. Under the impact of A. Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus,’ ethnomusicologists are beginning to reassess colonization and Westernization as projects that entail domination and acquiescence and that do not always occur along neatly separated lines of class or racial identity.

The notion, finally, that all identities are also gendered identities has greatly invigorated anthropological research on music and dance (Cowan 1990). Although the idea has been familiar to ethnomusicologists for some time—much more so than to musicologists whose subject always seemed to be an unquestioned male one—recent scholarship has emphasized the negotiated character of sexual identity and the way in which music intervenes in the construction of such identities (Koskoff 1987). As a recent study of the music of Maghrebian immigrants in France has shown, for example, rai performers and audiences construct complex identities around notions of sexuality, romantic love and adolescence that are inspired by Western liberal ideals of gender equality (Gross et al. 1996). At the same time these performers reproduce more traditional images of Arabness. While female singers often advocate more freedom for women, the jackets of their cassettes reproduce cliches of a more subdued kind of femininity and the ideal Arab woman.

Finally, an important focus that emerged from the current interest in identity and that undermines even further conventional notions of stable collective and individual identities—and the merely passive role of music in ‘expressing’ these—is the rather diverse set of practices circumscribed by terms such as diaspora, travel, migrancy, immigration, or displacement. In the recent past, all these practices have been dealt with to some extent by ethnomusicologists (Turino 1993), but musicologists and students of popular music have been less anxious to explore the interchange between music and the shifting boundaries of communities and audiences caused by large-scale movements of people. Furthermore, the spaces people traverse as tourists, migrants, refugees or touring musicians are all too often depicted as though they were bounded sites that are already filled with sound and much less as multiply overlapping contact zones in which identities and musics are always blurred and emergent.

4. Music And Modernization

Most scholars now agree that musics everywhere have been drawn into the maelstrom of modernization and, more often than not, have themselves become effective agents of modernization. While these scholars have as yet to arrive at a shared definition of modernization and modernity, it seems that the debate has centered on a series of intertwined issues and concepts. The first of these issues is globalization. Much of the discussion about globalization grew out of the concern with displacement and entailed a vigorous rethinking of the interrelationship between music and locality (Stokes 1994). While previous scholarship tended to assume a relatively static fit between place, spatial identity and music, an equation that often enabled scholars to produce richly detailed, empirically grounded narratives of local identity and music-making (Finnegan 1989), some researchers have gone one step further in examining locality as something that needs to be created in the first place. In a study of Nigerian fujı music and orıkı praise poetry, Karin Barber and Christopher Waterman (1995) show that while performers of these genres draw on a multiplicity of external sources to imagine densely local worlds, the emergent sense of locality is not simply stemming from any given body of materials or traditions. Rather, the ‘ultimate goal of any performance is to intensify the presence, image and prospects of local actors’ ( p. 243). Although it cannot be ruled out that Yoruba musical productions of place may be driven by the same agendas that underlie movements of national and ethnic purity, Barber and Waterman insist on the hybrid underpinnings of such assertions of local identity.

Moreover, the spaces that scholars of popular music study and work in are no longer necessarily only such rather abstract entities as cities and countries. Increasingly, other spaces, such as studios, malls, music departments and taxis, are becoming sites of inquiry.

Another aspect of modernization that dominates current debates is the power of capitalism and commodification to transform ‘traditional’ cultures, and the capacity of the Western mass media to shape the collective imagination of large populations. Some critics such as French sociologist Jean Baudrillard have tended to think about global cultural flows in rather uniform terms, positing a regime of simulations and simulacra as an all-embracing system. In line with this reasoning, some music scholars have taken a rather sinister view of global musical production at the end of the twentieth century. Steven Feld draws on Gregory Bateson’s term ‘schismogenesis’ to think through a set of escalating relationships marking the production and consumption of music on a global scale. Schismogenesis is a process through which the interplay between essentially dissimilar but mutually appropriative actions may lead to a closer symbiotic interdependence of both sides, to the point that they may even become incapable of self-correction and caught up in closed circuits of repetition (Feld 1994). Ultimately, what results from this scenario is a gray out of a new type. As discourses of authenticity and difference assert themselves and activities of commercial appropriation in turn get more overt and outrageous, some kind of ‘fusion of the parties for mutual business gain’ becomes likely ( p. 273).

Others scholars, by contrast, appear to privilege ‘Third World’ cultural practices with antihegemonic agency per se, stressing the potential of music to maintain the heterogeneity of the world’s cultures in the face of Western media dominance (Lipsitz 1994). The majority of scholars, however, have taken a more nuanced position toward the role of culture in reflecting and mediating global relations of power, numerous theoretical interventions having emerged in recent years that seek to provide new conceptual tools and models with which to grasp the twists and turns of global musical flows (Manuel 1993). Mark Slobin, for instance, in an attempt to account for the impossibility of representing both global generality and local specificity, has depicted the interplay of various ‘micromusics’ in the West as a kind of ‘interculture,’ a constant oscillation between the pressures of the ‘supraculture’ and the contention of various sub-cultures (Slobin 1993).

Finally, a handful of studies have attempted to view the making of globally connected identities as a two-way process in which center and periphery are constantly confused, and in which the West is just as much an ‘other’ of Africa or Asia as Africans and Asians have been the ‘others’ of Europeans (Erlmann 1999). This includes greater attention to the agency of those (predominantly Western) ‘global’ figures such as Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Quincy Jones, and Mickey Hart—whose practices and discourses are more than just manifestations of some anonymous capitalist world system or the global music industry.

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