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Papers by Sydney Hutchinson

Focus: Music of the Caribbean, 2019

University of Chicago Press, Dec 31, 2019

Resonancias: Revista de investigación musical, 2018

American Ethnologist, 2010

American Anthropologist, 2013

Focus: Music of the Caribbean, 2019

Journal of American Folklore, Oct 1, 2015

Journal of American Folklore, 2009

Dance has long played an important role in the construction of Latin American national identities... more Dance has long played an important role in the construction of Latin American national identities, and growing interest in the body as a focus of research has created a new impetus for dance ethnology. Nevertheless, academia in the United States as well as in many other countries has been slow to accept dance studies, in spite of the important roles that dance has played in the early development of the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology. This introduction discusses the history of dance in the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology and then considers the contributions of this special issue of the Journal of American Folklore to debates about transnationalism, globalization, changing ethnic identities, and gender roles. Conflict between insider and outsider perspectives on such issues can be partially resolved, it is suggested, through participatory or reflexive methods. Dance ethnography is thus shown to be an essential tool for the study of changing social realities in Latin America today.

Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2012

Until at least the 1980s, scholarship on Caribbean carnivals tended to overemphasize European roo... more Until at least the 1980s, scholarship on Caribbean carnivals tended to overemphasize European roots because of the celebration's ties to the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, scholarship on Caribbean music has long been embroiled in nationalistic paradigms that have hindered a view of the Caribbean as a cultural region with more commonalities than differences among the music cultures of the various nations (see Bilby 1985). In this paper, I combat these paradigms with the concept of convergence, an alternative to the problematic “syncretism.” It is complementary to current notions of creolization and hybridity, but unlike those concepts, it serves to emphasize the construction of cultural meaning over biological notions of race or ethnicity.

Journal of American Folklore, 2015

Creolization as Cultural Creativity. ed. robert baron and Ana c. cara. (Jackson: university Press... more Creolization as Cultural Creativity. ed. robert baron and Ana c. cara. (Jackson: university Press of mississippi, 2011. Pp. 320, photographs, bibliography, index.)Creolization as Cultural Creativity is a new collection of essays that take on an old topic. Together, the authors show how the concept of creolization, while now timeworn, is still relevant and useful for the study of caribbean cultures, as well as what the discipline of folkloristics can offer to creolization theorists. As editors Robert Baron and Ana c. cara explain in the introduction, creolization can help scholars to understand culture contact "from below" and to gain an emic view of strategies associated with creolization, such as reversal, carnivalization, improvisation, mimicry, and doubleness (p. 5). Folklorists, they add, are especially well positioned to offer insight into the grassroots everyday practices of creolization (p. 9).The ten essays in the volume offer ample proof of the editors' conten...

Latin American Music Review, 2011

1. Grupo formado inicialmente por los compositores José María Castro, Juan José Castro, Juan Carl... more 1. Grupo formado inicialmente por los compositores José María Castro, Juan José Castro, Juan Carlos Paz, Jacobo Ficher y Gilardo Gilardi con los objetivos de “estimular la superación artística de cada uno de sus afiliados por el conocimiento y el examen crítico de sus obras; propender al conocimiento de ellas por medio de audiciones públicas; editar las obras de sus afiliados; extender al extranjero la difusión de la obra que realiza el grupo; prestar preferente atención a la producción general del país suscitando su conocimiento por los medios a su alcance; abrir opinión públicamente sobre asuntos de índole artística, siempre que ello pueda significar una contribución al desarrollo o afianzamiento de la cultura musical”. Sobre el tema ver: Guillermo Scarabino, El Grupo Renovación (1929–1944) y la nueva música en la Argentina del siglo XX, Cuaderno de Estudio No 3, Bs. As., Instituto de Investigación Musicológica “Carlos Vega”, 2000.

Focus: Music of the Caribbean, 2019

University of Chicago Press, Dec 31, 2019

Resonancias: Revista de investigación musical, 2018

American Ethnologist, 2010

American Anthropologist, 2013

Focus: Music of the Caribbean, 2019

Journal of American Folklore, Oct 1, 2015

Journal of American Folklore, 2009

Yearbook for Traditional Music, 2012

Journal of American Folklore, 2015

Latin American Music Review, 2011

This feminist-oriented ethnography of Dominican gender performance focuses on masculinity and fem... more This feminist-oriented ethnography of Dominican gender performance focuses on masculinity and femininity in accordion-based merengue típico while also touching on cross-dressing and queer performance in other popular genres like bachata, reggaetón, orquesta merengue, merengue de calle, and fusion musics. By combining music, movement, video, and literary analysis with oral history, Tigers offers a new model for the holistic study of gender, while demonstrating the importance of local feminisms and local musics for understanding as well as destabilizing traditional notions of gender and genre. As a whole, the book aims to provide a new perspective on Caribbean gender that considers classic binaries but goes beyond them; to show how music can either reinforce entrenched gender roles or help to open up possibilities by imagining new roles and identities for all genders; to give concrete examples demonstrating the performativity of gender; and to show how powerfully musical performance unites gender, racial, national, and other identities, with both the problems and opportunities that such conjunctions entail.

Since its emergence in the 1960s, salsa has transformed from a symbol of Nuyorican pride into an ... more Since its emergence in the 1960s, salsa has transformed from a symbol of Nuyorican pride into an emblem of pan-Latinism and finally a form of global popular culture. While Latinos all over the world have developed and even exported their own “dance accents,” local dance scenes have arisen in increasingly far-flung locations, each with its own flavor and unique features.

Salsa World examines the ways in which bodies relate to culture in specific places. The contributors, a notable group of scholars and practitioners, analyze dance practices in the U.S., Japan, Spain, France, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Writing from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, and performance studies, the contributors explore salsa’s kinetopias—places defined by movement, or vice versa—as they have arisen through the dance’s interaction with local histories, identities, and musical forms.

Taken together, the essays in this book examine contemporary salsa dancing in all its complexity, taking special note of how it is localized and how issues of geography, race and ethnicity, and identity interact with the global salsa industry.

Contributors include Bárbara Balbuena Gutiérrez, Katherine Borland, Joanna Bosse, Rossy Díaz, Saúl Escalona, Kengo Iwanaga, Isabel Llano, Jonathan S. Marion, Priscilla Renta, Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, and the editor.

Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic b... more Salsa and merengue are now so popular that they are household words for Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Recent media attention is helping other Caribbean music styles like bachata to attain a similar status. Yet popular Mexican American dances remain unknown and invisible to most non-Latinos. Quebradita, meaning "little break," is a modern Mexican American dance style that became hugely popular in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States during the early to mid 1990s. Over the decade of its popularity, this dance craze offered insights into the social and cultural experience of Mexican American youth. Accompanied by banda, an energetic brass band music style, quebradita is recognizable by its western clothing, hat tricks, and daring flips. The dance's combination of Mexican, Anglo, and African American influences represented a new sensibility that appealed to thousands of young people. Hutchinson argues that, though short-lived, the dance filled political and sociocultural functions, emerging as it did in response to the anti-immigrant and English-only legislation that was then being enacted in California. Her fieldwork and interviews yield rich personal testimony as to the inner workings of the quebradita's aesthetic development and social significance. The emergence of pasito duranguense, a related yet distinct style originating in Chicago, marks the evolution of the Mexican American youth dance scene. Like the quebradita before it, pasito duranguense has picked up the task of demonstrating the relevance of regional Mexican music and dance within the U.S. context.

Dance Research Journal, 2013

World of music (new series) , 2012

Latin American Music Review, 2011

Dance Research Journal, 2010

... BLACK RHYTHMS OF PERU: REVIVING AFRICAN MUSICAL HERITAGE IN THE BLACK PACIFIC by Heidi Caroly... more ... BLACK RHYTHMS OF PERU: REVIVING AFRICAN MUSICAL HERITAGE IN THE BLACK PACIFIC by Heidi Carolyn Feldman. 2006. ... However, Feldman, an ethnomusicologist, examines the roles of black and white criollos in Lima, the capital, while Mendoza, an anthropologist ...

Studies in Latin American Popular Culture , 2006

Journal of Folklore Research, 2000

Journal of American Folklore, 2004

Journal of Folklore Research, 2001

Journal of American Folklore, 2004

Journal of Folklore Research, 2001

In the US, and in parts of Europe as well, many middle-class white males portray themselves as no... more In the US, and in parts of Europe as well, many middle-class white males portray themselves as non-dancers, and are often believed ineffectual on the dance floor. Popular discourse describes them as not being "in touch with their bodies." Yet these men do respond physically to music, if not primarily in ways generally described as dance. Among rock music fans, bodily response to music often takes the form of the playing of air guitar, a type of performance that often resembles dance in its use of rhythm, steps, and even choreography. Since 1996, air guitar has moved onto the international stage as a competitive event beginning in Oulu, Finland, then spreading to more than two dozen countries. Partly an ironic exaggeration of hypermasculine “cock rock” conventions and partly the heart-felt tribute of rock fans, successful air guitar performances balance silliness with sincerity. Although competition is still strongly dominated by white males, air guitarists nonetheless question typical rock constructions of masculinity and race through humor and a sense of irony. This paper draws on interviews and participant-observation conducted at the 2009 German national championship and the world championships in Finland to explore the relationships between masculinity and movement, as well as musical and bodily knowledge, in air guitar performance.

Carnival, long recognized as a site for class struggle, is also an area in which lay knowledge an... more Carnival, long recognized as a site for class struggle, is also an area in which lay knowledge and expert knowledge meet. In the Dominican Republic, laypeople commonly contribute their knowledge of mask- and costume-making, music, and dance, while experts add their abilities to organize and legitimize. Sometimes the two groups concur, but other times, conflicts arise. Whether self-proclaimed or officially appointed, “experts” could not produce a carnival without popular participation, so their ideas are only successful insofar as celebrants accept them. At the same time, neither group is homogenous. Intellectuals, including folklorists, may serve as negotiators between lay participants and government officials and other sponsors, and political views may color their actions. Carnavaleros themselves vary from individual participants to group members, casual celebrants to grassroots organizers. The ethnographer, as both participant and expert observer, has an uncertain position in this configuration, a position that is likely to influence her role in the negotiation process.

This paper examines interactions between laypeople and experts, as well as between aesthetic practices and local identities, in Dominican carnivals. While the carnivals of Trinidad and Brazil are clearly much better known internationally, the Dominican Republic is also home to a wide array of carnival traditions with surprising aesthetic and social diversity. In the 1960s, following the end of the Trujillo dictatorship and its repression of carnival, Dominican folklorists and other intellectuals took an interest in resuscitating the suffering tradition. Efforts to catalog, collect, and display mask types, differentiate regional practices, and organize the celebration were by the 1970s underway throughout the country.

Today, the equation between mask and costume types and specific places is widely accepted and reinforced through competitions. Yet the relationship between place and music and dance is much less clear. While, for instance, lay carnavaleros insist carnival originally had “no music," some experts insist that carnival characters’ movements are not "dance" because they no longer match those described in standard folklore texts. Carnival leaders believe creating local carnival music to replace the pan-regional pop songs currently used will improve the celebration; lay participants seem happy with their enormous, truck-mounted speaker towers blasting reggaetón. Carnival leaders ignore dance as practiced in the streets; lay participants sometimes see it as a key means of differentiating “their” carnival from others. For both sides, however, the expressive culture of carnival contributes to a sense of place.

This paper reflects on my participation in a carnival group in Santiago, Dominican Republic, for four years. Because Dominican carnavaleros frequently construct local identities by contrasting carnival practices from different towns, in this paper I accordingly compare the expressive culture of several carnivals. Focusing particularly on costumes and movements in Santiago, but with reference to practices elsewhere, I demonstrate how carnival and place are created through interactions between laypeople and experts. I also consider the reactions of local experts to my research on Santiago carnival movements as a demonstration of conflicts generated by a mismatch between lay and expert knowledge, as well as the ethnographer’s ambiguous position within local hierarchies.

Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis I, Proceedings of the ICTM Folk Musical Instruments Study Group Meeting, Erkner, Germany. Gisa Jaennichen, ed. pp. 79-90., 2009

In the Dominican Republic, the sounds of the accordion and the güira (metal scraper) used to play... more In the Dominican Republic, the sounds of the accordion and the güira (metal scraper) used to play merengue típico have at various points been considered more noise than music. If noise is a threat or contestation of power, then these instruments have indeed been seen as a threat to the survival of Dominican culture. At the time of the accordion’s arrival during the 1870s, the threat that sparked urban, upper-class polemics against the accordion was that of the lower classes usurping power and disrupting city centers. In the 1970s, when rural migrants again invaded the city of Santiago, debate over the noisy accordion, merengue típico, and those who play it resurfaced.

Because musical instruments are not “mere” objects but bearers of the meanings that arise through their interactions with people, this paper endeavors to uncover the social and cultural meanings of the accordion and the güira. Merengue típico, while still considered a rural music, is now produced primarily in the cities of Santiago and New York. By being out-of-place or between places, the music has become a site for social and spatial contestation related to ideas about noise and order and made audible through these instruments. A comparison of historical sources on accordion and güira combined with an analysis of the spaces in which típico is played today shows the role this rural “noise” plays in today’s cities.

Tatico Henríquez was an inescapable presence during my research into Dominican merengue típico. A... more Tatico Henríquez was an inescapable presence during my research into Dominican merengue típico. Although he died in 1976, even young musicians spoke of this accordionist as though they’d known him, and he was unanimously named the best típico musician of all time. His merengues still form the core of the típico repertoire today. But what was it about Tatico?
In this work I examine the role of the exceptional individual in traditional culture and society. Tatico was indubitably exceptional for his musicianship and charisma, yet he has also come to stand for things larger than himself. Thus, while part of the answer to the mystery lies in technique, voice, and personality, more important than those are Tatico’s embodiment of shared ideas about masculinity, migration, and nostalgia.
Tatico’s career spanned a tumultuous period that included the assassination of dictator Trujillo, multiple coups, a U.S. invasion, chaotic urban growth, and massive transnational migration. After Tatico, the effects of urbanization and transnationalism on traditional music have only been amplified. He therefore stands on a bridge between the country’s past and present.
Lise Waxer argues that the people of Cali, Colombia, “made sense of the city’s rapid urbanization” through their relationship to 1960s-70s salsa recordings (2002:14) which helped them to remember the period “not as a time of struggle and precarious existence at the city’s margins, but as a time . . . when new friendships and community bonds were forged through dancing together” (2002:109). In their focus on Tatico, típico musicians perform a similar act of collective remembering. In this case, the remembering is also rooted in gendered experiences and the construction of a new type of masculinity. Tatico embodies the new masculine archetype of the tíguere, master of the urban domain, whose ideals are expressed in his music, his persona, and the stories told about him. Building upon the work of prior researchers who have shown that the forms of Dominican masculinity have changed markedly since Trujillo (Simonson 1994; Krohn-Hansen 1996), I use merengue típico as a way of better understanding these changes.
Writing of the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, Virginia Danielson writes,
The ‘Voice of Egypt’ appears to be a spectacularly successful individual, clearly an exceptional person in many aspects. Yet, just as clearly, her ‘voice’ was and is a collective voice, constructed historically. The performances produced by a single individual . . . became widely shared within Arab societies and identified by vast numbers of people as important cultural property” (1997:198).

Tatico’s voice has also become a collective one. Remembering Tatico is a way to idealize the rural past, commemorate the moment of migration, and construct a masculine ideal. Tatico’s legendary charisma was not simply personal magnetism but rather the embodiment of key cultural values, which explains his conversion into legend. For some, he is a masculine model to be aspired to; for others, he is the audible trace of a distant past.

Proceedings of the ICTM Historical Sources Study Group Meeting, Stockholm. Susanne Ziegler, ed. , 2008

El son y la salsa en la identidad del Caribe, Dario Tejeda and Rafael Emilio Yunen, eds. Proceedings of the Segundo Congreso de Música, Identidad, y Cultura en el Caribe. Santiago: Centro León; INEC., 2008

Merengue típico is unique among Dominican popular music styles for being the only one in which wo... more Merengue típico is unique among Dominican popular music styles for being the only one in which women have been more noticeable as instrumentalists than as singers. The reasons for their relative success in this traditionally macho genre are not immediately apparent, but can be tied to reasons from the practical, such as learning situations; to the racial, like stereotypes associated with particular instruments; the historical, like key figures in típico and Dominican history; and the social, including the importance of carnival and the carnivalesque in the Dominican national imagination. Of course, it is also tied to social processes like female migration and transnational experiences, as well as women’s increased visibility in politics on the island. At present, the female accordionist exists in a contradictory position: to be respected, she must look like a woman but play and perhaps even sing like a man. If the classic male típico figure is the tíguere, the dandified but sexually aggressive “tiger,” the woman must become a tigress. The creation of this female role (not entirely without precedent in the Dominican Republic) helps típico musicians show the society at large that their oft-disdained style is progressive as well as traditional while also pointing to some ambiguities in the construction of Dominican machismo.

El Merengue en la cultura dominicana y del Caribe, Dario Tejeda and Rafael Emilio Yunen, eds. Proceedings of the Primer Congreso de Música, Identidad, y Cultura en el Caribe. Santiago: Centro León; INEC., 2006