Review: Making Music Indigenous: Popular Music in the Peruvian Andes by Joshua Tucker (original) (raw)
Related papers
Popular Music, 2021
This article addresses the relation between Andean 'traditional music' and circulations of people, objects, ideas and sounds. Although many studies on Andean indigenous music have explored such circulations, scholars still tend to understand musical practices in terms of 'cultures'. The case of indigenous music from Otavalo, in the Ecuadorian Andes, encourages us to go beyond this approach. I make two arguments. First, by conceiving of the translocal/transnational flows that have shaped 'traditional music' from Otavalo through the concepts of 'network' and 'music world', I unsettle the linkunderlying previous approachesbetween a specific people, music and place. Second, through the concepts of 'assemblage' and 'mediation', I closely look at processes of 'traditionalisation' and 'indigenisation' to show how, in the context of multiple circulations, social actors nevertheless produce a specific link between people, music and place in order to make a musical practice 'traditional' and/or 'indigenous'.
2016
espanolDesde los tempos pre-hispanicos, Cajamarca ha sido una importante region agricola del Peru gracias a sus recursos hidrograficos. Recientemente se ha convertido, sin embargo, en una zona de intensas revueltas sociales. Durante el gobierno neoliberal de Alberto Fujimori (1990-2002), el estado peruano permitio la entrada de corporaciones mineras transnacionales para la extraccion de oro. La explotacion minera ha causado un impacto negativo en los recursos hidricos de la region, afectando tanto al medio ambiente como a la salud y los modos de subsistencia de los habitantes de la region. Las nuevas concesiones de terrenos a las corporaciones mineras transnacionales por parte del actual gobierno sin el consenso de la poblacion local ha intensificado la conflictividad social. Este articulo discute las canciones de los ronderos a favor del agua y en contra del oro, asi como las actividades del Centro Documental de la Musica Tradicional Peruana en Cajamraca. Ademas, este articulo inve...
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2022
Archaeomusicological efforts to reconstruct tonal sequences, musical genres, and musical experiences of the precontact Andes face great challenges given a lack of written musical notation. We suggest that a sociomusicological approach focusing on the "social organization of resources, makers, and occasions of musical performance" (Feld 1984: 383) offers an alternative analytic more amenable to standard archaeological reconstruction. This emphasis on production, organization, and shared social space also sheds light on the historicity of performance, its social context, and its political implications. In fact, musical performances in many contemporary Andean communities express cosmological principles that underpin authority and enact principles of political organization in charged ritual settings. The highly spatialized and kinesthetic nature of these performances function as key elements, mapping performance spaces onto cosmopolitical landscapes. We seek neither to project this model into the past nor to identify its origins. However, we argue that a sociomusicological approach attuned to social space allows us to identify similar elements of musical performances in the Andean past while exploring the role of musical performance across broader sociopolitical contexts. Without reducing music to its politics or explaining political organization through music, we suggest that studying both together offers important insights.
Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology, 2006
For the indigenous inhabitants of the community of Peguche in the Ecuadorian Highlands, daily life is permeated by interactions with mestizos, indigenous people from other regions, and foreigners from Europe and North America. These intercultural relationships are deeply intertwined with the community's musicmaking, in traditional music, commercial music, and personal music. Traditional music performed at festivals in the community reflects a long history of Incan-Spanish interaction. Today it plays a role in contemporary indigenous-mestizo identity politics and indígenas' struggle to overcome their stigmatized social status. Commercial music performed for and sold to foreigners in Europe and North America provides an opportunity for indígenas to circumvent the socioeconomic oppression within Ecuador. Traveling musicians returning home to the Andes with newly acquired wealth, worldly experiences, and heightened social consciousness impact local politics, racial hierarchies, and indigenous identities. Personal creative music performed in the private sphere allows indígenas' to express and cope with their cosmopolitan intercultural lifestyles.
2013
Research on music was almost neglected during the history of the anthropology of Lowland South American indigenous societies. This may be due to their difficult accessibility and lack of infrastructure in former research, as well as due to the different focus of researchers. However, the area is now thriving, because many anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have recognised the central role music performance plays in ritual, specifically when ritual action involves non-human agency. The role of animals, plants or spirits in Lowland South American cosmologies has been studied intensely during the last decades, and laid way for the theories of perspectivism and new animism. The authors show how music is used in cosmologies where communication between humans and non-humans is paramount. Further on, they suggest that the sonic domain can help in explaining many indigenous narratives about transformations and non-human agency. 1. Introduction: Considering Music, Humans, and Non-humans . By Bernd Brabec de Mori & Anthony Seeger 2. Apùap World Hearing Revisited: Talking with ‘Animals’, ‘Spirits’ and other Beings, and Listening to the Apparently Inaudible. By Rafael José de Menezes Bastos 3. Flutes, Songs and Dreams: Cycles of Creation and Musical Performance among the Wauja of the Upper Xingu (Brazil) . By Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade 4. Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America . By Jonathan D. Hill 5. Shipibo Laughing Songs and the Transformative Faculty: Performing or Becoming the Other. By Bernd Brabec de Mori 6. Focusing Perspectives and Establishing Boundaries and Power: Why the Suyá/ Kïsêdjê Sing for the Whites in the Twenty-first Century. By Anthony Seeger
DANCING THE PLURIVERSE: CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE AS ONTOLOGICAL PRAXIS
This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago Firmino Castillo, Maria Regina. 2016. "Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis" in Special Issue, INDIGENOUS DANCE TODAY: Motion, Connection, Relation. Guest Editor: Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Dance Research Journal, 48( 01): 55-73. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0149767715000480 I
A Materiality of Sound: Musical Practices of the Moche of Peru
2015
The PhD dissertation entitled A Materiality of Sound: Musical Practices of the Moche of Peru examines the role of sonic practice within the Moche culture, a complex polity that flourished on the north coast of Peru between 100 and 900 AD. Music, as a cultural expression of sound, plays an important part in every known human society. Instead of accepting that such a significant aspect of human social life, as sound should remain forever beyond the reach of archaeological inquiry, A Materiality of Sound investigates the durable material traces of sound, such as instrumentation and architecture, using modern recording and acoustic measurement technologies. These techniques permit the exploration of aural experience and sound use in past contexts. The foundation for the archaeological inquiry of sound and music derives from the phenomenology of Merlau-Ponty (1962); a theoretical standpoint stating that humans experience and interact with the world through all our senses simultaneously. Archaeological interpretation tends to focus on the visual aspects of the world, with the implications that past peoples also privileged sight above all other senses. In order to interpret the choices and strategies employed by past societies, one must consider that the visual may not represent the only, or most valued, sense involved.