Jähnichen, Gisa (2021). Minorities’ Music and Dance on the Vietnamese Stage. Music and Marginalisation – Beyond the Minority-Majority Paradigm. Edited by Ursula Hemetek, Inna Naroditskaya, Terada Yoshitaka. Senri Ethnological Studies 105. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 125-144. (original) (raw)

Introduction to special issue on postwar music in Vietnam and the diaspora

Rising Asia Journal, 2024

FIFTY YEARS SINCE NATIONAL REUNIFICATION And the End of the Vietnam War wenty-seven years after the end of the Vietnam War, Trần Quang Hải (1944-2021), an ethnomusicologist and active performer of traditional music in the postwar diaspora, published an article in an Australian-Vietnamese publication about modern Vietnamese popular music. Focusing on Western-style popular music rather than traditional Vietnamese music that he was known for, the author divided the history of modern Vietnamese music into the following eras.

The Participatory We-Self: Ethnicity and Music in Northern Thailand

2017

The 20th century consolidation of Bangkok’s central rule over the northern Lanna kingdom and its outliers significantly impacted and retrospectively continues to shape regional identities, influencing not just khon mueang northerners but also ethnic highlanders including the Karen, Akha, Lahu, and others. Scholars highlight the importance and emergence of northern Thai “Lanna” identity and its fashioning via performance, specifically in relation to a modernizing and encroaching central Thai state, yet northern-focused studies tend to grant highland groups only cursory mention. Grounded in ethnographic field research on participatory musical application and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of “flow”, this dissertation examines four case studies of musical engagements in the north as it specifically relates to ethnic, political, and autoethnographic positioning, narratives, and group formulation. In examining the inclusive and exclusive participatory nature of musical expression with...

The Development of Anthropology of Music in Thai Society

Journal of Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University, 2020

This article aims to explore the historical development of ethnomusicological concepts in Thai society. I suggest that the ethnomusicology in Thailand is still rooted in theories and methods used in comparative musicology, an outdated approach that existed even before the founding of the discipline. Ethnomusicology was initially considered the study of non-Western musics while the study of Western music as colonialism is a musicological study. The rise of American Anthropology shifted the definition of ethnomusicology to the study music in and as culture. In Thailand, ethnomusicology was first established as a graduate course in Music Education program in higher education institutes following the paradigmatic turn toward folklore studies in the 1970s. However, the ethnomusicological discourse in Thailand are dominated by a confused discussion of defining itself against musicology. It is thus imperative to understand the social contexts undergirding the establishment of the discipline. I contend that Thai ethnomusicologists must have a greater understanding of interdisciplinary theories in humanities to situate the study of music within the culture of which it is a part and the people who use it.