Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Music and anthropology'

To many people, music is just a hobby, something they listen to on the drive to work or background noise throughout their day. Maybe they will go to an occasional concert or buy a record here or there, or more likely download one off iTunes. To some though, it can mean so much more. To some people, music can be the whole basis of their social lives. Here I will show how the music scene in DeKalb, Illinois has created strong bonds, enough to be termed a community. Helped through punk ethics and a DIY (do-it yourself) mindset, the DeKalb punk scene has brought together musicians, poets, artists, fans, and others involved through zines and record labels into one community. Through the words of those directly involved in the scene, I show how they view DeKalb’s punk scene as a community. The scene has become a welcoming space, where everyone’s projects are supported, leading to a variety of experimentation. One of the interesting elements of DeKalb’s scene in relation to other punk scenes is the older age of the participants. Traditionally seen as music for teenagers, as DeKalb is a college town the main participants are in their 20s, though older members are not rare; indeed, some are even in their 40s with families and kids. An important part of creating this scene is DIY philosophy, and I examine the role that has in creating a community. Additionally, spaces for music are equally important, as I illustrate how these spaces are essential in the music scene. Finally, as DeKalb is college town with a rotating population, I investigate what the future holds for everyone involved and the town’s punk scene.

Choro is a traditional Brazilian music that began in Rio de Janeiro during the latter half of the nineteenth century. A virtuosic instrumental music, choro developed through Brazilian interpretations of European dance genres, especially polka and waltz. Participation by both amateur and professional musicians characterizes choro's traditional pedagogy, a reflection of informal and formal learning processes and contexts. At the turn of the twenty-first century, choro schools now offer venues for defining and validating the tradition as well as inspiring an atmosphere for innovation and creation. Inherent within the concept of tradition is the dichotomy of continuity and change. This study exposes how institutions negotiate the past and present through a comparison of current and historic pedagogy and modes of learning. Choro institutions use traditional and innovative modes of learning to support and enhance the genre's current practice through community organization, which sustains and contributes to its continued performance. Chapter one focuses on defining choro music, first discussing the etymology of the word 'choro,' followed by a survey of choro's history and review of choro literature. The chapter concludes with an explanation of this investigation's purpose. In chapter two I posit the notion that a music community practices and performs choro. Biographies and stories of choro's past and present community members reveal how they learned choro. The chapter ends with an analysis of the processes that establish and reinforce the community. Chapter three examines how people learn choro. I offer prevailing learning perspectives—acquisition, participation, and knowledge creation—and establish categories for modes of learning—formal, non-formal, and informal—to define the processes and contexts involved in learning choro. Chapter four discusses the musical codes that characterize choro, what the choro community describes as a musical language. The chapter ends with a description of the curriculum at Escola Portatil de Musica, the school case study used for this dissertation. Chapter five is the summation and conclusions, revealing why musicians learn choro music.

This thesis explores the intersection of nationalism, popular music, and sport as they collided with German identity politics and discourses of twentieth-century history. I contextualize public performances of German national identity during the 2006 World Cup within the broader historical context of national identity construction through music and sport in the last two hundred. I contextualize Germans' public performance of national pride and hospitality during the World Cup as the latest in a long line of cultural performances of German identity that have shaped and been shaped by historical circumstances and socially conditioned discourses of national identity. Taking a broad historical and conceptual perspective on cultural performance, I argue that cultural performances of German national identity—communicated in music, sport, and visual symbolism in the public landscape (i.e., through the use of posters, ads, popular press, etc)—have been tailored to and contingent on the social and discursive exigencies of particular historical and political junctures of the past two hundred years. Likewise, cultural performances during the 2006 World Cup must be seen as particular to twenty-first-century German society. Analyzing the Germans' public performance of national identity as well as popular songs and their audio-visual texts (i.e., music videos), I argue that some supposedly nationalist performances of German identity gained traction and popular support during the World Cup because of the strong role played by popular music and sport in framing the terms of their performance and interpretation.

This dissertation explores the reconfiguration of Syriac Orthodox liturgical tradition among Aramaic-speaking Christian refugees in the Netherlands. Under the pressures of Dutch integration policy and the global politics of secular recognition, the Syriac liturgy is rapidly losing its significance as the central axis of social life and kinship-relations in the Syriac Orthodox diaspora. As such, it has become a site for debate over how to be religiously, culturally, and ethnically distinct despite the narrative binary of Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East that dominates Dutch multiculturalism discourse. Every week, young Syriac Orthodox women and men congregate at their churches to practice singing the liturgy in classical Syriac. What they sing, and how they decide to sing it, mediates their experiments in religious and ethical reinvention, with implications for their efforts at political representation. Singers contend not only with conditions of inaudibility produced by histories of ethnic cleansing, migration, and assimilation, but also with the fragments of European Christianity that shape the sensory regime of secular modernity. Public debates over the integration of religious minorities illuminate this condition of fragmentation, as well as the contest over competing conceptions of ethical personhood inherent in the politics of pluralism in Europe.

In my thesis I set out to investigate and understand my personal relationship with hip-hop music and the part it played in my development. In addition to my personal story, I sought to understand the status of hip-hop in a rural state like West Virginia. I utilized a memoir style of writing that relied heavily on self- reflection. I then fact checked my memories by incorporating hard data which allowed me to gain a greater understanding of how media spreads, and is consumed in West Virginia. I could then compare this data to the media consumption of the United States. These statistics showed that West Virginia is cut off from much of the media that is enjoyed by the majority of the country. The reasons were more varied and complex that I imagined, and ultimately my thesis changed course as I learned about my home state. In conclusion, my personal experience with hip hop was not typical of most adolescents in West Virginia. The trend in West Virginia is to maintain the status quo and reject new ideas. Most likely this will continue to be the trend as college educated youth continue to leave for more forward thinking surroundings. Media is simply a microcosm of the greater lack of any change in the social or political climate of the state.

Following the 1975-1979 genocide, Cambodian exiles in the U.S. recreated cultural institutions through music. Music remains significant in rebuilding cultural life in diasporic Cambodian communities. Live bands perform contemporary and classic ballads during Cambodian New Year in April, at wedding parties and in restaurants on weekend nights. Live rock bands continue to dot community celebrations as survivors collectively create musical repertoires and schedule practices to perform at festive community events. Despite the ubiquity of live musical performance in Cambodian communities, this aspect of Cambodian American cultural formation has been scarcely addressed in the literature. This Thesis addresses the deficiency in the literature through ethnographic fieldwork with a Southern California rock band called the Soriya Band, comprised of three guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer and two vocalists who are all first generation Cambodian survivors. Music persists as a vehicle for cultural creation and change for Cambodian American refugee-survivors.

This study examines how Vietnamese Americans perform identities that acknowledge their statuses as diasporic Vietnamese to construct and maintain specifically Vietnamese American communities. I argue that music, especially public forms of musical expression within mass media and locally staged cultural performances, is a crucial way for Vietnamese Americans across the diaspora to transmit markers of cultural knowledge and identity that give them information about themselves and the "imagined community" constructed through their linked discourses.

The argument is organized around two main ideas that focus on broad cultural patterns and locally situated expressions, respectively. First, music produced by the niche Vietnamese American media industry is distributed across the diaspora and models discourses of Vietnamese identity as different companies provide different visions of what it means to be Vietnamese and perform Vietnamese-ness on stage. I analyze the music variety shows by three different companies (Thuy Nga Productions, Asia Entertainment, and Van Son Productions) to argue that Vietnamese American popular media should not be seen as representing a single monolithic version of Vietnamese-ness; rather, each articulation of Vietnamese identity is slightly different and speaks to a different formulation of the Vietnamese public, producing a discursive field for diverse Vietnamese American identity politics.

Secondly, I show how identity is always performed in particular places, illustrating that Vietnamese Americans performing music in different places can have vastly different understandings of that music and its relationship to their identities. Using a Peircian semiotic framework, I articulate a theory of place-making in which places become vehicles for the clustering of signs and meaning as people experience and interpret those places and make meaning there. As people's experiences imbue places with meaning, people coming from similar cultural backgrounds may gain different attachments to those places and one another and thus different understandings of their identities as Vietnamese. I use two contrasting examples of Vietnamese American communities in Indianapolis and San Jose to show how people in each place construct entirely different discourses of identity surrounding musical performance based upon their positionality within the diaspora.

People have different hobbies. The people we are going to meet here share the same interest - choir singing. Singing together in different choirs is their hobby (leisure time interest).

What brings them together is the singing, getting an opportunity to sing together with people they otherwise would not meet. In this essay you will learn some of the reasons behind the fact that choir singing is a big movement in Sweden (reasons behind choir singing having a great number of practitioners). You will get a direct link to the informants, without having to read answers that have been tampered with. The choir singers who participate will speak directly to you.

The intent of this research is to reveal and understand the symbolic meanings of cultural and ethnic identity that cultural creators and receivers perceive through their involvement in mariachi. This study’s shows the way those involved in mariachi perceive their cultural and ethnic identity while living in a city that infuses Mexican and Texan cultural sensibilities. A mixed-method approach was taken between in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation. Participant observation was utilized as a means to build a stratified snowball sample of the various cultural producers and receivers of mariachi. The cultivation of this sample was guided by Griswold’s cultural diamond framework. Reliance on semi-structured in-depth interviews as the primary research method of inquiry illuminated the various horizons of meaning that mariachi performers, instructors, gatekeepers, and aficionados held in regards to their efforts to preserve a long standing cultural musical art form in San Antonio, Texas. Some findings include various stories and perspectives on cultural and ethnic identity in mariachi, varying strategies undertaken to preserve mariachi music in the twenty-first century through technology, its institutionalization into a public-education setting, the varying gender dynamics among mariachi performers, the question of authenticity and hybridization in mariachi music, and cultural politics in the mariachi music scene.

This dissertation explores a discourse of democratic modernity in EU-member Bulgaria, which revolves around a hybrid popular music called chalga. I argue that chalga does not function as the name of a defined music genre. Rather, Bulgarians use it as a self-reflexive voice of ambivalence regarding the recontextualziation in liberal democracy of the socialist language ideology of evolutionary modernization: navaksvane—catching up—with Europe. On one hand, chalga indexes musical images that resonate with the current zeitgeist of modern European culture: aesthetical and social heterogeneity as well as commercial mass media. On the other hand, Bulgarians take this Ottoman-derived word as a non-referential index that invokes anxieties of Balkanism—a discursive trope of European modernity that has invented the Balkans as its liminal incomplete Self. As the ethnographic chapters of the dissertation show, Bulgarians deal with their ambivalence to chalga by seeking paternalist figures capable of imposing the language regimes of navaksvane when performers and audiences digress too much into coded zones of Balkan liminality. Regimenting modern popular music with top-down control points also to the political communication implicit in chalga. Cognizant of their inferior location vis-à-vis "real modern societies", ordinary Bulgarians seek paternalist leaders who can address them on an intimate level but are powerful enough to impose norms and practices circulating to Bulgaria from loci that represent the Occident. The expectation to have such leaders is not exclusive to democracy. It defined the political culture during socialism and even before. What is special to the contemporary era is the discursive formulation of such leadership, which I define as paternalistic populism. Bulgarians regard democracy as working in their country when it is guided from above by an authoritarian boss (shef), who knows how to anticipate the popular will, how to ally with bigger and external forces in order to overcome the society's marginality, and most importantly, how to act with "barbarous" Balkan aggression so as to put the nation in modern European order.