Paper short abstract:

This paper disputes the notion that cultural dissolution comes from 'the outside', by showing how Shetland’s epistemological tradition of music making affords the incorporation and integration of outside musical influences and people to strengthen a sense of personal, social and cultural character.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I consider how metaphors linked to notions of cultural decomposition and dissolution emerged from experiences among sociomusical scene participants in the Shetland Islands (2012-2014). During archival research, I encountered the interpretation that outside musical styles, such as American country and western, threatened local traditional music with extinction (Cohen 1987), erroneously associated with fiddlers in touristic brochures. Cultural boundaries were either threatened by 'mainstream' outside influences (Cohen 1987) or the same influences would, with waves of development change, free islanders from their supposed involuted cultural uniformity (Byron 1983). For others, the discovery of oil in the North Sea in the 1970s spawned irrational fears among locals, prompting them to invent a Shetland 'way of life' (e.g., Black 1995). This interpretation supposed that locals were unaware of their own cultural practices, family and mobility histories, until the arrival of the oil industry threatened to dissolve them. However, my involvement with the musical community showed that an epistemological tradition of music making has been developed over the last few centuries, founded upon principles of sociability and mutuality, which make the incorporation of outside musical influences strengthen local productions and connections. Ethnographers have been inspired to document the uniqueness of societies before homogenizing structural forces, now associated with neoliberal and western mores (Ganti 2014, Wilf 2014), degenerate, dissolve, and assimilate them. Yet, the resilience of cultural identities and alternative social configurations, despite structural forces, indicates that decomposition, dissolution and degeneration are cultural and life processes that afford myriad creative responses.