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- Convenors:
-
Rajko Mursic
(University of Ljubljana)
Panagiotis Panopoulos (University of the Aegean)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel will touch affection of sounds and politics in SE Europe in the widest anthropologically relevant aspects: from sound studies to anthropology of music and dance. It will especially theorize cross-sections of art and politics, work and leisure, affect and defiance, past and the present.
Long Abstract:
The Balkans is a mess of sounds. In short distances, acoustic environments change, sounds of speech change, as well as sounds of music. These sounds as well rapidly change in time, locally and regionally. As empires, countries and nation-states in the region come and go, they leave traceable characteristics, continually transformed in new sounds: mixing, inverting, simulating, and charming.
The panel will touch affection of sounds and politics in South-Eastern Europe in the widest possible anthropologically relevant aspects: from sound studies to anthropology of music and dance. It will especially theorize cross-sections of art and politics, work and leisure, affect and defiance, past and the present.
The panel proposal is related to the research project Music and politics in post-Yugoslav space: toward new paradigm of politics of music at the turn of centuries,
funded by Slovenian Research Agency (2018-2021), and organised in cooperation with IUAES Commission on Music, Dance, Performative Practices and Sound.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Based on ongoing research among Greek environmentalists dedicated to sound therapy for eco-ethical self-transformation, the paper asks how sound is employed as a politics of affect that aims to recreate the ways in which human relate to the natural environment based on care and mutuality.
Paper long abstract:
Today, our planet is experiencing serious climatic changes that have been recognised to stem from a complex aggregation of human activities which cause multi-layered forms of pollution. Noise, or unwanted anthropogenic sound, is increasingly recognised as one such form of pollution. Initiatives that counter human pollution recognise the importance of sound and use it to their own ends, promoting societal transformation based on ecological paradigms that emphasise the impact of sound waves. Enquiring into how sound is employed in eco-activism as a medium for socio-environmental change, this paper uses insights from ongoing fieldwork among an initiative invested in sound therapy as avenue to self-transformation towards ecological ethics. Based on these insights, it asks how sound is deliberately employed as a politics of affect to create a relation of care and an understanding of mutuality between humans and their natural environment. Unlike initiatives for noise reduction, such engagement highlights the beneficial aspects of sound and connects these to eliminating not a symptom of today's multi-layered pollution, but to altering the cause, namely how humans relate to nature. The challenges and perspectives these insights pose to the anthropology of sound are approached and put up for discussion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores cinematic Zorba's dance by examining the ways in which people engage with dance in their lives in Greece. Τhis dance can act as an embodied index of historicity that challenges recognitions of past at present day, bringing close different historical contexts.
Paper long abstract:
Certain films are deeply woven into our lives and become part of who we are. This paper explores cinematic dance scenes that have fed both public and domestic discourses in Greece by examining the ways in which people engage with dance in their lives. My ethnographic focus is on the significance of cinematic dance as a cultural resource during the critical historical period of the economic austerity in Greece since 2008. I argue that cinematic dance may serve as an analytical tool for informal political commentaries at the local level. People who live, study and work in a suburb of Athens, reflecting and commenting on the financial crisis through their discussions about dance, cinema and social life. Moreover, through their performances, they introduced me to a veiled practice of resistance to and negotiation of the 'crisis'.
The ethnography focuses on cinematic Zorba's dance (1964) which became a symbol of Greekness winning global fame. I argue that this dance can act as an embodied index of historicity that challenges recognitions of past at present day, bringing close different historical contexts through the reworking embodied memory. Culturally significant cinematic dance orchestrates senses, feelings and the rhetoric of people towards the historicity of public culture in Greece. Through their interpretations, therefore, mediated by cinematic dance performances, people managed to voice collective as well as individual concerns, while simultaneously revealing how dance can be complex, fluid and political.
Paper short abstract:
Learning from the work of visual and sound anthropologists, this research reflects on the transformation of the sonic ecology of a "Gypsy Hood" in Romania, in the wake of the post-socialist transition.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will present how, in the course of an ethnography in the Romanian countryside, I gradually diverted my attention from the words of the musical genre of "manele" and the "lautari" (musicians) to listen more attentively to the noises and nuisances of the street.
This presentation is based on a long ethnography of almost 13 years in a Romanian village, where many families of lautari live. This survey, mostly conducted with a camera, focused particularly on the vernacular visual culture and the transformation of the labor economy in a context, since the early 2000s, marked by the post socialist transition and a growing income disparity between families. In a community where reciprocity is sought after and valued, recording the sonic ecology of the street, caught between sound-systems and gossip, questions inevitably the transformations brought by the arrival of a market economy.
Learning from the work of Steven Feld, this research reflects on the transformation of material culture - from cars to chainsaws and sound amplification systems - but also on the transformation of a sonic ecology marked by distrusts and competition (like the music used to cover up conversations in the ears of neighbours or, on the contrary, to defy them). For my interlocutors, therefore, the evil is less to be found in the lyrics of certain songs - as some of the evangelical Christians who are very present in the neighbourhood might suggest - than in the commodities and the sound transformations of the soundscape.
Paper short abstract:
Each corpus of B-H army had one art unit where musicians composed patriotic songs, boosted morale and glorified soldiers,commanders and beautiful homeland. What role did music played in the life of musicians and soldiers and how did it affect on the creation of Bosniac and Bosnian national identity.
Paper long abstract:
After Yugoslavia disintegrated to several independent states, Bosnian Serb/ Yugoslav army attacked Bosnia-Herzegovina on 6 April 1992 and occupied the country till the Dayton peace agreement was signed in December 1995. On 3 September 1992, the Presidency of B-H decreed the formation of seven corps of the ARBiH - armija BiH (Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina), based on their geographical position. Each corps had a sector for moral questions, with a main task to organise artists into art unit. The majority of Bosnian artists voluntarily joined art units and soon music, theatre and art detachments were formed. Results of their work were soon visible - musicians and singers composed patriotic songs in different musical genres and dedicated them to army commander, soldiers, beautiful Bosnia-Herzegovina and brave suffering people, artist paint pictures and prepared exhibitions, and actors performed theatre plays.
First corps was stationed in Sarajevo and art unit performed at different occasions army had organised. In Zenica, the third corps organised their local artists and theatre actors to perform patriotic songs for soldiers and civilians in Zenica but also abroad.
Extended fieldwork in Sarajevo and Zenica with in-depth semi-structural interviews, data gathering method and visual/audio material analysis gives the insight into the work of art units of B-H army and helps to answer the research question of the PhD in writing "what role and effect did art units of first and third corps of Bosnian-Herzegovinian army had in creation of Bosniac and Bosnian national identity in Sarajevo and Zenica?"
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores whether, when and how affective potential of collective singing can contribute to practices of (self)care that oppose bodily and mental exhaustion, and structural feelings of social disintegration and exhaustion.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores whether, when and how affective potential of collective singing can contribute to practices of (self)care that oppose bodily and mental exhaustion, and structural feelings of social disintegration and exhaustion. I focus on the activist choirs across the region of the South-Eastern Europe, self-characterized as participation-oriented decentralized collectives that employ collective singing as a way of social engagement. I demonstrate how, as a way of investing time in politicized leisure activities, collective singing offers a critical response to the current absence of systemic and structural care for human existence in the region. Understanding care beyond simply a practice of "help" or support but rather as complex sonic co-existences, I examine a wide range of collective sonic interventions into social space including care of body and wellbeing in a time of economic precarity, support for basic conditions and infrastructures of being alive, to the creation of new avenues of political action in political atmospheres structured affectively by apathy, exhaustion, and foreclosure.
I ask the following questions: How do the affective qualities of collective singing and sonic environments offer a critical response to absences of structural care? How do they help people resolve to live, persist, and resist precariousness and uncertainty? How do they enable affective mobilizations for developing strategies of (self-)care and new forms of agency?
Paper short abstract:
The paper looks at cultural practices appropriated by certain social groups, in their attempt to construct 'the people' against the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria. These include traditional dances (horo) among others. It particularly explores how music and sounds are mobilized in the process.
Paper long abstract:
The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (more commonly known as the Istanbul Convention) sparked a collective production of emotions (Ditchev, 2009) and completely reshaped the political discourse on gender in Bulgaria. Fed by mainstream and social media, the Istanbul Convention has turned into a moral panic (Cohen, 1972; Hall, 1980). Media content in the country has been rarely dominated by a topic for so long with 'gender' becoming a trigger word, click-bait and an offense expression.
The discourse against the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria has managed to construct enemies 'of the people', othering (Fielder and Catalano, 2017) at least three distinctive groups: 1) international elite lobbies pushing for 'gender ideology' and the 'gay agenda'; 2) local 'liberal vermin'; 3) anybody who bends 'traditional' gender roles, but especially the LGBTI community. What stands out in the analysis of these processes, is the cultural practices appropriated by certain social groups, in their attempt to further present the opposition against the Istanbul Convention, as people's will. These includes traditional dances (horo), celebrative marches and other ritual-like events inter-linking online and offline contexts. The paper will have a close anthropological look on these, exploring particularly how music and sounds are mobilized in the process.
Paper short abstract:
Work celebrations in Bulgaria are part of the experience economy and of conspicuous consumption. How they draw on popular culture and use music is explored in this paper.
Paper long abstract:
Work celebrations, like office parties and company days, are a genre of festivity that dates back to the seasonal holidays marking the end of work cycles. At the same time they are a reflection of the contemporary social and cultural context, from the values and orientations that are reaffirmed, to the music that is played.
In Bulgaria nowadays, the pathos of the heroic socialist worker celebrations is replaced by "employer branding" events, in particular in the booming IT industry. Weekend long music festivals and glitzy Hollywood-inspired parties are organised to engage and attract both current and potential employees. Both organisations and individuals use these singular and excessive events for self promotion, in the new mode of conspicuous consumption of events fostered by social media.
Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper explores the process of engineering of such events. Special focus is places on the "curatorial" role of the HR and employee branding executives who put together cultural assemblages drawing mostly, but also very selectively, on popular culture with pop-folk and chalga being a special point of contention.
Paper short abstract:
Music in Malawian electrified Christian churches and temples of local cults has a substantial character, identified as power. The sound affects the believers waking in them non-human beings. The density of timbre sticks the socio-spiritual world similarly as blood in a model proposed by R. Thornton.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I discuss the substantial character of sound in religious practices of northern Malawi. The sound of urban electrified churches, as well as drumming in rural possession cults produces a space in which the relationship between the spiritual and human world is established. In both Christian presbyterian churches and vimbuza temples, the sound has a dense, massive and vibrating texture of timbre. It profoundly affects believers in an embodied way. The sound is supposed to wake up (Tumbuka language - wauka) spirits in the body. The spirits are understood in the categories of power (nkhongono), like in many African religious practices (Ellis, Ter Haar).
To explain this embodiment, I refer to the model of the socio-spiritual world in which relationships among people and non-human beings are produced through the exchange of blood (Robert Thornton). I argue that religious music works similarly, providing a sticky transmittable substance that binds social actors of different ontological statuses. This practice is pre-linguistic, concerning one's subjectivity and his or her relationship to the social environment.
Moreover, this characteristic of sound is equally related to the local world as it is to infrastructures and global networks of power. In the case of timbre, local drumming imitate the noise of electric amplifiers. Subsequently, the electrical network, scarce in Malawi, produces a social space felt like a world of shared blood and the sound of music. This space is likewise identified with the spiritual power: of the Holy Spirit assembled with economic development.
Paper short abstract:
The author will present and discuss some examples of music production that relates Slovenia to former Yugoslavia. The main topic are relations between affective atmospheres and "paramount reality" in the space that somehow survived historical tragedies, especially in younger generations.
Paper long abstract:
The Balkans is in many ways more imaginary than real place. But when we come to the matters of affectation of its sounds and music, it seems it becomes real, especially outside of the Balkans. But what kind of reality we may "touch" when attending the Balkan party, concert of a local music star, or following specific online music production for the former Yugoslav market? The author will present and discuss some examples of music production that relates Slovenia to former Yugoslav space, e.g., Moonlee Records (Bernays Propaganda from Skopje, Žen from Zagreb) for alternative and rock, trap acts like Matter, or hardly classifiable Kukla (Кукла).
The main question the author will discuss are relations between affective atmospheres and Schützean "paramount reality" in the space that somehow survived historical tragedies, especially in "affective tonalities" of younger generations.