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Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the connection between music and language in the context of language revitalization. The focus is on a case study among the Mỹky nation in Brazilian southern Amazonia, that of the documentation of traditional jakuli music and its revitalization proceess in the community.

Paper long abstract:

As an orally-transmitted means of knowledge and communication, traditional music is very adjacent to language. This presentation discusses the connection between the two in the context of language revitalization. The focus is on one case study among the Mỹky nation in Brazilian southern Amazonia, that of the revitalization of traditional jakuli music.

Jakuli, as a musical genre, combines vocal and instrumental music with dance. Typically, men play the reed pipes while women sing the jakuli tunes. The author of this presentation worked together with the three last fluent performers of jakuli in the village of Japuira, with a heavy involvement of members of the community throughout the process.

The first stages of the revitalization of the jakuli involved the following steps:

• Recording and ranscribing the text of some of the tunes.

• Searching for the specific reed used to make katẽntiri pipes, harder and harder to find

due to the destruction of the forest by land invaders and ranchers.

• Building a prototype of practice pipes made with PVC piping.

• Developing an easy notation for the music.

• Developing printed and multimedia training materials.

Besides providing an answer to the community’s desire to not let jakuli vanish, the ripple effect of our work on its revitalization also encouraged the use of the Mỹky language, by (re)creating a communication space where the Mỹky language is omnipresent, and also by stimulating an interest in the lexicon, myths and oral history connected to the jakuli and to Mỹky-language song more broadly.

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Paper short abstract:

My paper will discuss the affective role of music in a recent cultural revival movement among the Huni Kuin, an Indigenous Amazonian people. Music plays a fundamental role in upkeeping conviviality among kin and generating positive social relations with outsiders.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will discuss the role of music in a recent cultural revival movement among the indigenous Huni Kuin people in South-Western Lowland South America. The cultural revival movement expresses a common desire to revitalize certain key Huni Kuin ceremonies and knowledge practices. At the heart of this movement is a reconstitution of the ayahuasca ceremony in a novel way which juxtaposes traditional voice only chanting with recent experimental musical endeavours, which include the use of instruments, in a cohesive structure which reflects Huni Kuin ontology. The affective quality of Huni Kuin music, both via live intercultural performances and internet videos, has afforded the Huni Kuin an unprecedented level of global exposure, opening pathways to new alliances and relationships with the Other. I propose to analyse the affect of music on two levels. Firstly, at the level of the village I analyse the crucial role music plays in the creation and maintenance of sociality, using indigenous concepts and what I coin ´acoustic conviviality´ to explore how music expresses the intentionality of the musician and affects the listener on a corporeal level. Secondly, I explore the intercultural sphere in which young Huni Kuin artists use their music in multifarious ways to form new alliances and friendships with outsiders. It is my intention to show the continuities between these two levels of analyses and argue that music plays a fundamental role in generating positive social relations, with far reaching consequences for the Huni Kuin in the 21st century.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the impact of Orlando Pantera's music and lyrics on the integration of Afro and popular expressions into contemporary styles and trends in Cape Verdean music.

Paper long abstract:

In 2000 I made a film (More Soul) with Cape Verdean musician and composer Orlando Pantera. In 2024, with fieldwork done in Santiago Island, I explored the influences of his music on the contemporary artistic scene using a multimodal anthropological approach, including traditional forms of visual anthropology while simultaneously engage the variety of media forms that exist today. Orlando Pantera (1967-2001) died at the age of 33, without recording any album of his own. My collaborative research and film rescues him from a certain anonymity, through a creative and experimental use of sound, image and written archives, unpublished recordings, archival material from artistic residencies in the 1980s, all this articulated with a journey, today, to the intricacies of the Cape Verdean "soul" that Pantera represents. As Cidra (2022:01) states, “his compositions negotiate the inclusion of historically silenced or subaltern histories, cultural practices, and experiences of being Cape Verdean within the framework of a hegemonic Creole national narrative”. He is considered today as the most influential of a new generation of musicians, setting his music and his use of an archaic creole on on nostalgic roots and rurality by . He unearthed traditional genres from the island of Santiago, coming back from colonial African slaves, forgotten by post-independence generations and, without reproducing them, created his own style, admired by both established and young people. Inspired by videoclips and photographs from the 80's and 90's, this multimodal research discusses ways of doing visual, sensorial and musical ethnography.

Cidra, R. (2022). Orlando Pantera e a performance da história. Lusotopie, XXI(1), 1-19. https://journals.openedition.org/lusotopie/4939

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Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Ilú Obá De Min, this paper focuses on its Afro-diasporic musicking, understanding it as a way of sharing and learning “ecologies of knowledge”, and, simultaneously, as a process of transformation and healing for the women who compose the group.

Paper long abstract:

The Ilú Obá De Min is a Brazilian street carnival group based in the city of São Paulo and formed by almost 450 women, mainly Black. The group works to preserve and to diffuse “Black cultures”, and to “empower” Black women in Brazilian society through the “Afro-diasporic performances” – rhythms, songs and dances of African Diaspora – that become ways of revindication of its African ancestry and resistance against racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination.

The group’s most important activity is the preparation of the Carnival parade, a creative process that lasts 6 months during which Ilú Obá De Min’s members collectively construct their musical performances. At the heart of this process there are the plural bodies of the group’s women that play, sing and dance, deconstructing hegemonic normative discourses and, at the same time, creating spaces of belonging.

From this point of view, Ilú Obá De Min’s main goal is not just the realization of the Carnival parade, but the very process behind it, since its musical-pedagogical practices promote, on one hand, the production, sharing and learning of “ecologies of knowledge”; on the other, the activation of collective and individual processes of self-recognition, the “transformation” of Black women’s positioning in relation to their bodies and subjectivities, and paths of “healing” for the “wounds” caused by a racist, sexist, patriarchal, heteronormative and deeply unjust and unequal society to Black and indigenous people, women and lgbtqia+ persons.

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Paper short abstract:

How do the musical practices of newly arrived African musicians remake the city of São Paulo? This ‘creative diaspora’ soundtracks a politics of assumed but complicated affect between Brazil’s historic and new africanities, bringing together an Afrobrazilian present and an Afropolitan future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents some reflections on what we call the African creative diaspora, such as we’ve observed in the last 8 years of ethnographic research and collaborative filmmaking with musicians and artists coming from different countries in Africa to Brazil in the last 10 years. In São Palco – An Afropolitan City, the 4th film made by the authors in this thematic project, we present the city of São Paulo as a kind of meta-stage occupied by artists from Togo, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, among other African nations, in dialogue with the Brazilian population and all of its openings, contradictions and tensions. What do African artists who arrive in Brazil bring with them on their journey? How do Brazil's African diasporas interact - the new creative diaspora and the historic one that turned the Atlantic into a cemetery? What stages are sought out, occupied or constructed, and then filled with the performances of artists who cross the ocean? Ancestral identities are updated in performances that construct an Afropolitan present in a metropolis where it is necessary to be bold, to colour the grey. The paper discusses ethnographic aspects as well as collaborative filmmaking as a method and a politics for anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

Aided by accessible circuit board printing platforms and music gear promotion videos on social media, the paper shows how today's flourishing of modular synthesizer manufacturing weaves webs of emotional regulation that make audible attachments to people, places, and histories of music technology.

Paper long abstract:

The last two decades have seen a flourishing of boutique electronic musical instrument makers. Aided by accessible circuit board printing platforms and craft vendor websites such as Etsy, it is now easier than ever to start a one-person musical instrument business. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with modular synthesizer manufacturers in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK to explore how such instruments come to serve as key conduits in the unfolding of social and affective relations. Modular synthesizers are flexible, open machines for music composition and sound design that are played by patching patch cords across the partial objects that make up the instrument. The instruments are increasingly performed in domestic spaces from where performance videos are circulated through social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. Conceptualising this culture as the cybernetic music of small tech in an age of citizen manufacturing, I show how patching modular synthesizers not only connects sound modules, but also weaves webs of emotional regulation that make audible attachments to people, places, and histories of music technology. Moreover, by highlighting the role of so-called 'synthfluencers' who demonstrate these instruments on social media, I explore how modular affect is driven by lively, adaptive interrelations between gear promotion and the emotional needs of musicians.

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Paper short abstract:

TikTok's Sound feature shapes a unique musical landscape, enabling users to navigate cultural boundaries and enact complex identities. This paper explores how Ethiopian-Israeli youth employ Sounds and music to convey nuanced cultural negotiations through embodied and interrelated musicalities.

Paper long abstract:

On TikTok, the Sound feature emerges as a catalyst for user interaction, shaping an innovative musical landscape. Users can select pre-existing Sounds, or craft their own, which then become available for others in their creations. In doing so, they lean on music to create and share TikTok videos, mostly through set dance challenges, lip syncs or gestures, participating in an embodied, mimetic and interrelated form of musicality. While the dominance of global Sound trends implies a homogenised cultural expression that is largely shaped by mass media, users will in fact strategically employ them to navigate niche digital spaces and ever-changing cultural boundaries. In Hadassah Neurim Youth Village, a boarding school in Israel for students of low socio-economic backgrounds and immigrant families, youth make TikTok videos on a daily basis, creating multifaceted audiovisual narratives that hinge on elements of their identity, from immigration and integration to their relationship with their birth country and national identification.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as an extended digital ethnography, this paper will focus specifically on Ethiopian-Israeli youth in the village. It will reveal how they utilise Sounds and music as a vehicle for communicating complex cosmopolitan identities that negotiates global, national, ethnic, and racial styles and leans on both Ethiopian-Israeli contexts and broader Afro-diasporic positioning. In doing so, It will show how these youths participate in a curated selection of popular trends through which they negotiate an evolving relationship with their peers, their ethnic and racial identities, and Israel’s state structure and integration strategies.

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Paper short abstract:

Unlike other music forms, Afrobeats is often criticised for being just for having a good time and not spreading a message. This paper explores how Afrobeats nonetheless evokes collective memories that bands transnational audiences into affective publics on YouTube.

Paper long abstract:

Afrobeats is a contemporary music form that originated from West Africa and is currently taking the world by storm. It is an eclectic music form that incorporates a large variety of music genres. As a music form that inspires dance challenges on TikTok, dancing on the streets and dancing in the clubs, it is often criticised for lacking a message. This paper explores how this music form functions as a catalyst for the formation of socio-political collectives that cut across geographic boundaries. Taking a case study of two Burna Boy songs, the paper looks at the intersection of African popular music and digital platform affordances in the aggregation of transnational affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015). Based on a thematic analysis of the YouTube comments section of the songs, the study finds affective publics are formed through collective memories (Eyerman, 2002) that are evoked by the songs. The study concludes that on the one hand, Burna Boy’s imitation of revolutionary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti evokes memories associated with songs that inspire political consciousness. On the other hand, lyrics of the song, together with the images in the music video, elicits common sentiments associated with shared history and experiences. Although Burna Boy comments on the Nigerian experience in these songs, the collective memories bands audiences of different nationalities and ethnicities together.

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Paper short abstract:

Our paper shows how music matters in the spontaneous shaping of a socio-cultural configuration of a taste-based cosmopolitan community in Jerusalem, where DIY and indie music bring together Jews and Arabs, seculars and ultra-orthodox Jews, locals and tourists to enjoy shared musical aesthetics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the formation of a taste-based cosmopolitan community in Jerusalem. Based on their shared attraction to indie music as well as to the ethics of Do It Yourself (DIY) practices, residents of different ethno-national and religious backgrounds gather in the city of Jerusalem to create their shared cultural space despite powerful socio-political mechanisms that push for their separation in the city and elsewhere.

Our ethnographic fieldwork shows how music matters in the spontaneous shaping of a socio-cultural configuration. According to our findings, there are similarities between the conceptual characteristics of the indie music as an alternative to the commercial orientation of the major record companies that dominate the Western market and the conceptual characteristics of the cosmopolitan ideals as alternatives to the nation-state epistemology. Specifically, our fieldwork, interviews and media analysis show how Jerusalem's scene of indie music allows for the creation of an alternative social scene that brings together Jews and Arabs, seculars and ultra-orthodox Jews, locals and tourists to enjoy musical aesthetics that draws from the alternative rock tradition and which goes beyond popular musical configurations.

In the presentation we will share our analysis of a music videoclip filmed in Jerusalem. As we will argue, the production of the videoclip highlights DIY's practices of cultural experimentalism that realize a normative ideal of the city as a shared public space that enables the formation of a cosmopolitan community of taste.

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This research explores the transformative role of online community radio within the context of Palestinian resistance, focusing on it's potential to embody care and foster international solidarity through sound.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the role of internet community radio in the Palestinian resistance, focusing on its potential to foster international solidarity across borders. It also investigates the potential of community radio to embody sumud, a Palestinian concept of steadfastness and resilience, and exist as a space for community care. This research aims to understand the importance of community radio in shaping and disseminating the Palestinian narrative and identity, while also assessing its contribution to the Palestinian liberation struggle. In pursuit of these objectives, the study employs a digital ethnography of Radio Alhara, drawing on relevant literature connected to protests on the sonic ground, active listening and cross-border broadcasting. This study underscores the importance of a committed scholarship, rooted in the community and a collaborative approach that questions the potential of decolonizing anthropology, and its contribution to the study of Palestine and is summarized in a e-zine format.