Paper short abstract:

This paper examines forced migrants in the German music industry. Their life stories illustrate how migrants navigate different ‘regimes of value’. Based on ethnographic work with professional musicians, I present their trajectory from strategic dependence to creative autonomy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how forced migrants negotiate dependent relationships across social spheres to pursue economic and personal autonomy. It examines this question through ethnographic work conducted with professional musicians in Germany. These life stories illustrate broader processes that define flexible capitalism: ‘undoing’ previous positionalities, recasting identities, and exerting agency in complex social fields. Such experiences in the context of displacement not only reveal a field’s underlying social structures, but also how they may be changed.

Public imagination romanticises artists as the epitome of freedom, valuing their work above debased transactional commodities. But musicians tell a different story. Value is determined less by one’s artistic quality and more by how one navigates ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai 1986) in multiple constellations of dependencies. In the paper I discuss three spheres of dependency. On the interpersonal level, a musician’s value is chiefly determined through winning social recognition and exchange. On the institutional level, the government and its diversity politics determine value through grants and subsidies – reproducing economic dependencies and categories of difference. The third category are migration-specific, including relations to ethnic minority groups and the state apparatus via asylum procedures, citizenship applications, unemployment, etc.

Many musicians cast moral judgement on those who simply ‘play the game’ or manoeuvre in these spheres solely for financial gain. But many admit that the path to artistic freedom requires a certain degree of dependency and entanglement. Some have achieved this desired autonomy, others are still playing the same old tune.