Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I explore how Slovenian “ethno” singers engage with notions of nature and the “natural.” Drawing both on onthological turn and poststructuralist view of music and voice as self-technology, I show how their practices alter Western dualisms, but also intersect with modern commodification processes.

Paper long abstract

Western epistemology has long been shaped by conceptual oppositions, one of them being culture/nature. The “ontological turn” questioned the legitimacy of applying these dualities to the ontologies of the “Others.”

This question - the epistemological schism between researcher and interlocutors - became central to my research with the singers of “ethno” music in Slovenia. How do we theorize emic narratives of engagement with traditional music as emancipatory while also analyzing its embeddedness within contemporary cultural processes and means of production?

I unravel this dilemma by exploring notions of nature and “natural” among singers from two epistemological standpoints. First, I draw on the idea of interlocutors as “co-theorists” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), and of folk song as agentive subject. I show how the affective engagement with traditional music allows singers to inhabit modes of subjectification alternative to Western dualisms and cultivate different relation to the nature.

Second, I consider poststructuralist notions of music and (“natural”) voice as “technologies of the self” (De Nora 2004) and show how the “natural voice” concept is embedded in contemporary processes of commodification of musical traditions, voice-work and self-work.

Bringing these seemingly incongruent approaches together highlights how engagements with traditional music complicate romanticized notions of “traditional ecological knowledge” and frame nature as emergent through performative practices. At the same time, singers - neither confined to nostalgic folk-life imageries, nor reducible to products of modern ideologies - strategically mobilize ideas of nature and the “natural” and take active role in the construction of their own life-worlds.