Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a year-long fieldwork, this paper examines the improvisational ways by which cosmopolitan worldviews are integrated into widely circulating Tausug music videos in the troubled regions of the Southern Philippines.

Paper long abstract:

This paper lays down a critical perspective of cultural improvisation as an analytical ground for understanding rooted forms of cosmopolitanism in a locality torn by strife and economic woes. To contextualise this point, the paper draws assumptions from a year-long ethnographic fieldwork on the production and circulation of popular small media recordings of Tausug music and dance videos in the streets and slums of Zamboanga and Sulu in the Southern Philippines. VCD productions and circulations in the region are akin to a small cottage industry pursued by agents who live ordinary lives as flea market sellers, rickshaw drivers, wedding performers, or small internet shop owners deeply invested in a creative engagement that can be described as improvisational. The improvisational character of VCD production is evident in times when video producers utilise pocket-size home video cameras as music filming tool, internet shops as video editing laboratory, and video grabs of Hollywood films as visual background for local music. Notwithstanding the limitations of their resources and security troubles their communities face, Tausug video makers write music and film videos with themes that resonate with the cosmopolitan dictum of cultivating responsibility towards the others while upholding the idea of oneness of humanity amidst broad diversities of faith and disparate sense of social belonging in the region. This fluid, indeterminate flow of quotidian life in Zamboanga and Sulu provide a lens for viewing a process of identity construction that does not stray from the cosmopolitan vision of ethical engagement of self and other.