Abstracts for October 21, 2004

Kate Brucher: Levar o Nome da Terra p'ra Fora: Bandas Filarmónicas Performing Place in Portugal and Abroad

Bandas filarmónicas, or civic wind bands, proclaim that their mission is "to carry the name of their terra (hometown) abroad." Using this mission as a point of departure, I explore ways that bandas filarmónicas support economic and social networks between local terras and diaspora communities.  Bands, individual musicians, band music and recordings travel between Portugal and northern Europe, North America, and South America, tracing a map of Portuguese communities that crosses political borders and wide geographic distances.  Bandas, even while performing at patron saint feasts in Portugal, often cultivate relationships with emigrants living abroad that have returned home for their hometown feast.  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with the Sociedade Filarmónica de Covões, I look at the ways that the band strengthens relationships between local audiences and vacationing emigrants, particularly through the interplay of rapsódias portuguesas (rhapsodies based on traditional Portuguese songs and dances) and North American band music in their performances.  By exploring tensions between Portuguese emigrants' experiences of bandas filarmónicas' performances and the ways that bandas in Portugal conceive of a Portuguese diaspora as an extension of terra, this project critiques notions of nationalism by looking diaspora within the framework of the nation. 

Jesse Johnston: Melodies of Ethnicity: Czech-American Polka Music and 'Czechness'

Polka music is the entertainment of choice at Wisconsin's Czech-American festivals. But why do Czech-Americans dance the polka? Is it because of the dance's reputed Czech origins? Or does it keep alive an "Old World" ideal removed from the present-day Czech Republic? European music scholars pin the dance's origins on Bohemia, the Western province of the Czech Republic. This emphasis on physical place as the determiner of origin creates many tensions. It discourages questions about why Czech-Americans polka or how the music is part of their modern world. At Czech-American festivals, stories of the polka's origins level the particularities of small groups (such as Bohemians and Moravians) in favor of "national" ethnic identities. Finally, classifying polka as the product of one culture and one place belies the cultural plurality of nineteenth-century Central Europe. Modern polka dances and community festivals offer unique chances for performers to perform their ethnicity. In my observations at two Czech-American festivals in Wisconsin, polka seemed most important as a link to an imagined past and an idealized homeland. This reduces the centrality of place as a physical location by "relocating" it to an ideal of mind. To examine the links between "real" and "ideal" homeland, I trace Czech melodies from the "Old World" to the United States. Polka, heard as one piece of Czech-American identity, reinforces a "Czech" ethnicity and so provides a glimpse of one way that Czech-Americans have effected or effaced an "Old World" heritage.

Joshua Tucker: "Sowing Culture" on Disc: Media, Migrants and Musica Ayacuchana in Contemporary Lima

Over the past decade and a half, the Andean musical style called música ayacuchana has emerged as one of the most popular and widely consumed musics in Lima, Peru.  In this paper, I will explore the role of DJs and record producers in popularizing the style, showing how some of their actions have influenced its success.  I will question the way in which these individuals have mobilized a series of ideas about music, race, and education that have deep roots within the music’s home region of Ayacucho, in order to position it as the music of choice for an emergent Andean middle class in Lima.  I will suggest that the rise of música ayacuchana has had somewhat ambivalent consequences: though this has contributed to the entry of Andean peoples and Andean cultural practices into the national imaginary, it has also tended to reinscribe local Ayacuchano systems of racial distinction in a powerful way.