Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance (review)

Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991) developed the influential theory that nations do not exist a priori, nor are they formed by drawing international borders; nations come into being through a process of people believing or being convinced that they are one nation who share common elements, such as history, language, or ethnicity. Nations do not form around people, but through them and dialectically the nation becomes internalized as a part of identity. Because the scope of the nation goes beyond face-to-face interactions, binding and powerful common ties, such as history and music, are shared nationally only in the imagination. Anderson listed print culture as one of the key products and means by which people imagined themselves to share common experiences and identities in the nineteenth century. In turn, anthropologist Michelle Bigenho wondered if Bolivians, who lacked a high rate of literacy or even a common language from the republican period through the early twentieth century, might have developed their own national identity through other processes. In her book Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performances (2002), Bigenho explores

alternative modes of feeling membership in imagined communities, modes that, through music performance, are not outside of visual representations, but are at once connected to embodied practices and sonorous experiences. . . . I want to lay out a nation that listens to, dances, and feels an imagined common bond.

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Basing her study on fieldwork carried out in multiple sites and performance contexts from 1993–95 and the summers of 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000, Bigenho draws on interviews and observations as well as her own experiences performing as a violinist with the Bolivian group Música de Maestros.

The role of musical performances in nationalism is explored through the consideration of two interrelated areas: authenticity and local, ethnic, and national identities. The connection between authenticity and identity may not be apparent on the surface; however, disagreements, criticism, and clashes around musical performances reveal that these issues are connected by struggles for power within the social matrix through discourses about the right or true (authentic) musical experience or performers. Bigenho identifies three types of authenticity and uses each chapter of the book to explain how these claims are made and by whom. The author outlines the following types of authenticity—experiential, cultural-historical, and unique—or the felt, represented, and exchanged, respectively. Bigenho develops these "heuristic devices" to aid in the examination of the distinctions of ideology and claims about authenticity among different performance contexts and musical genres. Authenticity can become a slippery subject to ethnomusicologists when claims are lived as real or natural facts, even though all claims are constructed, socially imbedded, and contested. Bigenho addresses this by creating three analytic categories and also thoughtfully cautions that these are interpretive categories and not representations of reality.

Chapter 2, "What Makes You Want to Dance," examines experiential authenticity, which involves realness that is felt in the body; it is the groove of music. Properly executed experientially authentic music frequently inspires movement and dance in Bolivia. This matters to identity because this feeling

becomes a "sensory metaphor" characterized by synesthesia: when one sense experience, by continuity, draws an associative relation with another sense experience (see Shore 1991, 18). This sensory feeling of music performances establishes relations between people and physical places.

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Bigenho offers many examples of experientially authentic musical performance that vary greatly in their sound and social contexts. She includes carnival performances of duct flute ensembles in rural indigenous communities, the pan-Andean group Los Kjarkas and confusion over the saya and caporal dances, Música de Maestro metrical ambivalence in the cueca, and avant-garde practices on indigenous instruments. In each case the author explains not only the characteristics of the sounds performed, but also the meaning and felt experiences of those performances for each group. In the end she concludes that experiential authenticity's persuasion...