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2. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
- Indiana University Press
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40 2 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: “World Music” and the Commodification of Religious Experience Steven Feld Schizophonia and Its Discontents Since the early 1980s I have been tracking “world music,” a term I do not use transparently , as a benign generic gloss for human musical diversity. My interest is specifically in “world music” as a label of industrial origin that refers to an amalgamated global marketplace of sounds as ethnic commodities. Once more idiosyncratically and unevenly collected and circulated under labels like “primitive,” “folk,” “ethnic ,” “race,” “traditional,” “exotic,” or “international” music, today’s world music tells a new story, one about intersections of transnational capital, global economic niche expansion, technological ubiquity, and the contradictions of aesthetic pluralism and product homogenization. It is a story about the shaping power of a global recording industry that sees the marketplace as the actual arbiter and guarantor of musical authenticity. This is to argue that the existence of the category of “world music”—like the category of “fine art” examined by Fred Myers (2001)—derives from and is chiefly dependent on the marketplace, and not from formal genre distinctions , autonomous aesthetic qualities, or geographic categories. Like other contemporary anthropological projects, mine owes a certain impetus to Michel Foucault’s (1977) insistence that the modern world is full of categorizations experienced as normalizing routines that render things invisible but known. I find it useful to examine many invisible but known qualities of world My Life in the Bush of Ghosts | 41 music through the concept of “schizophonia,” a term introduced by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1977, 90) to refer to the splitting of sounds from their sources. Unlike Schafer, I do not use the term principally or simply to refer to the technological process of splitting that constitutes sound recording. Rather, I am concerned with the larger arena where sound recordings move into long- and short-term routes of circulation and patterns of consumption. At stake, then, in the splitting of sounds from sources is the possibility of new social life, and this is principally about the recontextualization and resignification of sounds. It is the relationship of these social processes of resignification and their relationship to commoditization that I have been following, specifically how schizophonic things participate in what Arjun Appadurai (1986) has called “regimes of value.” My larger goal is to theorize how the experience of music is now increasingly mediated and tied to recorded commodities, but my specific interest is to explore the role of schizophonia—a decidedly nervous word, of course—in producing a classic form of modernist anxiety. This is the anxiety that world music variously reduces cultural equity or creates deeper cultural cleavages and hierarchies. It is the anxiety that world music—whatever good it does, whatever pleasure it brings— rests on economic structures that turn intangible cultural heritage into detachable labor. It is the anxiety that this detachability marginalizes, exploits, or humiliates indigenous originators and stewards. It is the anxiety that the underlying tale here is about the enrichment of global corporations, the consolidation of music ownership in centers of power, and the reproduction of the West touristing the rest for leisure and pleasure. Alongside the production of these anxious narratives, world music has consistently , indeed, dialectically, produced a much more frequent narrative, one of celebration . It is this celebratory narrative that sees world music as indigeneity’s champion and best friend. This celebratory narrative sees musical hybridity and fusion as cultural signs of unbounded and deterritorialized identities. It sees the production of both indigenous autonomy and cultural hybridity as unassailable global positives, moves that signify the desire for greater cultural respect, tolerance, and blending. Here is where celebratory discourse virtually proclaims world music as synonymous with anti-essentialism, with borderlessness, with cultural free flow, with a futurist hope or prediction of greater cultural and economic equilibrium. Anxious narratives tend to focus more sharply on economics and power. They emphasize how the music marketplace is structurally founded on historical inequities in the areas of copyright, royalty structures, ownership regimes, and access to the market. They insist that the industry is currently organized in ways that typically reproduce and amplify these fundamental inequities. Celebratory narratives , on the other hand, tend to pay more attention to how pleasure and participation enhance new connections and close old gaps. They emphasize new possibilities , new forms of recognition and the potential for respect they bring. In short, [54.159.186.146] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:05 GMT) 42...