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​7 Conclusion one’s​oWn​Music,​soMeone​else’s​nAtion Victor Hugo Gironda told me a poignant story about his own musical touring experiences in North America. He had received an invitation to Canada along with promises of performances, organizational structures, and a place to reside while he worked. Once he was in Canada, all those promises melted away, and he found himself unable to make an immediate return trip to Bolivia. In short, this was one of those international touring disasters that Bolivian musicians dread. As he was biding his time to return to Bolivia, he and his friends heard about activities of Canadian First Nations and attended some of its events. At one of them, they received an invitation to stay as long as necessary . Gironda told me about his tremendous gratitude to his indigenous hosts who saved him in a time of need. He also talked about a tie he felt to them, musing about the connections between them, in spite of the differences between situations of North American and South American indigenous peoples. Gironda is the musician pictured in figure 18, signing autographs for Japanese school children and wearing a Redskins T-shirt.1 At one level, this book has been about the intercultural nexus of Bolivian music in Japan as an ethnographic space through which to ground what often have been called sweepingly and ambiguously “transnational cultural flows.” At another level, it is a critique of nationalism as an ideology, and an exploration of how indigeneity and race thinking work with nationalism in local and transnational places. At yet another level, it moves beyond mere references to exoticism, unpacking what it means to play “someone else’s music.” Through the critiques of nationalism and stories about playing someone else’s music, I have aimed to maintain in the balance a serious consideration of the material and affective economies that might be dismissed too quickly in frameworks of exoticism, appropriation , and commodification. Bolivian music took a round about route to Japan. First, it was transformed into “Andean” music, a process that moved through Argentina and European countries before reaching Japan. Bolivian music eventually captivated Japanese listeners and began to attract audiences with 168 Chapter Seven deep commitments not only to hearing this music but also to playing it, learning it from Bolivian masters, and traveling to Bolivia to experience its imagined original sources. The political economy of this nexus has involved the experiences of staging, for Japanese school children, “authentic” Andean music performances—representations that referenced an imagined indigenous world. The front door to an easily recognized Andean indigeneity has been “El condor pasa,” the most immediate Japanese referent to the Andes that made a meandering journey through Simon and Garfunkel’s trail of fame. The Bolivian musicians with whom I performed pushed back against these narrow expectations, balancing out a program that staged the multicultural specificities of their country, including indigenous music from the highlands and lowlands. As many Bolivian musicians who tour Japan do not self-identify as indigenous , one might point the finger and say: they are playing someone else’s music. According to these criteria, the Japanese, the Bolivians, and I were all playing someone else’s music. The accusatory frame, even as it is associated with emotional responses to real historical injustices, can block off further discussion of how this borrowing, mimicry, appropriation , or theft works in nationalist ideologies, shared nostalgia for indigeneity , local economies of musicians in Bolivia, and transcultural systems of desire and affect. The work of Bolivian musicians in Japan, in small but significant ways, has made possible other kinds of musical projects at home. From an economic perspective, those who might have quit playing music remained in this field because they were able to supplement insufficient earnings in Bolivia with their take-home pay from a tour of Japan. However, the picture is no more than relatively rosy. When I checked in with musicians in the summer of 2008, I was told that Japanese companies were decreasing Bolivians’ pay, reducing their daily stipends, and scheduling just as many performances as in previous tours. Stories of work accidents and minimal health care responses to them revealed the limited coverage the sponsoring company carried for these musicians. Musicians now buy used computers upon their arrival in Japan in order to check their e-mail and chat through wireless connections available in most of their hotel accommodations . While these communication improvements eliminate the lengthy search for a nearby Internet caf...

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