Ethnicity
Giving a strict definition to ethnicity is considered difficult by many scholars, but it can be best understood in terms of the creation and preservation of boundaries, in contrast to the social "essences" in the gaps between these boundaries. In fact, ethnic boundaries can both define and maintain social identities, and music can be used in local social situations by members of society to create such boundaries.
Although groups are self-defining in how they express the differences between self and other, colonization, domination, and violence within developing societies cannot be ignored. In a society, often dominant groups brutally oppress minority ethnicities from their classification systems. Music can be used as a tool to propagate dominant classifications in such societies, and has been used as such by new and developing states especially through control of media systems. Indeed, though music can help define a national identity, authoritarian states can control this musical identity through technology, in that they end up dictating what citizens can listen to. Governments often value music as a symbol, which can be used to promote supra-national entities. They often use this to argue the right to participate in or control a significant cultural or political event, such as Turkey's involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest.
Historically, anthropologists have believed that ethnomusicologists deal with something that by definition cannot be synonymous with the social realities of the present world. In response, ethnomusicologists sometimes present a concept of society that purely exists within an all-encompassing definition of music. Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger agrees with this, giving an example of how Suya society (in Brazil) can be understood in terms of its music. Seeger notes how "Suya society was an orchestra, its village was a concert hall, and its year a song."
Music helps one understand oneself in relation to people, places, and times. It informs one's sense of physical place - a musical event (such as a collective dance) uniquely evokes collective memories and experiences of place. Both ethnomusicologists and anthropologists believe that music provides the means by which political and moral hierarchies are developed. Music allows people to comprehend both identities and physical places, as well as the boundaries that divide them.
Gender is another area where boundaries are "performed" in music. Instruments and instrumental performance can contribute to a society's definition of gender, in that behaviour of performers conforms to the gender expectations of society (e.g. men should not display effort, or women should feign reluctance to perform). Issues of ethnicity and music intersect with gender studies in fields like historical musicology, the study of popular music, and ethnomusicology. Indeed, gender can be seen as a symbol of social and political order, and controlling gender boundaries is thus a means of controlling such order. Gender boundaries reveal the most deeply intrinsic forms of domination in a society, that subsequently provide a template for other forms of domination. However, music can also provide a means of pushing back against these boundaries by blurring the boundary between what is traditionally considered male and female.
When one listens to foreign music, one tries to make sense of it in terms of one's own (familiar) music and musical worldviews, and this internal struggle can be seen as a power struggle between one's musical views and the other, foreign ones. Sometimes, musicians celebrate ethnic plurality in problematic ways, in that they collect genres, and subsequently alter and reinterpret them in their own terms. Societies often publicize so-called multi-cultural music performances simply for the promotion of their own self-image. Such staged folklore begins to greatly diverge from the celebration of ethnic plurality it purportedly represents, and the music and dance being performed become meaningless when presented so entirely out of context. In such a scenario, which is seen very commonly, the meaning of the performance is both created and controlled by the performers, the audience, and even the media of the society the performance takes place in.
Music rarely remains stable in contexts of social change -- "culture contact" causes music to be altered to whatever new culture it has come in contact with. In this way, minority communities can internalize the outside world through music-a kind of sense-making. They become able to deal with and control a foreign world on their own (musical) terms. Indeed, such integration of musical difference is an integral aspect of the creation of a musical identity, which can be seen in Seeger's description of the Brazilian Suya, who took music from an outside culture and made it their own as an "assertion of identity in a multi-ethnic social situation." In addition, consider the development of East Indian culture. Many of the trademarks of East Indian society, such as the caste system and the Bhojpuri form of the Hindi language, are becoming obsolete, which erodes their concept of ethnic identity. In light of these conditions, music has begun to play an unprecedented role in the concept of East Indian ethnic identity Music can also play a transformative part in the formation of the identities of urban and migrant communities, which can be seen in the diverse and distinct musical cultures in the melting pot of communities in the US. In the case of colonialism, the colonizer and the colonized end up repeatedly exchanging musical ideas. For instance, in the Spanish colonization of the indigenous Native Americans, the resulting mestizo music reflects the intersection of these two culture spheres, and even gave way to new modes of musical expression bearing aspects of both cultures.
Ethnicities and class identities have a complicated relationship. Class can be seen as the relative control a group has over economic (relating to means of production), cultural, political, and social assets in various social areas. In the case of migrant communities, the divide between the concepts of ethnicity and class blur (for instance, one ethnic group/class level provides cheap labor for the other, such as in the case of Latinx Mexican immigrants performing cheap farming labor for White Americans). This blurring can also be seen in Zimbabwe, where White settlers determined a hierarchical social order divided by ethnicity: Blacks, others "coloureds," Asians, and Whites (who were at the top of the hierarchy). The concept of "geographical heritage" (where one cannot change where one's ancestors come from) contributed to this concept of immutability of this constructed hierarchy; White settlers enforced the ranks of this hierarchy through their definition of how "civilized" each ethnic group was (Whites being the most civilized).
However, one cannot simply match a class with a single musical style, as musical styles reflect the complex and often contradictory aspects of the society as a whole. Marxist subcultural theory proposes that subcultures borrow and alter traits from the dominant culture to create a newly diverse range of available traits where the signs of the dominant culture remain, but are now part of a new and simultaneously subversive whole. In fact, ethnicities are similar to classes in many ways. They are often either defined or excluded based on the rules of the dominant classificatory system of the society. Thus, ethnic minorities are forced to figure out how to create their own identities within the control of the dominant classifications. Ethnic minorities can also use music in order to resist and protest the dominant group. This can be seen in European Jews, African Americans, Malaysian-Chinese, and even in the Indonesian-Chinese, who expressed resistance through Chinese theater performances.
Medical
Scholars have characterized medical ethnomusicology as "a new field of integrative research and applied practice that explores holistically the roles of music and sound phenomena and related praxes in any cultural and clinical context of health and healing". Medical ethnomusicology often focuses specifically on music and its effect on the biological, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual realms of health. In this regard, medical ethnomusicologists have found applications of music to combat a broad range of health issues; music has found usage in the treatment of autism, dementia, AIDS and HIV, while also finding use in social and spiritual contexts through the restoration of community and the role of music in prayer and meditation. Recent studies have also shown how music can help to alter mood and serve as cognitive therapy.
Ethnochoreology
Ethnochoreology (also dance ethnology, dance anthropology) is the study of dance through the application of a number of disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and ethnography. The word itself is relatively recent and etymologically means “the study of ethnic dance”, though this is not exclusive of research on more formalized dance forms, such as classical ballet, for example. Thus, ethnochoreology reflects the relatively recent attempt to apply academic thought to why people dance and what it means. Ethnochoreology is not just the study or cataloguing of the thousands of external forms of dances-the dance moves, music, costumes, etc.- in various parts of the world, but the attempt to come to grips with dance as existing within the social events of a given community as well as within the cultural history of a community. Dance is not just a static representation of history, not just a repository of meaning, but a producer of meaning each time it is produced-not just a living mirror of a culture, but a shaping part of culture, a power within the culture :
- “The power of dance rests in acts of performance by dancers and spectators alike, in the process of making sense of dance… and in linking dance experience to other sets of ideas and social experiences.”
Dance whether social, ritual or even theatrical, is inherent in a complex web of relationships. He interprets the socially predetermined and meaningful ways of movement and, of course, the history of dance groups in specific societies. In this way dance is "a social text" complex, multifaceted and constantly evolving. Additionally, dance as a social practice acts according to space and time, becoming expressions of everyday life and the respective social structure that comes in contact. Moreover, dance, apart from allowing people to express themselves, is a focal social, cultural process related to human identity, contributes to "structure and diffuse cultural meaning" and can cultivate an interactive and practical narrative imbued with political views.
Ethnochoreology, dance ethnology, and dance anthropology are closely related fields of study, with slightly varying and often overlapping histories and methodologies.
The history of ethnochoreology and dance anthropology
The study of dance anthropology developed out of the work of colonizers, missionaries, and researchers of disciplines such as anthropology and musicology. The first observations of dance in Indigenous and non-Western societies were not necessarily due to dedicated study, rather emerging as byproducts of other anthropological research. In many of the cultures studied, observations on dance could not be ignored due to dance’s importance to Indigenous ceremonial life. Many of these observations were speculative, lacking in qualitative or quantitative analysis, and assumed false dichotomies between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ societies. In 1933, musicologist Curt Sachs wrote Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (World History of the Dance) in an attempt to provide an analytical framework for the study of dance based in cultural evolution. However, his data was often insufficient or misleading, and therefore his work is no longer considered a viable basis for the study of dance anthropology.
In 1962, the International Council for Traditional Music established a working group that laid the foundations of the field and defined ethnochoreology as a science. Anca Giurchescu, who would later serve as chair of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology from 1998 to 2006, was a member of the 1962 committee. Ethnochoreology originally focused on the national dance traditions and folk dances of specific European countries, but has since expanded to include new urban folk groups and the dance traditions of immigrants.
Modern dancer and anthropologist Gertrude Prokosch Kurath pioneered the specific field of dance ethnology, which developed in America parallel to the development of ethnochoreology in Europe. Kurath considered dance ethnology to be a branch of dance anthropology, and laid its foundations in her 1960 work Panorama of Dance Ethnology: outlining dance ethnology’s methods of documentation and analysis, and opening the discussions on dance transmission and diffusion, tradition and innovation, and relation to other aspects of culture. Whereas dance anthropology focused on the study of culture through dance, dance ethnology focused on questions of dance specifically, employing insights into human behavior to answer such questions. Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham were both notable dancers that bridged the gap between dance performance and dance ethnography.
Methodological and ethical issues
There are many methodological and ethical issues that arise from research in ethnochoreology. Anthropological research in general is a source of contention and suspicion for many Indigenous peoples, as historically it has been used as a tool of colonization, rather than to benefit Indigenous societies. For early anthropologists and missionaries, the research of non-Western cultures and subsequent categorization into Western terms and canon was a method of colonization. For example, many cultures have no generic word for “art,” or for “dance.” Western dichotomies of art dance vs non-art dance, professional vs hobbyist, and religious vs secular do not necessarily apply to other societies. The assumed transference of such concepts are a method by which Western concepts have been imposed on non-Western societies by anthropologists, art collectors, etc.[9] Some dance ethnologists have tried to rectify this issue by changing their field of inquiry from the term “dance” to broader ideas of “movement systems” and “human movement.” Historically, dance anthropology often also fell into the larger category of primitivist thought, suggesting an evolutionary or progressive model of dance. Research along the primitivist vein associates Indigenous peoples with animals and nature more closely than with humanity.[8] The primitivist art movement created a progressive model of art, in which art began with Indigenous art forms and ultimately developed into Western modern art, therefore positing that Western art forms were more socially developed than those of Indigenous peoples.
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