Music as culture

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

Classes are expository, combining the teacher’s presentation with texts presentation and debate by students. 

Learning Outcomes

1. To be able to problematize music as a product of specific historical, cultural and social contexts of production.

2. To know critically the concept of culture, its meanings and debates in anthropology.

3. To know the disciplinary project of ethnomusicology, the development of the discipline and the main paradigm shifts throughout the twentieth century, including the transformations of its object(s) of study.

4. To master the concept of cultural relativism, particularly regarding music.

5. To acknowledge the importance of fieldwork and ethnography as ways of understanding the musical practices of different cultural contexts and to problematize the complexity of the dichotomy between observer and observed.

6. To develop an ethical and critical positioning towards the social role of ethnomusicology for understanding the phenomenon of music.

7. To develop the necessary tools to understand how music complexly participates in broader social and cultural phenomena.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

This syllabus aims to sensitize students to an understanding of music in culture (integrating the set of cultural practices of a group); and as culture (as an expression in its own right that produces its own meanings) (Merriam 1964). It promotes a perspective not centered on music itself, but on the historically situated subjects who understand, learn, interpret, produce and relate to it. Through the analysis of case studies, students will be asked to consider how different musical practices are mediated by their own concepts, value systems and discourses; and to understand how they participate in broader cultural phenomena such as: nationalism and nation building; identity struggles and social movements; the construction and negotiation of gender categories; the boundaries between the traditional and the modern; the impact of globalization in world music traditions; urban popular expressions and alternative cultures, among others.

Head Lecturer(s)

Leonor Duarte Patacas de Areia Losa

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Research work: 25.0%
Participation: 25.0%
Laboratory work or Field work: 25.0%
Synthesis work: 25.0%

Bibliography

BARZ, G. F. e COOLEY, T. J., ed. 1997. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Nova Iorque: Oxford University Press.

CIDRA, R. 2021. Funaná, Raça e Masculinidade: um trajectória colonial e pós-colonial. Lisboa: Outro Modo.

CLIFFORD, James e MARCUS, G. E. 1986. Writing Culture : the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

FELD, S. 2012 [1982]. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3.ª ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Machin-Autenrieth, M. 2020. "The Dynamics of Intercultural Music Making in Granada: Everyday Multiculturalism and Moroccan Integration" in Ethnomusicology 54(3):422-446.

MERRIAM, Alan. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni.

MCDONALD, D. A. 2009 “Poetics and the Performance of Violence in Israel/Palestine.” Ethnomusicology 53(1): 58–85.

RICE, T. 2014. Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford university Press.