Browsing by Author "Meintjes, Louise"

This dissertation examines how un(der)employed South Korean young adults maintain optimism in their pursuit of a “good life” that itself is contingent on regular employment. Based on fieldwork about everyday economic insecurity in neoliberal Seoul, I propose that the labor invested to keep their employability viable includes a labor of the voice. I examine how my informants cultivate the aesthetic, poetic, and communicative qualities of their voice in order to get ahead in a world in which quantitative assessments, communicative labor exchange, and technological mediation—the “digitalities of neoliberalism”—confer value on particular kinds of voice. I attend to the shifting demands that inform what one’s voice can do or should be (or not) to be aurally recognized as an employable subject, arguing for how this conceptual instability keeps Koreans’ aspirational pursuits continuously unfinished, and their social mobility largely horizonal. Listening durationally to how my informants’ vocal articulations register this potential, this dissertation critiques the teleological orientations of neoliberal (im)possibility that aurally implicates their voice and limits their futurity otherwise. Terming this specific process “analog optimism,” I propose that laboring (over the voice) is a process which continuously hints at the qualitative capaciousness of more life, both in the future and the meantime, even as the rationalized logics of a knowledge economy compresses the vitality of life, reduces time for pleasure, incites exhaustion, and complicates their status as a liberal human.

At the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s.

Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.

This dissertation traces the range of popular forms and practices associated with the harpsichord in the twentieth century in the United States, focusing on the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It draws on archives of period correspondence, sound recordings, and news clippings, as well as on my interviews with harpsichord builders and performers and on fieldwork I conducted at a prominent American harpsichord company during 2008. I argue that the harpsichord enabled practices and discourses through which the white middle class could critique the post-World War II United States, and that the material aspects of the harpsichord--its sound, its wooden materials and its construction methods--provided a gauge by which to measure how far the postwar everyday had veered from what was imagined to be an "authentic" human existence.

I focus the dissertation around the influence of a particular narrative associated with the harpsichord: that of the aristocratic, delicate instrument decimated by the Industrial Revolution. I first chart the ways that this narrative circulated in academic histories and popular media during the twentieth century, and how it was linked to perceptions of the harpsichord's physical "shortcomings." Focusing on its career in 1940s-60s popular music recordings, I then show how the stereotype of its "tragically disadvantaged" sound shaped acoustic and discursive constructions of that sound. I continue by demonstrating the classed critiques surrounding the instrument's commodification as a "do-it-yourself" kit--an affordable product that seemed to contradict the instrument's history as an elite, custom-made object. Lastly, I show how the harpsichord's story articulated with the biographies and sentiments of specific people, particularly those affiliated with the shop of Massachusetts harpsichord builder Frank Hubbard in late 1960s and early 1970s. Ultimately, I argue that the Movement's ideal of "historical authenticity," along with the post-World War II mass appeal of period instruments and period performance practice, emerged out of time and place-specific meanings, and through multiple social and commodity networks.

This dissertation documents African-American girls' musical practices at a Boys and Girls Club in Durham, NC. Hip-hop is the cornerstone of social exchanges at John Avery, and is integrated into virtually all club activities. Detractors point to the misogyny, sexual exploitation and violence predominant in hip-hop's most popular incarnations, suggesting that the music is a corrupting influence on America's youth. Girls are familiar with these arguments, and they appreciate that hip-hop is a contested and sometimes illicit terrain. Yet they also recognize that knowledge about and participation in hip-hop-related activities is crucial to their interactions at the club, at school, and at home. As girls hone their listening skills, they reconcile the contradictions between behavior glorified by hip-hop and the model presented to them by their mentors. This project examines how African-American girls ages 5-13 use their listening practices to claim a space within hip-hop's landscape while still operating within the unambiguous moral framework they have learned from their parents, mentors and peers. Through ethnography and close analysis of vocal utterances, dance moves and social interaction, I consider how individual interactions with mass-mediated music teach girls a black musical aesthetic that allows them to relate to their peers and mentors, and how these interactions highlight the creativity with which they begin to negotiate sexual and racial politics on the margins of society.

In jazz circles, someone with "big ears" is an expert listener, one who hears the complexity and nuance of jazz music. Listening, then, figures prominently in the imaginations of jazz musicians and aficionados. While jazz scholarship has acknowledged the discourse on listening within various jazz cultures, to date the actual listening practices of jazz musicians and listeners remain under-theorized. This dissertation investigates listening and aural experience in a New York City community devoted to avant-garde jazz. I situate this community within the local history of Manhattan's Lower East Side, discuss the effects of changing neighborhood politics on music performance venues, and analyze social interactions in this scene, to give an exposition of "listening to music" as a practice deeply tied into other aspects of my interlocutors' lives. I engage with cultural anthropology, urban sociology, and media studies, applying insights from those fields while engaging perennial concerns and topics of jazz scholarship: the nature of musical improvisation, and relatedly, the dynamics of listening and aural perception, as well as the complex, changing, but continuing relationship between African American cultural practices and jazz.

This project makes several contributions to the ethnomusicology of listening and to jazz studies. First, I argue for and demonstrate an ethnographically-informed mode of music analysis: I use ethnographic data on participants' aural experience as the basis for

fine-grained sound analysis. Second, in attending to the processes that produce alternative, parallel, and sometimes intersecting canons, I locate the work of canon formation in the everyday lives of listeners and reveal its political and ideological implications. Finally, building on the previous two arguments, I propose that listening, though often experienced as subjective and private, takes place in networks of social relationships that listeners constitute both through real-time interaction and through engagements with history. Although scene participants vary widely in their theories of how to listen, it is through interactions around shared aural experiences that they carry on the ethos of the 1960s countercultural and Civil Rights movements and reproduce their investments in the ideas of social and musical marginality in the post-Fordist New York of the early 21st century.

This multi-sited (or “patchwork”) ethnography (A.L. Tsing 2011, xi; Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020; Marcus 1995; A.L. Tsing 2015) examines how Mande music is remade in its circulation through world music industry networks of the Black Atlantic. I study how world music record producers work to reconcile ethical, aesthetic, and financial motivations in sound. Turning to Toumani Diabaté’s Kaira (1988), an influential world music album produced by ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán, I argue that this recording has been uniquely consequential in defining the sound of Mande music for Global North publics, and then I treat it as a case study to consider the ethics of cross-cultural record production. I show how Durán engages with a politics of invisibility to prioritize the careers of her collaborators, to cultivate ethnographic authority in her recording practice, and to create avenues for broad public appreciation of Mande music traditions, even as she effects alterations on the musical practices she proposes to reflect. Next, I illustrate how one Mande musician’s expressive practice is transformed by his migration to the Southern United States and by his interactions with the music industry in that context. Finally, I present a sonic exposition of twenty-six Mande music recordings that I myself produced as yet another frame in which to consider how Mande music is remade in circulation.

This dissertation investigates identity, citizenship, and belonging on the Navajo (Diné) Nation in Arizona and New Mexico through an ethnographic study of Navajo country western bands and the politics of Navajo language use. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed by scholars as a singular and somewhat monolithic entity. But my dissertation tracks the ways that Navajos distinguish themselves from one another by dint of geographic location, physical appearance, linguistic abilities, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, class affiliations and musical taste. These distinctions are made over and above citizenship requirements for enrollment in the Navajo Nation. Thus, I focus on how a Navajo politics of sameness and difference indexes larger ideas and perceptions of "social authenticity" linked to the ability to speak, look and act "Navajo." Based on 28 months of fieldwork, the dissertations draws on three types of qualitative data: 1) interviews with Navajo country music performers and Navajo language activists 2) participant observation that included playing with three Navajo country bands and living on the reservation 3) discourse analysis of musical performances, band rehearsals, Navajo newspaper articles and other media The resulting study joins linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of music (ethnomusicology) and American Indian Studies to show how "being Navajo" is contested and debated, and, more broadly, to interrogate the complex ways that indigenous identities are negotiated across multiple, often-contradictory and crisscrossing axes.

This dissertation explores creative music, sound design and image production in the context of consumer culture (as defined by how its participants socialize in late-capitalist culture using commodities). Through the stylization of image, music and sound effects, advertisers communicate an abstract concept of a brand, and instantiate the brand through an audience member's heightened experience of the brand via the ad. Facilitated by socialized and mediatized frameworks for brand communications, branding is an embodied practice that relies on the audience member's participation with the brand through her/his real experience with an (audiovisual) advertisement. The effect of making the abstract brand tangible relies on successfully executing advertising objectives to create "impact" through stylized and often hyperreal representations of reality. At the same time, audience members' encounters with ads and branding practices represent bona fide experiences for them within American-capitalist cultural practices, and audience members take part in these practices as part of social participation and general making-sense of their everyday lives.

In late-capitalist consumer culture, the idea of the "consumer" operates within the liminal space of constructions of hyper-reality and the self. Through advertising, corporate interests mediate how people relate to and through commodities as consumers. Through ads, producers communicate an idea of a brand, that is, the collection and stylistic design of specific visual and sonic symbols, and the associated ideas, values or emotions that project an identity or persona about a company and its products or services. In attempts to increase the efficacy of their ads, ad producers fashion image, music and sound design specifically in ways they believe will generate "impact," that is, a physical, physiological or emotional response to audiovisual stimuli that are infused with symbolic meanings and values.

In their attempts to create effective ads, ad producers circumscribe identities of people based on demographics, behavior metrics, or a host of other measures intended to define what the industry calls "target audiences." With the belief that target audience members share wants, needs and values, ad producers build constellations of audiovisual signifiers that they believe will resonate with target audience members. These signifiers borrow from cultural narratives and myths to tell stories about brands and products, and communicate how people's lived experiences might be transformed through consumption practices.

With meticulous formulation of image, music and sound design, ad producers create a "hyperreality," that is exaggerated, heightened or stylized representation of reality. Through these carefully produced audio and visual artifacts, ad producers (re)circulate cultural narratives they believe communicate meaning and ideas of value, and make those abstract beliefs tangible through the audience member's sensorial experiences. With hyperreality grounded in an audience members' body and emotions, ad producers believe they can shape and direct audience members' ideas about their personal identities, and that of others and social groups. Additionally, ad image, music and sound design contribute to the naturalization of the ways people can socialize around branded identities and interconnect through commodities.

My dissertation is a sensory ethnographic study of the competing forces through which places become cities. I examine how sounding and listening animate practices of city-making in Gulu, Uganda. During my research, I apprenticed with car mechanics, understudied with music producers, and shadowed municipal technocrats, in addition to analyzing a variety of archives, conducting interviews, making sound maps and collecting field-recorded sounds. This multi-sited approach enables me to foreground the entanglement of technical expertise, place-specific knowledges, expressive socialities, and transnational political ecologies. I consider these encounters in dialogue with literature on cities in Africa, studies of sensory and aural politics, and critical theories of intimacy and materiality, to show how Africana aurality shapes city-making. Each of these entangled practices give rise to “Gulu City” through intimate aural relations through which lived environments are actively made into cities. This work contributes to the broad theorization of cities in the global south by examining sounding and listening as environmental, embodied, and atmospheric as well as social practices that afford vital urban relations.

This ethnography examines the relationship between mass-mediated aspirations and spiritual practice in Los Angeles. Creative workers like actors, producers, and writers come to L.A. to pursue dreams of stardom, especially in the Hollywood film and television media industries. For most, a “big break” into their chosen field remains perpetually out of reach despite their constant efforts. Expensive workshops like acting classes, networking events, and chance encounters are seen as keys to Hollywood success. Within this world, rumors swirl of big breaks for devotees in the city’s spiritual and religious organizations. For others, it is in consultations with local spiritual advisors like professional psychics that they navigate everyday decisions of how to achieve success in Hollywood. As Hollywood attracts creative workers, the longstanding spiritual economy in its shadow attracts spiritual practitioners from around the world, some of whom seek to launch high-profile spiritual careers for themselves by advising other dreamers in Los Angeles.

At stake is how contemporary spiritual organizations and media industries co-create mass aspirations that circulate globally and become lucrative projects in the pursuit of their fulfillment in Los Angeles. Taking up Hortense Powdermaker’s famous description of Hollywood as a “dream factory,” I call attention to the “dream refinery” at work throughout Los Angeles. Through attention to spirituality, I examine how mass-mediated aspirations become embodied by individuals and then made into local projects that can be refined, influenced, and transformed. Hollywood has long been closed for ethnographic access. My work shows that Hollywood and its global influence can be accessed through para-industries to Hollywood. In the shadow of Hollywood, many people and industries work on the dreams of aspirational individuals. By foregrounding spirituality in Los Angeles as a spiritual economy made up of interconnected industries, I examine the historical and contemporary proliferation of spiritual groups, practitioners, and professionals in Los Angeles. Tracking the work of professionals like psychics who work on the dreams of their clients, I follow the dreams and struggles of aspirational individuals in Los Angeles. I examine the consequences that turning to spirituality can have on dreams, the worlds that emerge out of imbuing aspirations with spirituality, and various forms through which spiritual industries appeal to aspirational populations. Based on longterm ethnographic fieldwork with professional psychics, spiritual practitioners, media professionals, and Hollywood hopefuls, my research examines the spiritual economy of Hollywood dreams in Los Angeles.

Abstract

Mexico City's punk scene has a notorious reputation, based on the supposedly angry, rude, and destructive behavior of its integrants. Certainly, participants in the punk scene value intense affects, aesthetics, and interpersonal exchange, but see them as means to amplify their political consciousness, their attempts to create alternative social networks. In this dissertation thesis, based on an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City's punk scene, I investigate the co-constitution of the aesthetic and political for participants of the punk scene and ask what "the political" might entail for the city's marginalized punk youth. In pursuing a local punk aesthetics that is both righteous and profane, to borrow descriptive terminology from Dick Hebdige, I argue for close formal analysis of musical, artistic, and other social performance. I employ formal analysis to evaluate the flourishing of punk in the context of "el DeFectuoso"--as residents name the hard-scrabble, global South metropolis of Mexico City--decades after punk's initial arrival in Mexico. Deluezian network theory and social movement theory more broadly help me argue for a politically constituted music "scene," created largely through U.S.-Mexico cross-border relations, without fixing its boundaries or stultifying its politics. Additionally, I explore the affective dimensions of punk performance, the role of music in subjectivization, and the importance of the body trained intersubjectively for both listening and performing. It is at the points of convergence of these three approaches that I locate a punk aesthetics as at once a punk ethics, animated by an ideal of "direct action." Within chapters organized through broad themes like networks, violence, labor, and solidarity, I address topics from the harsh, hard-working vocal performances punks employ to the various anarchist currents that shape an always-tenuous, specifically Mexican punk solidarity, constituted through practices like street sing-alongs, the creation of alternative DIY networks of exchange, and fanzine writing and design. Within these routes of investigation, I elucidate the ways in which participants in Mexico City's punk scene use profanity and outrage in the performance of a righteous ethic that informs their struggles to maintain solidarity and make a difference, through an explicitly political social network that is nevertheless grounded in aesthetic experience.

Through an anthropological study of a set of interrelated traditional (“trad”) jazz scenes in New York City and New Orleans, Louisiana, this dissertation argues that gentrification – a class concept coined in 1960’s sociology – is best understood intersectionally across boundaries of race, class, and gender. Drawing from formal interviews, archival research, and participant observation as a musician/anthropologist, the author focuses on competing historical discourses and musical techniques in trad jazz that map onto broader social conflicts in the present day United States. Conflicts between musicians play out in the re-sounding of early 20th century music embedded in Jim Crow segregationist histories. Such a re-sounding takes on renewed ethical and political dimensions in a contemporary postmodern moment characterized by a heightened politics of intersectional identity. Building upon work the aesthetics of gentrification in geography and anthropology, this dissertation argues that “Pre-war Aurality” – a youth oriented aesthetic that lauds the live performance of pre-World War II popular and vernacular music – is a hegemonic, postmodern aesthetic in contemporary capitalism. Expanding upon methods and theories from the anthropology of sound and expressive culture, the author shows the dialogic relation between economic and cultural displacement by focusing on the how urban space is constituted through live performance. This approach expands on previous ethnographies of jazz communities by featuring working musicians in favor of those who have received extended critical acclaim, and by foregrounding theoretical questions around the sonic qualities of urban space.