Ethnomusicology of Citizenship, Ethnomusicology as Citizenship

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores and contextualizes the recent ethnomusicological preoccupation with citizenship. Ethnomusicology’s engagement with the term ‘citizenship’ started under the rubric of ‘sonic citizenship’—though this term soon disappeared; “citizenship” subsequently filtered into chapter headings, conclusions, footnotes, and index entries. The chapter explores the ever-deepening levels, and ever-widening circles, in which this term now moves. It explores three trajectories of it, labeled ‘identity,’ ‘technocracy,’ and ‘intimacy,’ with reference to case studies in Central Asia, West Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe. Though there is little dialogue across this field, the chapter concludes, this literature exemplifies a common interest in postcolonial critique, in a performance-centered critical framework, and in a task-oriented, collaborative form of ethnographic practice—a shift, in other words, from an “ethnomusicology of citizenship” to “ethnomusicology as citizenship.”