Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter locates the current ethnomusicological interest in citizenship in a broad critical landscape, arguing that the relationship between music and citizenship is embedded in a longer history of philosophical and critical inquiry, and specifically the work of Rousseau, a line of inquiry entangled with the birth of ethnomusicology itself. Starting with the strange case of the “sly civility” of Zeki Müren in Turkey, the chapter plots a route that simultaneously recenters music in the discussion of citizenship and democracy, and decenters the West’s self-placing in the center of such discussions. The chapter explores the broader critical literature on audiences, media, voice, and sovereignty. Ethnomusicology asks its questions, this context suggests, neither in a vacuum, nor in a state of dependence upon a more recent anthropology of citizenship.