Michelle Bigenho: Abstract
Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance
Palgrave, 2002
Why is one Bolivian's music "groove" another Bolivian's most inauthentic expression? Sounding Indigenous brings together both urban mestizo musical expressions and music performances of highland indigenous communities to examine competing claims of authenticity, and the transformations which occur when performative experiences enter the realms of representational practices. Beyond a theorization of authenticity itself, this multi-sited ethnography of music performance examines the contemporary privileging of indigenous authenticity in the pluricultural Bolivian context, and within a globalized political economy of cultural difference. As both an ethnographer and performing musician, I address the different attitudes Bolivians assume towards cultural, historic, and artistic authenticity.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: AUTHENTICITY MATTERS
Moving Through Places
Pursuing the Real Thing
Flags
CHAPTER 2: WHAT MAKES YOU WANT TO DANCE
Your Groove, My Noise
The Autochthonous and the Dangerous
What' Wrong with Kjarkas
Dancing to the Band: What the Military did for Bolivian Soundscapes
Is it in Two or Is it in Three?
Pleasure in the Absence of Glue: That Music Makes Me Nervous
CHAPTER 3: "TIME!"
Festival and Fiesta Time
A Concert for the Indigenous Peoples: Postcard Perfect
To Show Our Work
What You See is What You Get
Limiting Synesthesia and Learning to Dance
CHAPTER 4: INDIGENOUS COOL AND THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS
Verticality in La Paz
To Be a Musician in La Paz
The Troupe is It
The Politics and Aesthetics of the Pluri-Multi
Recording the Masters, Recording Tradition
Listening to Nostalgia: "Arte y Trabajo" and the Chaco War
Anti-Nostalgia
CHAPTER 5: THE BURDEN AND LIGHTNESS OF AUTHENTICITY
Comparing Toropalca and Yura
Song Text and Music Performance
The Threatened Source of Authenticity
The Absent and the Vague
Yure–os' Songs in Comparative Perspective
"In Bolivia, Everything is Etcheverry"
The Politics of Coca in Yura
Modernity, Nostalgia, and Imagined Communities
CHAPTER 6: SONOROUS SOVEREIGNTY
A Place Called "Yura"
The Tour: Sonorously Practiced Space
Competing Refrains
New Narratives of Nation, New Rituals of State
Rehearsing New Rituals of State: Popular Participation in Yura
Sensing Ayllu Spaces Through Music and Language
CHAPTER 7: THE INDIGENOUS WORK AND ITS AUTHORSHIP
The Anthropologist's Exchanges
Whose Cassettes are These?
Owning Culture
Patrimony: The Nation-State as Author
CHAPTER 8: CODAS, DESPEDIDAS, AND KACHARPAYAS