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Shifting Identities, Shifting Roles: Advocating for India’s Unheard Melodies.
Organizer: Zoe Sherinian, University of Oklahoma
Life experiences, politics, and beliefs inevitably affect a scholar’s choice of subject and lead to shifting roles as a researcher. Until the early 1990s, the academic study of music in India was dominated by the formal analysis of the classical Hindu practices. No significant study of the music of India’s religious and social minorities, nor the relationship between the identities of the music, its practitioners, and its ethnographers had been conducted. We propose to analyze the dynamics within the academy, the South Indian context, and our careers that have shifted our focus towards “minority musics,” shifted our understandings of the cultural identity and value of the musics, and led to shifts in our ethnographic roles. Panelist One explores the relationship between reception study and advocacy of Dalit Christian folk music among Tamil villagers in a highly politicized ethnographic context. Panelist Two examines how film music is hegemonic in India, yet often excluded from academic discourse due to its musical aesthetics, social status, and connection to the profit-driven film industry. Panelist Three reflects on how changing times and personal relationships during her thirty-year history of working with Jewish women’s Malayalam songs in Kerala have led to shifting ethnographic roles and new understandings of the cultural identity of the music and its women performers. As Oberlin College alumni and former Oberlin Shansi Fellows, we hypothesize that Oberlin’s progressive environment steeped in music, activism, and the commitment to creating positive change in the world has had a formative impact on our career choices.
Reception and Advocacy of Tamil Folk Music: Performing Multiple Ethnographic Roles Among Dalit Christian Villagers.
Zoe Sherinian, University of Oklahoma
The Dalit Christian theologian Theophilus Appavoo (1940-2005) radically reformed Protestant music in Tamilnadu, India. He intended to create a liberation theology through Tamil folk music that would easily transmit to villagers, and engage them in a discourse of caste, gender, and class consciousness. In 2002, I conducted a reception study among Dalit Christian villagers and found that the most positive effects made through Appavoo’s songs occurred in places where his former seminary students taught the songs by engaging villagers in a dialogue about issues of oppression, and used the songs in social activism where they had direct referential meaning. However, where the villagers were not clear about the significance of the music, I often attempted to explain Appavoo’s ideas such as unity, shared eating, and folk music as a worthy and powerful medium for Christian liturgy. I argue it is essential to reflexively distinguish between the responses of my informants based on my multiple roles as observer/interviewer and advocate. However, I maintain that multiple and shifting roles may be necessary for the researcher in a highly politicized ethnographic context where a significant expectation of the work is to contribute to positive change through a dialogical process. I believe my use of this method is rooted in my experiences as an undergraduate at Oberlin College in which classroom learning was fused with my development as an activist, and in my initial experience in India as an Oberlin Shansi Fellow, which involved developing close relationships with and a commitment to minority communities.
Popular Music as a “Minority Music” within South Asian Studies? Advocacy, Academics, and the Real World of Tamil Film Music
Joseph Getter, Wesleyan University
How can the most dominant form of mass-mediated popular music in India be considered a minority music? In academia, Indian classical musics are often the only forms considered worthy of study. Moreover, the primary method used is analysis of musical systems, thus failing to garner insight from cultural analysis. This paper examines the status of Tamil film music: a hegemonic genre made minority by its absence from musical academic discourse. I argue that film music is often excluded--even dismissed as "trash"--due to musical aesthetics which are perceived as impure, the often inferior social status of its musicians, and the film industry's entanglement with commerce and profit-making. I also reflect on my own development as an ethnomusicologist, examining choices I have made in subject matter and method. As an Oberlin undergraduate I was deeply moved by studying oppressed Dalits in religion courses, studying India's tribal music in the ethnomusicology program, and being steeped in the College's activism for peace and justice. Subsequently while conducting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in India and the US, I observed aspects of popular culture not well represented in scholarship, and found experiences of hegemony and oppression within the classical arts that caused me to realize such problems must be integrated into our academic understanding of Indian music. To conclude, in my present work as a teacher, and as a performer of both film and Karnatak music, advocating for Indian culture and music that have been relegated to a minority status, is primary.
Malayalam Jewish Folk Songs 1977-2007: Shifting Ethnographic Roles In Their Preservation and Analysis
Barbara C. Johnson, Ithaca College
Ethnographic research is influenced by changing times and by significant personal relationships. This reflexive paper discusses shifting ethnographic roles and analysis during two periods of research on the Malayalam folksongs of Kerala Jewish women in India (where the songs originated) and in Israel (where most of the Kerala Jews migrated in the early 1950s). From 1977-1981, I was involved in a collaborative project to collect and index the songs, recording them and photocopying the hand-written notebooks in which many generations of Kerala Jewish women had preserved them. Recollections of this period raise issues about “salvage ethnography” and insider vs. outsider advocacy for “cultural survival”. I have returned to the songs since 1995, developing an ethnohistorical study of Kerala Jewish women’s culture in India and Israel framed by descriptive analysis of their songs. This work reveals important shifts in the understanding of gender since my 1970s introduction to Women’s Studies. It is deeply affected by years of work with the late Ruby Daniel, an elder Kerala Jewish song expert, and by two recent developments: a performance revival of the songs by Kerala women of my generation in Israel, and new life for the Jewish songs in Kerala itself through the efforts of Malayalam linguist Scaria Zacharia. Understanding my own ethnographic engagement with the songs and the Kerala Jews includes reflection on formative early experiences as an Oberlin College undergraduate in the late 1950s (especially the folk song revival and the early civil rights movement) and as a Shansi representative in Tamilnadu.