Item Details

Rainforest to Raves: Ethnomusicological Forays into Popular Music

Issue: Vol 6 No. 2 (2019)

Journal: Journal of World Popular Music

Subject Areas:

DOI: 10.1558/jwpm.40175

Abstract:

Steven Feld’s ethnomusicological framework was originally formulated to investigate the music culture of an indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. Nonetheless, its potent amalgamation of linguistic anthropology, ethnoaesthetics, social phenomenology and Geertzian interpretivism has become an influential approach to popular musics that avoids reductionistic political economic assessments. This article argues for a Feldian ethnomusicological perspective as a corrective to ethnocentric and dismissive tendencies in the study of popular music. Only an ethnographically grounded, culturally sensitive approach can lend insight into popular music’s prominent role in a range of social upheavals in the late twentieth and twenty-first century.

Author: Jeremy Wallach

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