First and Second Collaborative Colloquium on November 18 and December 4
The first and second Collaborative Colloquia of the semester will focus on a set of related topics. The first colloquium on the 18th of November will discuss the role of "Music and Fieldwork ind Southeast" Asia. The second colloquium on the 4th of December zooms in on the question of "Why is Burmese pop music so bland and so popular". The second colloquium will be presented by Prof. Ward Keeler of UT Austin.
Cover of a burmese casette tape
As the new semester is starting up, the dates and themes for the first two Collaborative Colloquia have been set.
Both of them will zoom in on a set of related topics.
The participants of the first colloquium will discuss the role of "Music and Fieldwork in Southeast Asia" on Monday, 18 November from 1600-1800 in the Institut für Ethnologie Seminarraum. Dr. Eric Haanstad will offer a brief presentation exploring how aesthetic participation in music production offers an experiential vehicle through which fieldwork’s cultural tensions and interpretive revelations can be navigated. Then the participants will engage in a broader discussion of the interdisciplinary role of music in fieldwork, generating a basis for understanding music in Southeast Asia within the context of the colloquium that follows.
The second colloquium, "Why is Burmese pop music so bland and so popular?" will be on Wednesday, 4 December from 1600-1800 in the Institut für Ethnologie Seminarraum. This colloquium will be presented by Prof. Ward Keeler Ward from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Burmese have long enjoyed commercial recordings of their own music. To this outsider, the pop music of the 1960s, which melded Burmese instrumentation and some elements of older ways of singing with an international pop music style, represents a highly engaging, accessible but unusual, form of pop music. More recent Burmese popular music shows much less distinctiveness. Instead, like much pop music throughout Southeast Asia, it appears highly derivative: musically predictable as well as lyrically vapid. The question is what explains a shift in aesthetic preferences, away from a uniquely hybrid Burmese pop music to a much more conventionally international one.The aim is not to justify personal evaluations but rather to try to account for a surprising change in tastes. To do so, it will be considered why little of Western musical ideology seems to resonate in Burma.
Under the coordination of Dr. Eric Haanstad, participants meet every month and share ideas based on thematic issues of mutual interest: democratization and everyday politics; decentralization and the (re)construction of local identities; conceptualizations of Asia, the West, the Islamic world, diaspora, contemporary art, etc. The format varies in relation to the particular topics and research materials are circulated beforehand to facilitate discussions. The colloquium is an opportunity to collaboratively explore the broad nuances of Southeast Asia Studies from perspectives outside of our individually-crafted projects.