Call and Response: Music, Power, and the Ethnomusicological Study of Politics and Culture "New Directions for Ethnomusicological Research into the Politics of Music and Culture: Issues, Projects, and Programs"

Across the humanities and social sciences, a wide range of scholars seek to understand the role that expressive culture in general and music in particular play in the politics of social life. Though it may once have been controversial, the notion that music has meanings or social dynamics that we may call political would not, I think, be a provocative one for scholars in our field today. For example, we now agree that music is a key medium through which identities emerge. In musical practice, agents construct new identities, subjects are interpolated into pre-existing ones, interlocutors negotiate or battle over identities, and all this occurs in ways that can be oppressive or resistant, mundane or extraordinary, residual or emergent. Further, music may serve as one or more form of capital.