Document Type

Honors Project - Open Access

Abstract

Based on thirty-seven interviews with musicians and performers in Mongolia and Hawaiʻi, this ethnography explores the complex relationships between nationalism, cultural imperialism, hybridity, and conceptions of authenticity in the colonial context through the lens of folk music. Engaging with theories of practice and postcolonialism, I argue that within contemporary contexts of globalization and cultural imperialism, musicians and performers have formed a sense of musical and cultural identity dependent on nationalist conceptions of tradition, yet the notion of cultural authenticity no longer depends on the absence of Western influence, but on the cultural sovereignty of the artist and the agency of self-representation. I found that such evocations of a nationalist conception of cultural tradition following periods of colonization or political subordination reflect the subjugated group’s attempts to reclaim certain elements of the once taken-for-granted, pre-colonial past. However, since these societies can never return to the unquestioned truths of this pre-colonial, pre-globalized past, self-conscious attempts to evoke, or invent, such a past within the present cultural and geopolitical context represent what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the orthodoxy, which can only exist as a counterpoint to the constant change and competing possibilities of the colonial situation. I argue that by establishing this imperfect orthodoxy of invented tradition as a vital form of cultural identity, these groups reckon with the feelings of loss inherent to the experience of political subordination and cultural imperialism while asserting a new form of cultural and political sovereignty within a globalizing national framework.

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