SEM 64Th Annual Meeting
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SEM 64th Annual Meeting SEM 2019 Abstracts Book – Note to Reader The SEM 2019 Abstracts Book is divided into two sections: Individual Presentations and Organized Sessions. Individual Presentation abstracts are alphabetized by the presenter’s last name, while Organized Session abstracts are alphabetized by the session chair’s last name. Note that Organized Sessions are designated in the Program Book as “Panel,” “Roundtable,” or “Workshop.” Sessions without a designation are composed of individual abstract submissions and will not have an Organized Session Abstract. To determine the time and location of an Individual Presentation, consult the index of participants at the back of the Program Book. To determine the time and location of an Organized Session, see the session number (e.g., 1A) in the Abstracts Book and consult the program in the Program Book. Individual Presentation Abstracts Pages 1 – 93 Organized Session Abstracts Pages 94 – 111 Society for Ethnomusicology 64th Annual Meeting, 2019 Individual Presentation Abstracts Yearning in Ambivalence: Independent Music Production and The Craft of an Affective Space: ASMR's Vernacular Theories and Nationalism in Post-Revolution Egypt Neuropsychology. Yakein Abdelmagid, University of Pennsylvania Giulia Accornero, Harvard University This paper explores the ambivalence of belonging and national identity among ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, labels the effect that a certain urban middle-class youths in post-revolution Egypt. Independent music producers category of audio-visual stimuli produces on their listeners: a "pleasurable, tingly, represent the new generation of urban middle-class Egyptian youths who aspire relaxing sensation that begins in the head and scalp and moves throughout the for alternative cultures independent from the state-controlled mainstream media, limbs of the body." An international, internet-based community meets and grows and whose lives have been shaped by the hopes and frustrations of the 2011 mainly around You Tube videos whose audio-visual content is designed to trigger revolution. The paper examines a common lyrical theme in independent music the ASMR. But Wikipedia pages, websites, blogs, Facebook groups, podcasts, and producers' songs, the ambivalence towards the nation, exploring the music iPhone applications also proliferate, sustaining a community that is not only producers' simultaneous attachment to and estrangement from the nation. On the 'consuming' but also inquiring and giving feedback, creating what I would call a one hand, independent music producers describe a sense of estrangement from "the 'vernacular theory' of its peculiar sounds. At the same time, the ASMR community nation" and "the people" in the aftermath of the counterrevolution and the has triggered an academic response in neuropsychology. This field focuses on the resurgence of populist authoritarianism. On the other hand, independent music mind-body effects that audio-visual stimuli can elicit, ultimately narrowing down a producers also express their affective attachments to the nation by describing the complex phenomenon to an automatic bodily response. In this paper I focus on the ways their careers and aesthetics are rooted in the Egyptian cultural milieu. I community and the academic response, concentrating on their agency in shaping argue that independent music producers register the ways youths in Egypt are this phenomenon. I ask: is ASMR a truly new feeling? How can the discourse and refusing the official national identities imposed by the state and established media vocabulary around a certain sensation determines it? How has the online content industry. Instead, these producers address audience not as members of the nation, given rise to a particular ASMR aesthetic that is now characteristic of a certain but rather as listeners who share similar ambivalence towards the nation. In so sonic quality? I argue that we cannot fully account for the affective space crafted doing, the affective affinities coalesced by independent music and its expression of around the ASMR, as both a bodily sensation and sonic quality--and how the two national ambivalence lay down the groundwork for alternative forms of belonging. might interact, unless we reconsider how the community "vernacular theories" In the face of the populist aesthetics of authoritarianism in Egypt, independent work with academic discourse to inform the ways in which we hear and feel sound. music production is expressive of counter-aesthetics for those who yearn to belong and yet fail but to share their collective ambivalence. Sound as Schema: Sonic Materiality, Transgender Embodiment, and Combat Sports Aural Apophenia and Resonant Affinities between Japan and Ethiopia James Ace, University of California, Los Angeles Marié Abe, Boston University Martial arts training fosters acute physical awareness: a fighter constantly How might we understand the potentialities of sound when it is misheard? What reorients and revises their body map in response to rapidly-changing do we make of hearing when it generatively transcends the limits of aural surroundings. Sound plays a critical role in bodily perception, for instance, through intelligibility? This paper is a preliminary exploration of the phenomenon of aural the skidding and stomping of feet on the mat, or air moving audibly through the apophenia - error of perception, a kind of mishearing, to theorize the potentialities mouth and nose. Not only does a fighter sense their own body in space; they of sound to confuse, allure, and bring to life yet-to-exist, imagined affinities across perceive it as an object in relation to the resonating body of their sparring partner. difference. I pursue this inquiry by tracing the unlikely aesthetic resonances and What happens, however, when a fighter identifies more closely with the way their cultural affinities between Japan and Ethiopia through the circulation of musical partner’s body feels and sounds than with their own? In this paper I draw on sounds of enka, a sentimental popular music genre from 1950s Japan. By tracking personal experience as a transgender male fighter and practitioner of krav maga the circulation of enka from Japan to Ethiopia - via Japan’s former colony Korea, who trained almost exclusively with cisgender men prior to medically where Ethiopian soldiers fought along the UN troops during the Korean War, I transitioning, to suggest that a fighter’s sonic body map does not necessarily match explore how imagination conditions our hearing and formation of affective up with their physical form as observable from the outside. Building on alliances, and how these uncanny resemblances are listened to by others in return. transgender, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories (Salamon 2010; Drawing on Jocelyne Guilbault’s theorization of the “politics of musical bonding” as Merleau-Ponty 1962; Anzieu 1989), I argue that in a fight scenario sound might a processual example of worlding and anthropologist Susan Lepselter’s work on come to exist as something functionally similar to a body schema: a morphological resonance as the “just-glimpsed connections and hidden structures felt to shimmer sonic map that we can perceive as tangibly as our physical bodies. I explore the below the surface of things,” I examine the politics and poetics of aural apophenia dissonances between these multiple and contradictory schemata and the ways in and the affective forces of, and desire for, uncanny affinities that emerge from such which they figure into a fighter’s bodily perception in moments of high sensory generative mishearings. Through this analysis, this paper also aims to contribute input or disorientation. In doing so I bring together theories of sonic tactility and to both the growing body of literature historicizing the Africa-East Asia ties, and transgender embodiment to trouble assumptions about what it means to be the critique of the U.S./Euro-centric discourses of global circulation within material. ethnomusicology. 1 Society for Ethnomusicology 64th Annual Meeting, 2019 Individual Presentation Abstracts A Cry for Palestine: Vocal Practice and Imaginaries of Palestinian-ness A Participant-Observer Participates: Building Alliances Among Women among Chilean Soccer Supporters of Club Deportivo Palestino Musicians in California’s Central Valley Luis Achondo, Brown University Hannah Adamy, University of California, Davis Palestino is a soccer team founded in 1916 by Palestinian immigrants in Chile - Women musicians in California's Central Valley want to organize, both to build a home to the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world. Though community which transcends the industry-mandated competition of the regional originally envisioned as a space where Arabs could socialize, Palestino is now music scenes, and to challenge the limits within which women musicians eke out followed by Palestinian-Chileans and non-Arabs alike. A group of supporters with their professional lives. As their available employment in a men-dominated scene no Palestinian heritage known as Los Baisanos (a mispronunciation of paisanos, depends on their gendered novelty rather than their expertise as musicians, that is, countryfolk) constitute the most boisterous section of the team’s fanbase. women musicians often compete for gigs. Organizing has proved difficult, as the Like other Latin American supporters, they cheer Palestino through Argentine- musicians in the Central Valley perform a diversity of popular music genres,