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Raising the Bar: The Reciprocal Roles and Deviant Distinctions of Music and Alcohol in Acadiana by © Marion MacLeod A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Ethnomusicology Memorial University of Newfoundland June, 2013 St. John 's, Newfoundland ABSTRACT The role of alcohol in musical settings is regularly relegated to that of incidental by stander, but its pervasive presence as object, symbol or subject matter in Acadian and Cajun performance contexts highlights its constructive capacity in the formation of Acadian and Cajun musical worlds. Individual and collective attitudes towards alcohol consumption implicate a wide number of cultural domains which, in this work, include religious display, linguistic development, respect for social conventions, and the historically-situated construction of identities. This research uses alcohol as an interpretive lens for ethnomusicological understanding and, in so doing, questions the binaries of marginal and mainstream, normal and deviant, sacred and profane, traditional and contemporary, sober and inebriated. Attitudes towards alcohol are informed by, and reflected in, all ofthese cultural conflicts, highlighting how agitated such categorizations can be in lived culture. Throughout the dissertation, I combine the historical examples of HatTy Choates and Cy aMateur with ethnographic examinations of culturally-distinct perfonnative habits, attitudes toward Catholicism, and compositional qualities. Compiling often incongruous combinations of discursive descriptions and enacted displays, my research suggests that opposition actually confirms interdependence. Central to this study is an assertion that levels of cultural competence in Cajun Louisiana and Acadian Nova Scotia are uneven and that the repercussions of this unevenness are musically and behaviourally demonstrated.
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