Berlin/Accra Music, Travel, and the Production of Space
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Berlin/Accra Music, Travel, and the Production of Space Florian Carl Digitized by UCC LIB Für meine Eltern Digitized by UCC LIB Digitized by UCC LIB Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction: Music and Mobility 1 2 Africa and the Zoo 20 3 Musical Geography 34 4 Approaching Urban Space 56 5 Black Atlantic Worlds 76 6 Mapping the Scene 100 7 Symbolic Economies 121 8 Traveling With Culture 143 9 Conclusion: Music, Power, Space 167 References 181 Digitized by UCC LIB Digitized by UCC LIB Acknowledgements This study grew out of the research project “Processes of Musical Transforma- tion and Identity Construction in Migrational Settings: The Music of Ghana- ian Migrants in Germany and its Transcultural/Transnational Connections.” The research cooperation was based at the University of Music and Drama Hanover, Germany, and the University of Ghana, Legon, and it was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Within this framework I have been a research fellow in Hanover from March 2004 to August 2007. I am very grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation for the material support without which this study would not have been possible. This study was first handed in as my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Music and Drama Hanover. I am particularly indebted to my supervisor Raimund Vogels in Hanover for his constant advice, encouragement, and friendship which exceeds the work in this project. I also thank Willie Anku for his support during my time in Legon. To my other colleagues in the research project, particularly Matthias Eger and Martin Ziegler, I am thankful for fruit- ful discussions, ideas, suggestions, but more importantly for their friendship and the beautiful time I had over the course of three and a half years. After all, much of my own thoughts in this thesis reflect views we collectively arrived at, though I alone am, of course, responsible for what is written here. For his corrections, comments, and the detection of linguistic oddities I would like to thank Dennis Newson in Osnabrück, who took the effort to read through all chapters. Having lived in Ghana some forty years before I got to know the country, under completely different political and infrastructural con- ditions, the feedback I got from Dennis was particularly valuable for me and our exchange, largely by email, was, I think, highly interesting for both of us. It goes without saying that for any mistakes that are left in the text I alone am, of course, accountable. I also wish to acknowledge a number of people in Berlin and Accra, where I carried out the bulk of my research, without whom this study would have hardly been possible: Ofei Ankrah, Judith and the family Bögelsack, Gordon Odametey, Mark Kofi Asamoah and all members of Adikanfo, Lina Bundrock, Kay Boni, Margareth Dzikpor, Charles Kwame Konu and all ix Digitized by UCC LIB x Berlin/Accra members of Nortseme. There were many others who shared their views, knowledge, and time with me and whom I might have forgotten to mention here. My sincere thanks to all. Finally, without the love and support of my family I would not have been able to finish this work. The trust my parents, to whom this book is dedicated, put in me and my work is a constant motivation, not to mention the material support they have been giving me over all these years. And lastly, without the love, care, patience, and encouragement of my wife, Hornam, I would not have accomplished the often arduous task of sitting down and write. My grati- tude to all of you is beyond words. Digitized by UCC LIB 1 Introduction: Music and Mobility The World in Motion This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labor, immigration, urban sprawl. More and more people “dwell” with the help of mass transit, automobiles, airplanes. In cities on six continents foreign populations have come to stay — mixing in but often in partial, specific fashions. The “exotic” is un- cannily close. Conversely, there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of “modern” products, media, and power cannot be felt. An older topography and experience of travel is ex- ploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something radically new, another time or space. Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighborhood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth. […] “Cultural” difference is no longer stable, exotic other- ness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt. (Clifford 1988:13f) This is how James Clifford describes the predicament of culture and the con- ditions of ethnographic modernity in the twentieth century. All the more at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves “off center among scat- tered traditions,” in a world in which “the conditions of rootlessness and mo- bility” are “an increasingly common fate” (ibid.:3); a world in which “[p]eople and things are increasingly out of place” (ibid.:6) and in which, as Clifford, quoting a poem by William Carlos Williams, puts it, “pure products go crazy.” “Globalization” has become one of the keywords in today’s political de- bates. Employees, it is held, have to position themselves vis-à-vis multinational corporations, national economies to compete for “the best heads” in Marshall McLuhan’s often evoked “global village”; the “war against terrorism” can only be won by an international “coalition of the willing,” and “global warming” only stopped by the concentrated forces of the international community. The outgrowths of transnational migration can be watched every other day on the 1 Digitized by UCC LIB 2 Berlin/Accra evening news. And while thousands of young Africans risk their lives on over- loaded boats heading north in hope of a better life, thousands of Europeans cross the Mediterranean by airplane in the other direction every year on their way to the tropical beach resorts and game reserves of the south. The world is shrinking, it is said; the near has become the far, and the far the near. There is virtually no place on earth where we would not encounter familiar sights, no place where one could not drink Coca-Cola, watch CNN, or listen to the mu- sic of Michael Jackson. On the other hand groups stubbornly, and in some places increasingly aggressively, insist on their cultural, ethnic, or religious dif- ferentness, as do nation-states on their particular national interests, and in- dividuals on their individuality. The fear of modernity has always been indif- ference and “alienation,” hence the concerns about the particular, the individ- ual, the unique. This is roughly how the now often recounted story of globalization goes. Many see the distinctiveness of places disappearing in a single globalized mass culture, and reactions to the finding of this “global homogeneity” range from regret over different forms of salvage attempts to anxieties to the point of hos- tility. We cannot deny and should not ignore that global processes increasingly affect each of us in our daily lives. Yet, there are also less dramatic versions of the narrative about global interdependence. Social anthropologist and promi- nent analysts of transnationalism Ulf Hannerz, for example, is skeptical about the withering away of cultural diversity. As he remarks: The people in my favorite Nigerian town drink Coca Cola, but they drink burukutu too; and they can watch Charlie’s Angels as well as Hausa drummers on the television sets which spread rapidly as soon as electricity has arrived. My sense is that the world system, rather than creating massive cultural homogeneity on a global scale, is re- placing one diversity with another; and the new diversity is based relatively more on interrelations and less on autonomy. (Quoted in Clifford 1988:17) Cultural pessimists would hold that the products of this “new diversity” are less “authentic” than the ones they replace; they are condemned as commercial- ized, standardized, artificial, fake. As Clifford comments in the initial quota- tion to this chapter, with the former “pure” products going “crazy,” a “whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt” (Clifford 1988:14). The world is not what it used to be — such com- ments seem a little bit like what every generation says about the one by which it is superseded. After all, every discipline constructs its own authenticities. Digitized by UCC LIB Introduction: Music and Mobility 3 Modernity harbors some real paradoxes, and the global might not be the right place for purists. Yet, for many people who live with what is said to be the consequences of globalizing processes — migrants, professionals, artists, musi- cians, cosmopolitans; people who try to manage their professional and per- sonal lives translocally between at times contradictory worlds — globalization is not so much an ideological, but a very concrete organizational and logistic problem. Thus, while acknowledging that there is a new quality to movement, mobility and global travel traffic as compared to two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago, the question for us should not so much be whether we like this fact or not, but rather how we and other people deal with these new conditions both conceptually as well as practically. Reconsidering Ethnography If we principally accept Clifford’s characterization of the predicament of cul- ture in the world we live in, it seems legitimate to ask whether ethnography — an awfully old-fashioned-sounding term once referring to the description of the customs and beliefs of other peoples and cultures — makes sense at all within this world of extremes and rapid change.