Bluegrass Nonsense Politics Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Justin Acome, M.A. Graduate Program in Political Science The Ohio State University 2013 Dissertation Committee: Sonja Amadae, Advisor Barry Shank Amy Shuman Copyright by Justin Acome 2013 ABSTRACT This project is an ethnographic critique of depoliticization as a mode of exclusion and silencing through vernacular cultural forms like bluegrass festivals. The argument builds a theory of the implication of concepts of honesty, nostalgia, and family in the experience of Central Ohio bluegrass festivals, claiming that broader sensibilities of the world bear on people’s understandings of bluegrass just as bluegrass festivals are themselves examples of the sorts of setting in which those sensibilities are formed and produced. ii DEDICATION For Roger and Ren, and complicated history. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Most proximately, portions of this project were been presented at the 2011 International Country Music Conference, the 2011 and 2012 Annual Meetings of the American Folklore Society, and the 2012 IU/OSU FSA Conference, and benefited significantly from the conversations those events precipitated. Steve and Sandy Acome, my parents, were in many ways more responsible than anyone for the fact that I could with equal pretensions of fluency navigate conversations about dairy farming, syncopation, old motorcycles, barrel racing, and the romanticization of biscuits and gravy. Education is a strange politics, and I owe an unpayable debt to them for having situated me to begin to grasp its strangeness. They, as well as the parents of my partner, Bruce and Gale Bernhagen, in all their unquestioning support, have also been important articulators of how productive nonsense can sometimes be. In my time at Ohio State, the Department of Political Science provided me with access to undergraduate classrooms populated by some of the best and most interesting undergraduate students I could have hoped to have the opportunity to teach. Importantly, too, the OSU Center for Folklore Studies and the Diversity & Identity Studies Collective at OSU (DISCO) were intellectual homes that provided irreplaceable political patience. I have been fortunate to encounter a number of good teachers who by their interest in listening and engaging helped keep open doors of curiosity that my lurking ii cynicism wanted often to close – notably John Odell, Rob English, and Ron Steel at the University of Southern California and Morgan Liu and Maurice Stevens at OSU. Debra Moddelmog’s mentorship and friendship have been crucial to the momentum that has sustained my attention to this work. I would, similarly, not care about politics or the Academy in the way that I do had I not met Larry Gross when I did, and had I not had the privilege to work with him for the time that I did. They are both models of citizenship, in the fullest sense of what that can mean, and the world would be a better place were there more people like them in it. Barry Shank and Amy Shuman have done more to buttress my faith in the world and in politics than I’m capable of articulating, and Sonja Amadae has been the one person more than any other without whose support and advocacy I would, I suspect, have no dissertation for which to acknowledge anyone else. My committee members have proven themselves capable of a patience that has left a lasting impression, and I can only hope they each know how appreciative I am. Becca has kept me going more than she probably realizes. Jecca, Amber, Eli, Heff, Meg, Nikki, and Nate gave me reason to care enough about the world to make me want to say something about it - all of this is, in some sense, for them. Had Jason Keiber and Austin Carson not happened into an earlier path I may have abandoned all of this a long time ago. Dave McLaughlin has taught me more about how to talk about authenticity than anyone, and also been a supportive friend and colleague. Jess, Michael, Stacia, and Adriane, aside from being wonderful people, have also taught me a great deal about recognizing people we don't think we understand. iii Jack, Riley, and Lindsay, ultimately, have given me up for long enough to find these words and get them on paper, which has been no small matter. This work took more from them than from me. I am excited to be able, now, again, to share as much nonsense with them as I can. iv VITA 2001……………………..B.A. International Relations, University of Southern California 2003……………………..M.A. International Relations, University of Southern California 2009……………………..M.A Political Science, Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Political Science Minor Field: Comparative Cultural Studies iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION .............................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................. ii VITA ........................................................................................................................................... iii PREFACE ..................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 1: ON AUDIENCE AND METHOD ...................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 2: SITUATED DISAGREEMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF NONSENSE .......... 70 CHAPTER 3: MANAGING NOSTALGIA ............................................................................. 105 CHAPTER 4: HONEST MINSTRELSY ................................................................................. 124 CHAPTER 5: A FIGURE OF IMPOSSIBLE VIRTUE ........................................................... 148 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 172 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 180 iv PREFACE My argument in these essays is that bluegrass festivals can be instances of things that seem to be apolitical but which might more fruitfully be understood to be depoliticized. By “depoliticized,” this means that bluegrass’s latent political underpinnings are obscured through the practices of people in a culture where they shy away from overt senses of conflict and difference. These are people engaged (if implicitly) in making sense of their worlds and the other people that comprise them, engaged in practices of sense-making that can be understood as political. I have described these practices in terms of an underlying politics of politicization and depoliticization, where the activity of making of sense of the world is also an act of engaging in non-sense. This underlying politics of depoliticization proceeds in an environment characterized by nonsense, a notion with two connected but distinguishable guises. The word nonsense is my attempt to engage with depoliticization by illuminating and focusing on non-sense, as the opposite of sense, my plea for broader recognition not just of the opposite of any particular sense but of the impossibility of any self-evident or universally valid sense, as recognition of the particular made-ness of any sense. Nonsense is also a characterization of my own (and I infer, others’) experiences of the opacity and nonsensical-seeming character of the sense other people seem to make of 1 their worlds, an empirical claim about the ability and need for people at bluegrass festivals to deny the impossibility of any definitively general or universal sense. I, from my semi-remove as a participating observer, at once recognize their sense as evidence of non-sense and yet contextualize it as nonsense, necessary and inevitable though it may be. Neither aspect of nonsense is separable from the other. Nonsense is a plea for recognition of the partiality and made-ness of sense, where I would hope more people might recognize the fact that others make different senses than they themselves do, and yet an acknowledgment that while despite recognizing the necessary partiality of their own sense they nonetheless construct apolitical-seeming practices like bluegrass to at least temporarily deny that their own experience and sensibility are indeed partial and particular. In fact, the denial of impossibility and the felt retreat from overt politics is what enables a person to engage the less obvious but more important underlying politics of nonsense and sense-making. Politics, which in its fundament is an engagement with people different from oneself, and as is apparent in the two aspects of nonsense, is always at once about experience, observation, and description, oneself and others, both particularity and generalization, and it is as much about recognizing nonsense as recognizing one’s own nonsense as making the sense. I argue that it is a productively incomplete denial of impossibility, when these evasions of overt politics become engagements in depoliticized practices and result in reproductions and improvisations of what are recognizable as ideological