| Music performances provide sensuous experiences through which individuals establish domain over places by physically moving through them and by imaginatively constructing them within a corpus of song lyrics. Paradoxically, music performances also become detached easily from their purported places of origin, entering a symbolic economy within which it is argued that representational decisions privilege visual over sonorous sense experiences. For those who participate as performers and audiences of these music performances, the splitting of sounds from their sources produces diverse attitudes towards the idea of an original and invokes different nostalgic perspectives.;Through analyses of Bolivian music performances by a music school and a performing ensemble in La Paz, and two rural sites in Potosi, this ethnographic project explores the intersection of local, sonorously defined places with places as defined through state, national, and transnational processes. This intersection, apparent as a shift in privileged sensory domains, becomes acutely relevant in the contemporary Bolivian context, where the state, through new legislation, is recognizing local ethnic populations. The focus on the local, national, and transnational confirms a model of identification processes whereby ethnic identity is more prominent in those contexts where social groups have had more contact with outsiders. Calling into question common sense expectations of modernity, the thesis argues that local and translocal identification processes can be mutually constitutive. However, no single model of cultural transformation accounts for the multiple ways in which modernity is locally experienced.;Musical examples, both with and without lyrics, are analyzed in terms of performance contexts, production networks, sensuous experiences, and linguistic meanings. From these music performances two key tropes structure narratives of nation: the Chaco War (1932-1935) as a temporal reference of Bolivian national origins and a highland/lowland divide as a temporal and spatial reference of both national diversity and unity. The present study situates these narratives within a global trend which favors a politics of respecting cultural differences and simultaneously masks discussions of socioeconomic inequalities. |
