The International Journal of Traditional Arts

Introduction to “Social justice, human rights, and sustainability of traditional arts”

Catherine Grant — 2022-11-08

Wellbeing, Cultural Protection, and Sustainability of Traditional Music among Children and Young Adult Syrian Refugees

Guilnard Jean Moufarrej — 2022-11-08

This article examines the relationship between the sustainability of traditional arts and al-ḥimāyah al-thaqāfiyyah lil-atfāl “children’s cultural protection” and their wellbeing in the context of forced migration. It focuses, in particular, on the role of traditional music among children and young adult Syrian refugees in reference to Nefes Music School, which was founded in 2019 in Gaziantep, Turkey. War and displacement have greatly impacted the lives and wellbeing of Syrian children and young adults both inside and outside Syria. Whether they live in refugee camps or in other settlements, they endure psychological, social, and economic challenges as they try to cope with the trauma of war and displacement. For the refugees living outside of Syria, the pressure to integrate into the cultures of the host countries and to resist different sorts of discrimination add to their traumatic experience.

The article discusses the strategies employed by Nefes Music School in order to establish an Arab music program in exile, and how music can help the students whose majority have fled Syria as young children and are now trying to adapt to a new environment. What role can traditional music play in the lives of refugees who have endured horrific experiences of war, displacement, and loss of loved ones? How can this music contribute to the integration of the Syrians in their host culture and how can the transmission of the musical heritage of displaced people through the younger generation foster its sustainability? How is the international community contributing to the safeguarding of Syria’s cultural and musical heritage? And finally, what are the challenges for the sustainability of these initiatives and therefore for the sustainability of Syria’s traditional music?

The importance of the “Mazowsze” National Folk Song and Dance Ensemble in initiatives to sustain and revitalize folk music and dance in Poland.

Katarzyna Ewa Skiba — 2022-11-08

The paper examines the role of the State Folk Song and Dance Ensemble ‘Mazowsze’ in the post-war revival of traditional music and dance in Poland. The initiative was entangled in the processes of propagating ideas of social justice, democratisation of culture and equal access to artistic education. Through the insight into the history of the ensemble in changing socio-political contexts, the author discusses how different regional traditions of peasant songs and dances have been relocated to theatre stages and public institutions, adopted to the tastes of urban audiences, popularized and included into the mainstream of national culture.

The phenomenon has been initiated right after the Second World War as part of initiatives to rebuild cultural life in Poland and revalue folk arts as an important component of cultural heritage, enabling rural artists to gain professional education, social acclaim and international recognition. Over the next seven decades a team of talented youths, recruited from the villages of Mazovia region, has been transformed into a big company of professional musicians and dancers, coming from all social groups and corners of Poland. Along with an increasing number of international tours, the ensemble came to represent the broader image of national identity, exhibiting the diversity of regional cultures and blending the folklore with aristocratic traditions, urban fashions and dominant contemporary trends of stage presentation.

The paper explores to what extend cultural policies in Poland have triggered the shift in representation of traditional culture in the performances of “Mazowsze”. It also demonstrates how the artistic stylisation of Polish folklore (presented by this company), its social relocation and global dissemination have served the purpose of its preservation. It determines the results of the restitution of peasants traditions in new contexts of urban scenes or cultural centres under protection of the state and artistic elites.

Music and the African Girl Child: Sustainability and Resistance in Pot Drum Music

Ruth Opara — 2022-11-08

Music and dance are integral parts of girlhood in the southeastern part of Nigeria, where I grew up. Most of our training and activities focused on molding girls to become better women, desirable maidens for marriage, and ultimately good wives; the girls’ dances also serve this purpose. However, gender violence affects this process in musical performance spaces. By examining the Avu Udu—a pot drum dance practiced by Owerri, Igbo girls in southeastern Nigeria, I argue that girls utilize music to resist traditional gender norms, and to protect themselves from a society that ignores their psychological well-being and fails to protect them from gender-based violence. Because of the complexity of the girls’ performances and lived experiences, this article further addresses a range of issues. The analyses of selected songs, dances, bodily gestures, and lived experiences of the girl dancers (between ages six to fifteen) show that the viability and sustainability of the Avu Udu depend on the Igbo’s conventional archetypes of patriarchy. Narratives, history, and existing scholarship account for changes in Avu Udu dance that stem from transformations in Nigeria’s social, political, and economic conditions. The roles that music plays in shaping the girl child and her response inform the intersections of music, gender, and resistance in Igbo, Nigerian culture. This research places the African girl child at the center of timely issues pertaining to social justice.

Far from Forgotten: Bharatanatyam, cultural infrastructure, and the conundrum of promoting equity when funding US-based state folklife apprenticeships

Aruna Kharod — 2022-11-08

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)-funded state folklife programs historically aim to “[identify]...arts that are at risk for being forgotten” and “fortify those at-risk art forms” (Malloy and Murphy, 2017, p. 11). Far from being forgotten, Bharatanatyam—classicized Indian dance—is an elite artistic genre upheld by strong cultural infrastructure and a large body of socioeconomically privileged Hindu Indian practitioners in the US (e.g., O’Shea, 2003; Soneji, 2010; Putcha, 2019). The tension between Bharatanatyam’s status as a prestigious, well-supported dance form and the NEA’s priority to support and sustain “at-risk” artistic practices inspires a nuanced examinination of the ideologies, institutions, and individuals involved in regularly funding Bharatanatyam folklife apprenticeships across the US. I push back against the notion of uncritically safeguarding minority cultural forms uncritically by expanding on Grant’s (2016) idea of artistic infrastructure. In this article, I analyze NEA’s and UNESCO’s intersecting ideologies on folklife and heritage promotion, Bharatanatyam’s US-based history and artistic infrastructure as a genre belonging to a racial minority group, and autoethnographic reflections as a former Bharatanatyam apprentice and ethnomusicologist. Through this three-pronged approach, I seek to unveil the multilayered and nuanced analyses that grantmaking organizations and individuals must exercise in order to enact their commitments to equitably supporting artistic genres—especially those belonging to minority or marginalized groups.

Participatory Ethnomusicology: An Epistemic Approach to Social Justice, Human Rights, and the Sustainability of the Traditional Arts of Minorities

Subash Giri — 2022-11-08

A range of unfortunate circumstances––violence, poverty, unemployment, drug trafficking, displacement, and the like––driven by the forces of conflict, climate change, natural catastrophes, and pandemic have tremendously affected minority groups living across the globe. Social stereotyping, exclusion, stigmatization, discrimination, domination, and prejudice equally impact minority groups based on an ethnic identity, race, religion, language, and/or political opinion. This article examines the three key interconnected issues of social justice, human rights, and the sustainability of the traditional arts of minorities in the context of such circumstances. It reflects on the applied ethnomusicology-guided approaches employed in ethnomusicological research in minority studies, including the inquiry into new epistemological scenarios in ethnomusicology. It also refers to the theoretical and methodological idea of Participatory Action Research (PAR). Grounded in the principles of applied ethnomusicology and the PAR paradigm, this article proposes and discusses ‘participatory ethnomusicology’ as an epistemic approach to social justice, human rights, and the sustainability of the traditional arts of minorities. The article presents a participatory collaborative research project conducted with the Nepalese minority immigrant community of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and demonstrates how the community became the primary actors in the study with shared roles and authority over decision-making at all stages of the research––identifying the key issues of the community and planning, implementing, and reflecting on the research project.

Revitalizing Potehi Practice: Preservation, Innovation, and Transmission by Rumah Cinwa in Contemporary Indonesia

Yuan-Hsin Tung — 2022-11-08

Wayang potehi is a Chinese Hokkien glove puppetry heritage that was introduced to the Indonesian archipelago by the substantial influx of Chinese Fujian immigrants during the late sixteenth century to early seventeenth century. It used to be common in Chinese-Indonesian communities throughout Indonesia prior to President Suharto’s New Order Regime (1967-1998), primarily performed inside Chinese temples as a crucial means for Chinese to worship gods and ancestors, as well as an expression of gratitude for success in business. In the current Reformasi political era, the genre is generally regarded as a waning Chinese tradition that only appears in the region of Java. This article examines the preservation of wayang potehi in contemporary Indonesia, particularly through the various efforts devoted by Rumah Cinwa - a generation Z Indonesian dominated potehi troupe. Grounded by the framework of wayang potehi practice, these young practitioners’ flourishing creativity has catalyzed new styles in performance practice which they called wayang potehi Nusantara, namely Indonesia archipelago’s wayang potehi, displaying varying degrees of localization from the appearances of puppets to the content of repertoire to the music accompaniment. In addition, Indonesian cyberspace is used a site for digitally promoting these new styles and performance information across the country. This article argues that such efforts are attributed to the idea of multiculturalism that upheld by the contemporary Indonesia democratic regime. The active participation of the members of Rumah Cinwa in wayang potehi practice and innovation reveals their understanding of multiculturalism as sincerely embracing all cultural others in society, and which paving the way for the sustainability of the genre in the future Indonesia.