Trust in music: Musical projects against violence in northern Colombia

Middleton, Ian Thomas

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/101511 Copy

Description

Title

Trust in music: Musical projects against violence in northern Colombia

Author(s)

Middleton, Ian Thomas

Issue Date

2018-07-02

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Turino, Thomas

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Turino, Thomas

Committee Member(s)

• Solis, Gabriel
• Silvers, Michael
• Hertzman, Marc

Department of Study

Music

Discipline

Musicology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Trust
• Music
• Colombia
• Violence
• Nonviolence
• Peacebuilding
• Tambora
• Gaita
• Ethnomusicology
• Phenomenology
• Semiotics

Abstract

Colombia's protracted civil war is characterized by cycles of pervasive distrust and violence. The people I work with are involved in projects across the north of the country aimed in part at breaking these cycles. In this dissertation I offer an applied ethnographic analysis of the dynamic relations between local forms of trusting, music making and (non)violence. While I recognize music's impact is sometimes minimal or negative, I focus on projects with demonstrable positive impact as part of my commitment to the struggles of my interlocutors. My account is comparative, describing individuals and groups from different towns, sub regions, and positionalities within the conflict, and engaging with similar but contrasting musical styles and projects. I show that musical practices in which participants aim to maximize the breadth of participation (the number of people engaged) tend to foster thin trusting across a broad radius of people, whereas musical practices aimed at the maximum depth of experience of a reduced number of performers tend to generate thick trusting among reduced pools of people. Peacebuilding requires both thin and thick trusting, but the latter can preclude broad organization. I consider festivalization of the musical practices I describe as a means of constructing a parallel peace. While partly successful it can reproduce in miniature some of the violences associated with clientelistic coercive trusting. I present one national project as an exemplar of best practice. The Legión del afecto works to generate an imbricated peace through radically inclusive projects in which young people practice and champion both thick and thin trusting, and peaceful living together, using a wide range of musical practices as part of an integrated, reflexive methodology. My arguments are based in, and seek to finesse, semiotic and phenomenological accounts of music as social life.

Graduation Semester

2018-08

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101511

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2018 Ian Middleton

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