Identity and Expressive Culture
Code
722001035
Academic unit
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Department
Sociologia
Credits
10
Weekly hours
3 letivas + 1 tutorial
Teaching language
Portuguese
Objectives
This seminar aims: a) to promote a reflection on how the expressive production and consumption strategically contribute to the affirmation, negotiation and redesigning of identity in the context of migration processes; b) to foster critical analysis of common sense, media and political discourses about the expressive production and consumption; c) provide essential tools to build semi-autonomous research projects in this area; d) to reflect on the relationship between the production, mediation and consumption of expressive practices, especially music and dance, and its articulation with sociocultural identities; e) to examine perspectives from cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology and cultural studies dealing with the ways identities are expressed and negotiated through the production of sound, movement, text and visuality as interconnected expressive
dimensions.
Prerequisites
None.
Subject matter
Part One:
1. the cultural dimensions of consumption: consumption beyond the economic.
2. Proposal for a definition of active consumer: processes of appropriation, objectification, incorporation and conversion.
3. The processes of construction and reconstruction of identity in contemporary societies. Reflexivity and the problem of choice. 4. Practices and contexts of use: private and public contexts.
5. The social construction of taste, mechanisms of social reproduction and identity.
6. Habitus and lifestyles. Social markers, differentiation and individuality.
7. Different markets, different scales: the flows and trajectories of objects.
8. Transformation and appropriation of things in the contexts of production and in different contexts.
Part two:
1. Expressive culture and identity in ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology
2. Nations and nationalisms
3. Globalization, popular music and the category of world music
4. Race, Diaspora and emerging identities in postcolonial Europe.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P. (2001) The Aristocracy of Culture, In Miller, D. Consumption. Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, London, Routledge.
Howes, D. (1996) Introduction. Commodities and Cultural Borders, in Howes, D. ed., Cross Cultural Consumption. Global Markets Local Realities, London, Routledge.
Miller, D. (1998) Coca-Cola: a Black Sweet Drink from Trinidad, in Miller, D. Ed., Material Cultures. Why Some Things Matter, London, The University of Chicago Press.
Erlmann, Veit (1996) Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: reflections on World
Music in the 1990s, Public Culture 8: 467-88.
Feld, Steven (1994) From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: on the Discourses and Commodification Practices of World Music and World Beat in Steven Feld e Charles Keil, Music Groves. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Guilbault, Jocelyne (2007) Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidads Carnival Musics. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Teaching method
The seminar combines expositions by the instructor, students presentations and discussions.
Evaluation method
The evaluation is based on complementary elements: the students active participation and critical engagement with the debated themes; two oral presentations focusing two of the courses required texts; two written papers on the same texts not exceeding three to four pages each; and a written paper not exceeding the twelve pages focusing on
one of the main themes either of the first or second part of the course.