Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This dissertation is about the mediation of cross-cultural difference among Moroccan and Spanish musical practitioners. It is based on the idea that negotiations across the gaps of such difference have been promoted through the increased circulation of people, products and ideas in the modern era. Based on fieldwork during the years 2003-2007, primarily in the urban sites of Granada, Spain and Fez, Morocco, the project focuses on popular music, how both the production and reception of music are critically bound up with notions of genre, how resulting associations of musical practice are affected by different uses of technology, and how musical practices of all types partake of and help form different ideas of belonging.
The understanding of genres of musical expression by listeners and performers alike serves a similar function in demonstrating affiliation with certain in-groups or belief in certain ideologies: e.g., of ethnic or national belonging; or of modern, cosmopolitan access. Tracking not only performance of certain genres but discourse about those genres provides clues to how crucial cultural and political differences are understood and mediated.
Key sites for research included official venues for public concerts and cultural tourism, but also more everyday spaces of musical production and reception such as bars and cafes, homes, taxis, streets, parks, and small retail shops. In the course of my research I attended dozens of performances and rehearsals by professional and amateur musicians, trailed selected working musical groups over many months as they pursued their performance practices, and interviewed both music producers and music listeners in many different contexts.
In the course of explicating the processes of musical production and reception in these locales, the project explores a broad set of related topics while framing the overall investigation theoretically. These topics include questions of migration in the modern era, of cosmopolitanism in various forms as a response to increased cross-cultural contacts due to various human movements, as well as consideration of crucial aspects of modernity– e.g. colonialism, nationalism, globalization, and cultural, economic and technological development–-all of which have been significant for cultural practices in Morocco, and among Moroccan emigrants to Spain and elsewhere in recent generations.
To understand the consequences of exchange across cultural divides – from those occurring early and even within moments of first contact between different human groups, to colonial era encounters, and finally to complex cultural, economic, and political interactions in an era of increasingly globalized behaviors-social theorists from Homi Bhabha to Michael Taussig have stressed the significance of mimetic behavior in the negotiation by humans of their cultural differences. My research tracks the adoption, distortion and re-purposing of novel cultural forms, techniques, and ideas arriving from others’ distant practices as one ongoing social channel for cultural expression. It also tracks adherence to “traditional” means, along with the appropriation of innovative practices as ways of marking group inclusion and exclusion.