Michelle Bigenho

Biography
Michelle Bigenho, associate professor of anthropology and Latin American studies, holds a B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in political science and Latin American studies; a "magister" in anthropology from the Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú; and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University. Her current research interests include indigeneity, alternatives to intellectual property, transnational cultural work, indigenous heritage, folklorization processes, and the politics of culture. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright IIE, and the Whiting Foundation, as well as fellowships from University of Cambridge’s Centre of Latin American Studies and University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. She is currently heading up an NSF-funded collaborative project entitled Cultural Property, Creativity, and Indigeneity in Bolivia, with Henry Stobart (Royal Holloway University of London), Juan Carlos Cordero (Bolivia) and Bernardo Rozo (Bolivia).

Her second monograph, Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan (Duke 2012) received a prize from the Latin American Studies Association, Asia and the Americas Section. Her other publications include Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance (Palgrave 2002), chapters in several edited volumes and articles published in American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Anthropological Quarterly, and Journal of Latin American Anthropology.

Music performance on the violin has formed a significant part of her research approach in Peru, Bolivia, and Japan. She has participated in over fourteen recordings with the Bolivian ensemble, Música de Maestros.

Education
Cornell University, Ph.D. 1998 Anthropology

Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú, Maestría 1991 Antropología

University of California, Los Angeles, B.A. 1988 Political Science and Latin American Studies

Courses
Who Owns Culture?

Latin American Social Movements (in Spanish)

Music and Politics of Latin America

Indigenous Politics of Latin America

Performance and Ethnography (methods

Local Music in the Global Mix

Political Economy of Pleasure

Senses Culture, and Power

Altered States

Gifts Sex, and Commodities

Performing Bolivian Music (Jan term)

Life Stories from Latin America Music and Politics of Latin America Zapatistas

Fidelistas and el Che: Changing Visions of Latin American Society

Andean Lives

Comparing Modernities in Latin America

Peru Imagined, Unimagined, Reimagined

Students I Advise
Div II

Harrison Fuerst

Liz King

Tana Pierro

Maxwell Pollock

Aaron Brame

José Andre De Leon

Sean Fletcher

Emily Horne

Div III

Emma Brewster

Jacqueline Hsu

Sarah Hunter

Cameron Merker

Research and Current Projects
My current research interests include transnational music performance, cultural politics of states, musical intimacies, folklorization, and cultures of area studies. While I am a musician (violinist), and music has formed an integral part of my research endeavors, my intellectual projects aim to pull music out of an autonomous sphere and into an overall interpretive frame that unites more phenomenological approaches with an analysis of the political. My theoretical frameworks, therefore, favor ritual analysis as applied to nation-states, performance and performativity, embodiment and memory, and intimacies in relation to political subjectivities.

I am currently engaged in a research project about creativity, indigeneity, cultural property, and heritage in relation to the new Bolivian constitution. This NSF-funded collaborative project returns to intellectual questions about indigenous authorship that I posed in a chapter of my first book, and eventually aims to connect with global dialogues on indigeneity and cultural property. The research is guided by the questions of whether or not and how Bolivians, as they go through constitutional change and legal transformation, will propose alternatives to the globally prevalent intellectual and cultural property regimes that generally have fallen short in the following areas: the recognition of collective creativity, the problems of access in unequal social terrains, and the tensions between the state and indigenous groups with respect to heritage. For this project I am collaborating with Henry Stobart (Music, Royal Holloway University of London), Juan Carlos Cordero (Bolivia) and Bernardo Rozo (Bolivia). For advances in this project, see Cultural Property, Creativity, and Indigeneity in Bolivia , and the blog for Alta-PI (Alternativas a la Propiedad Intelectual).

My first book, Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance (2002), analyzed the multicultural politics of Bolivia. Through cases that brought together both urban mestizo musical expressions and music performances of highland indigenous communities, I interpreted competing claims of authenticity and the transformations that occur when performative experiences intersect with the realms of representational and commodifying practices. I applied a methodology of "moving through places" – analyzing Bolivian music performances at local, national, and transnational levels. My own participation as a performing musician was documented throughout this multi-sited ethnography. In this work, I showed how debates over authenticity provide a lens into cultural politics and the differentiated power relations that let some subjects speak about the authenticity of others. Central to my interpretation was a theorization of authenticity--through an expansion on the ideas of Walter Benjamin-- in the realms of musical experience, representation, and commodification.

In my second book, Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan (Duke University Press 2012), I ask the question: What does it mean to play “someone else’s music”? Going beyond the accusatory lenses of exoticism and cultural appropriation, Intimate Distance delves into this question through a focus on Bolivian musicians who tour Japan and Japanese who do much more than passively consume this music. Bolivian musicians have been touring Japan since the 1970s, often coming to rely heavily on these flexible labor contracts to sustain their economic and artistic goals at home. Japanese audiences have taken up these musical forms as hobbyists and even as professional musicians, often sojourning to Bolivia for extended periods. Framed as an inter-area ethnography that breaks new ground in relation to on-going discussions of multi-sited methodologies, Intimate Distance examines the globalization of Andean music, addressing these processes as transnational cultural work and as affective encounters with otherness. Central to these transnational performances is a staging of indigenous worlds, even if many performers do not identify as indigenous subjects. Across geographic and cultural distance, however, Bolivians and Japanese involved in these musical practices often expressed a racialized narrative of intimacy that referenced shared indigenous ancestors who remained unnamed, prehistorically positioned, and disconnected from contemporary indigenous struggles. The text grapples with transnational cultural labor, cultural intimacy across multiple boundaries of otherness, race thinking within nationalism, and the productive unsettling of the usual East-West binary that structures many discussions of cultural difference and exotic fantasy.

For another project I have collected oral histories and conducted archival research to analyze Bolivian processes of folklorization between the 1930s and the 1960s. This period of Bolivian history marked the moment when non-indigenous nationals started imagining their nation through urban staged representations of indigenous cultural expressions. At stake was an imagining of Bolivia as a “modern” nation, as mestizos both covered deeply racialized discourses through the celebration of “folklore,” and compared their own staged work with Western high art. I have published two pieces from this still on-going project: “Making Music Safe for the Nation: Folklore Pioneers in Bolivian Indigenism” and “Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasy and Indigenismo.”

Publications
'''MONOGRAPHS

INTIMATE DISTANCE: ANDEAN MUSIC IN JAPAN

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Intimate Distance: Andean Music in Japan (Duke University Press 2012), winner of the 2012 Writing Prize from the Latin American Studies Association, Asia and the Americas Section.

What does it mean to play "someone else’s music"? Intimate Distance delves into this question through a focus on Bolivian musicians who tour Japan playing Andean music and Japanese audiences, who often go beyond fandom to take up these musical forms as hobbyists and even as professional musicians.


 * Endorsement
 * "Michelle Bigenho's dazzling new book probes the fascinating, unexpected story of Japan's romance with Andean music. Her ethnography tacks between Bolivia and Japan, and illuminates an economy of music, livelihood, and attraction that Bigenho triangulates through her own research as an anthropologist and a mistress herself of the Andean fiddle. Her smart, sophisticated analysis speaks to debates about indigeneity, music and performance, and the dialectics of history, desire, and globalization in a multipolar world. It's a book as adroit, intricate, and sometimes very moving as the lilting Andean folk melodies that Bigenho and her Bolivian bandmates played so many nights as they toured throughout the islands."—Orin Starn, author of Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian
 * For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit
 * For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press, please visit

SOUNDING INDIGENOUS: AUTHENTICITY IN BOLIVIAN MUSIC PERFORMANCE

Sounding Indigenous: Authenticity in Bolivian Music Performance (Palgrave 2002) explores the relations between music, people, and places through analysis of Bolivian music performances: by a non-governmental organization involved in musical activities, by a music performing ensemble, and by the people living in two rural areas of Potosi. Based on research conducted between 1993 and 1995, the book frames debates of Bolivian national and indigenous identities in terms of different attitudes people assume towards cultural and artistic authenticity. The book makes unique contributions through an emphasis on music as sensory experience, an examination of authenticity in relation to music, a combined focus on different kinds of Bolivian music (indigenous, popular, avant-garde), and an interpretation of local, national, and transnational fieldwork experiences.

 


 * Table of Contents:
 * Authenticity Matters
 * What Makes You Want to Dance
 * "Time!"
 * Indigenous Cool and the Politics of Aesthetics
 * The Burden and Lightness of Authenticity
 * Sonorous Sovereignty
 * The Indigenous Work and its Authorship
 * Codas, Despedidas, and Kacharpayas
 * Codas, Despedidas, and Kacharpayas

Images and sound for Sounding Indigenous

EDITOR

Performance, Revolution, Pedagogy: Theatre and its Objects (co-edited with Alberto Guevara issue of on-line journal InTensions 4 (fall 2010)

PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

2007 “Bolivian Indigeneity in Japan: Folklorized Music Performance” in Indigenous Experience Today, Marisol de la Cadena, Orin Starn, eds. Pp. 247-272. Oxford: Berg

2006 “Embodied Matters: Bolivian Fantasy and Indigenismo” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11 (2): 267-293.

2006“Inter-area Ethnography: A Latin Americanist in Japan,” Anthropological Quarterly 79 (4): 667-690.

2005 “Making Music Safe for the Nation: Folklore Pioneers in Bolivian Indigenism,” In Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity and the State in the Andes, Andrew Canessa, ed. pp. 60-80.Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

2001"Political Economy of Pleasure" co-authored with Bethany Ogdon, Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24 (1): 155-161.

1999 "Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State," American Ethnologist 26 (4): 957-980.

1998"Coca as a Musical Trope of Bolivian Nation-ness," Political and Legal Anthropology Review 21 (1): 114-122.

1996 "Imaginando lo imaginado: las narrativas de las naciones bolivianas," Revista Andina, Año 14 (28): 471-507.

 

SELECTION OF OTHER ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

2008 “Why I’m not an Ethnomusicologist: A View from Anthropology” In The New (Ethno)musicologies, Henry Stobart, ed., pp. 28-39 Scarecrow Press (Europea Series).

2006 “Laboring in the Transnational Culture Mines: the Work of Bolivian Music in Japan,” In Culture and Development in a Globalizing World: Geographies, Actors, and Paradigms, Sarah Radcliffe, ed.pp 107-125. London and New York: Routledge.

2004 “Why They don’t All Wax Nostalgic: Comparing Modernities Through Songs from the Bolivian Andes,” In Quechua Verbal Artistry: The Inscription of Andean Voices/ Arte expresivo quechua: la inscripción de voces andinas, Guillermo Delgado and John Schechter, eds. pp. 263-297. Bonn, Germany: Bonn Americanist Studies-BAS/Shaker Verlag.

2001 "Propiedad indígena, patrimonio, y la nueva tasa?" Anales de la Reunión Anual de Etnología, 2000. pp. 127-131. La Paz: MUSEF.

Community Involvement
Latin@ and Latin American Studies

Five College Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Council:

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Alta-PI (Alternativas a la Propiedad Intelectual)