In her second monograph, following the exceptional Sounding Indigenous, Michelle Bigenho discusses the process of localization and adaptation of musical forms—in this case, the music is Bolivian, both of urban and indigenous traditions. The players are Japanese and mestizo Bolivians (many without indigenous ancestry) and the author, an American anthropologist. Bigenho proposes that we speak of the feelings created in this performative environment as “intimate distance,” pleasure and closeness, such as that made when playing music with others is intimate, yet relations of power and inequality exist, creating distance, even in this intimacy. Many recent publications track cross-cultural reception and practice of various performing arts—on Japan alone there are substantial studies, including those by Ian Condry on hip-hop, Marvin Sterling on reggae and dancehall, David Hebert on wind bands, and Bonnie Wade on the role of the composer in modern Japan. Yet, somehow, Andean music in Japan seems more surprising, perhaps because unlike hip-hop, reggae, and classical music, the existence of a community of Bolivian music fans, aficionados, and performers in Japan challenges ideas of the standard transcultural flows of culture. Cultural flows that are part of the art music tradition, or popular genres in America and Western Europe, conform to expectations, but the existence of Japanese experts in Andean music—people who, since the 1970s have traveled to Bolivia and elsewhere in the Andes to learn the music and even become professional musicians—defies expectations.
Bigenho begins the book discussing the performance of indigeneity, and uses her own blond, short-haired, American perspective to introduce a discussion of the ways in which Japanese people “relate to Bolivians and Bolivian music through their own racialized narratives of indigeneity” (11). She clarifies how Japanese settlers in the Andean region and the Japanese musical apprentices are different—and also that these Japanese musicians see themselves as explorers, but not tourists, connecting to Bolivian music due to a mythical common ancestor and similar musical motifs. The introduction ends with a standard breakdown of each of the following chapters.
The second chapter, focused around the well-known song “Que te pasa, condor,” is essentially a history of knowledge and awareness of Bolivian music outside the Andean region. Bigenho unpacks the performance of indigeneity here, introducing the second-order reception of Bolivian music and how this international validation facilitated the folklorization of Bolivian music. The third chapter discusses work and value in performing world music internationally. This chapter includes more details of the primary research site—a tour of Japan by the Bolivian musical group Bigenho has performed with for many years, a group also central to her first book. Differing ideas about performance, work, and cultural misunderstandings experienced by Bigenho's group and other performers in Japan illustrate what it is like to work in the “culture mines” (89), a term Bigenho uses to clarify the ways that Bolivian musicians travel abroad, laboring in uncomfortable conditions to earn money that can later be used for creative projects or for their families after returning home.
In chapter 4 Bigenho turns her attention to the voices of Japanese musicians and others associated with the Bolivian/Andean musical scene. Bigenho speaks of this process as consumption: “Consuming Bolivian music ultimately means playing it, manipulating it, making it one's own, and establishing different social relations in the educational and performance process” (99). The chapter introduces important ideas, but ultimately is the least compelling in the volume, lacking the profound insights that elsewhere are illustrated with Bigenho's own experiences. Chapter 5 tackles the paradox of Japanese and mestizo Bolivians connecting through performing an indigenous Bolivian art, as the Bolivians occupy a position of insider authority—without reflexivity about how their own mestizo identity is separate from indigenous identity. Bigenho's exploration of racialization demonstrates the connections between performative culture and national pride in Bolivia, then addresses Japan with its long-held myth of homogeneity denying, for example, Ainu and Okinawan difference. Bigenho observes that “while these narratives that racialize culture have very different meanings within Japanese and Bolivian national historical trajectories, they still are imagined as points of connection and similarity” (142). Such connections emerge, for the Japanese participants in this scene, in a nostalgic desire to find exotic-but-lost characteristics of Japan in Bolivia.
The tone of chapter 6, “Gringa in Japan,” makes clear that for Bigenho, some of the most profound new understandings were related to her reflexive position in this unusual research framework. Bigenho's observations about multi-sited ethnography and what it means to do research with a population she knows well and can speak with easily (Bolivia/Bolivians) and one where the opposite is true (Japan/Japanese). These observations are engagingly presented through vignettes of different interpretations of history—where the Bolivians and the Japanese identified with each other's positions vis-à-vis American imperialism. Bigenho's deepened understanding of “area studies frameworks and disciplinary expectations” (155) presented in this chapter are of broad interest to scholars in area studies, particularly when they conduct research in two or more locations with such unequal preparation.
The conclusion returns to more fully develop the idea of intimate distance and what intimate/intimacy can offer as an analytical tool. Bigenho found that it allowed Japanese and Bolivians to interact with each other, to connect in a profoundly different way than either country connects to the United States. This examination of postcolonial studies is articulated as an “intimate distance.” The term encapsulates the closeness required to learn and play music with others or for others, while acknowledging that participating in such practices in relation to musics of ethnic/national others does not make us part of that culture. The music can forge intimacy, but a degree of distance cannot be surmounted. People who participate in these foreign musical cultures are attracted to those cultures, and negotiate the feeling of closeness and the distance from those cultures in fascinating ways. Bigenho connects to contemporary concerns about appropriation, but ultimately concludes that for the Japanese the performance of Bolivian music, even in Bolivian clothing, reaffirms but does not challenge Japanese nationalism.
This book is written at an upper-level undergraduate or graduate level; it is meaty and at times hard to chew. For me, another American academic, it sings when Bigenho uses vignettes and her own experiences to examine the fieldwork process and the academic project of studying performative identities. Her insight and reflexivity in these sections is profound, and the book would work well as a teaching tool on how to write up ethnographic research and some of the pitfalls of research. For example, no matter how much trust and rapport you establish, you can still experience discomfort and a feeling of alienation in the field. However, for someone with only the slightest passing interest in Bolivian music but with deep questions about how a foreign music is localized and adapted in East Asia, the details on Andean music at times dragged on and the sections and chapter focused on the Japanese perspective felt noticeably shallower.
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[Review length: 1145 words • Review posted on September 12, 2017]