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Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production

Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production
Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production
Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad "facts" and "truths", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados' relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structures
0014-1836
222-253
Malcomson, Hettie
d8a28a18-c129-4a08-8805-3365d51d253c
Malcomson, Hettie
d8a28a18-c129-4a08-8805-3365d51d253c

Malcomson, Hettie (2014) Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production. Ethnomusicology, 58 (2), Spring Issue, 222-253. (doi:10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0222).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad "facts" and "truths", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados' relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structures

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MalcomsonH Aficionados preprint.pdf - Accepted Manuscript
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e-pub ahead of print date: 22 April 2014
Published date: 22 April 2014
Organisations: Music

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 376372
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/376372
ISSN: 0014-1836
PURE UUID: 13afcf4d-dacb-4c7a-bb9b-abff7458d156

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Date deposited: 20 Apr 2015 08:16
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 19:41

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