scholarly journals Spotify and the democratisation of music

Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Thomas Hodgson

Abstract The corporate rhetoric of streaming platforms often assumes a tight link between their scale-making ambitions on the one hand and the creative interests of musicians on the other. In practice, most musicians recognise that claims of musical ‘democratisation’ are deeply flawed. The creative ambivalence this produces is an understudied pillar in scholarship on digital music platforms and suggests that these systems can be more creatively constrictive than empowering. Based on ethnographic research among Spotify engineers, record labels and musicians, this article explores how music recommendation systems become inculcated with a corporate rhetoric of ‘scalability’ and considers, following Anna Tsing, how this impacts musical creativity further down the value chain. I argue that the ‘creative ambivalence’ that these technologies produce should be more fully understood as woven into a complex web of social relations and corporate interests than prevailing claims of technological objectivity and ‘democratisation’ suggest.

Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (S1) ◽  
pp. S51-S71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Malefakis

AbstractFor a group of Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Their migration to the city and entry into the urban economy had occurred along ethnic and kinship lines. But, as they perceived the socially heterogeneous environment of the city that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds, they experienced their continuing dependency on their relatives as a form of confinement. Against the backdrop of the city, the Wayao perceived their social relations as being burdened with an inescapable sameness that made it impossible to trust one another. Mistrust, contempt and mutual suspicion were the flip side of close social relations and culminated in accusations ofuchawi(Swahili: witchcraft). However, these accusations did not have a disintegrative effect; paradoxically, their impact on social relations among the vendors was integrative. On the one hand,uchawiallegations expressed the claustrophobic feeling of stifling relations; on the other, they compelled the accused to adhere to a shared morality of egalitarian relations and exposed the feeling that the accused individual was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were of particular importance to others.


1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Elliott

In Luke-Acts the social codes and concepts associated with food and meals replicate and support the contrasting social codes, interests, and ideologies associated with the Jerusalem Temple, on the one hand, and the Christian household, on the other. In this study the thesis is advanced that in contrast to the Temple and the exclusivist purity and legal system it represents, Luke has used occasions of domestic dining and hospitality to depict an inclusive form of social relations which transcends previous Jewish purity regulations and which gives concrete social expression to the inclusive character of the gospel, the kingdom of God, and the Christian community.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaila Sultana

This paper contributes to a recent development in Applied Linguistics that encourages research from trans- approaches. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic research project carried out in a university of Bangladesh. It is illustrated how young adults actively and reflexively use a mixture of codes, modes, genres, and popular cultural texts in their language practices within the historical and spatial realities of their lives. The paper shows that the interpretive capacity of heteroglossia increases when complemented by an understanding derived from transgressive approaches to language. The paper proposes a reconceptualised version of heteroglossia, namely transglossia, which explores the fixity and fluidity of language in the 21th Century. On the one hand, transglossia is a theoretical framework that addresses the transcendence and transformation of meaning in heteroglossic voices. On the other hand, a transglossic framework untangles the social, historical, political, ideological, and spatial realities within which voices emerge. Overall, it is suggested that transglossia and a transglossic framework can provide us with an understanding of language that notions such as code-mixing or code-switching or any language-centric analysis fail to unveil.


1963 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Goncharov

The colonial system is a system of social relations based on the political and economic domination of backward peoples by imperialist powers, in a world divided territorially and economically. The colonial régime is a monopoly exercised by the bourgeoisie of an imperialist country, based on economic and extra-economic pressure in a dependent country. This imperialist monopoly has two basic functions: on the one hand, it exploits the colonies; on the other hand, it maintains and develops the political enslavement necessary for its own existence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 953-970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers

In this essay I explore the ways in which the internal Albanian politics of memory in Kosovo rely on a longer, lived history of militant self-organisation than the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war period alone. On the basis of recent ethnographic research, I argue that the memory of prewar militant activism is symbolically codified, ritually formalized, and put on the public stage in Kosovo today. Not only has this process effectively rehabilitated and consolidated the personal, social, and political status of specific former activists, it also has produced a hegemonic morality against which the actions of those in power are judged internally. On the one hand, this process reproduces shared cultural references which idealise ethnonational solidarity, unity and pride and which have served militant mobilisation already before the 1990s. On the other, it provides the arguments through which rival representatives of the former militant underground groups (known asIlegalja)compete both socially and politically still today. Although this process demarcates some lines of social and political friction within society, it also suggests that international efforts to introduce an identity which breaks with Kosovo's past and some of its associated values, face a local system of signification that is historically even deeper entrenched than is usually assumed.


2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Schoina

Abstract Considering the largely unacknowledged connection between Byron and Mary Shelley on the logistics which pertain to the experience of crossing-over cultures, this paper investigates the notion of authentic Italianisation as exemplified in their related texts, and discusses its problematics in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in Romantic culture. Thus, on the one hand, my paper examines how the Romantic anticipation of being immersed in local culture and of “going native” is articulated – or rather, performed – by Byron himself, by considering specific rhetorical strategies and figures of filiation he used to ground his relationship to Italian place. More specifically, I contend that although Byron’s polymorphic identification to Italian place is constructed in the imagination, it is also grounded in time- and space-bound actions and involves a structure of social relations. On the other hand, the paper delineates how Byron’s idiosyncratic immersion into Italianness is theorised by Mary Shelley and counted on as a model of second culture acquisition.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jerolmack ◽  
Alexandra K. Murphy

Masking, the practice of hiding or distorting identifying information about people, places, and organizations, is usually considered a requisite feature of ethnographic research and writing. This is justified both as an ethical obligation to one’s subjects and as a scientifically neutral position (as readers are enjoined to treat a case’s idiosyncrasies as sociologically insignificant). We question both justifications, highlighting potential ethical dilemmas and obstacles to constructing cumulative social science that can arise through masking. Regarding ethics, we show, on the one hand, how masking may give subjects a false sense of security because it implies a promise of confidentiality that it often cannot guarantee and, on the other hand, how naming may sometimes be what subjects want and expect. Regarding scientific tradeoffs, we argue that masking can reify ethnographic authority, exaggerate the universality of the case (e.g., “Middletown”), and inhibit replicability (or “revisits”) and sociological comparison. While some degree of masking is ethically and practically warranted in many cases and the value of disclosure varies across ethnographies, we conclude that masking should no longer be the default option that ethnographers unquestioningly choose.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M Kenyon

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Blue Nile town of Sennar, supported by archival and historical documentation, this article explores the history of Zar spirit possession in Sudan, and the light this throws on the interplay of religions over the past 150 years. Life history data supports the argument that contemporary Zar is grounded in forms and rituals derived from the ranks of the ninteenth-century Ottoman army, and these remain the basis of ritual events, even as they accommodate ongoing changes in this part of Africa. Many of these changes are linked to the dynamic interplay of Zar with forms of Islam, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other. In the former colonial periods, political power resided with the British, and Khawaja (European) Christian Zar spirits are remembered as far more important. Today that authority in Zar has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims and local holy men, on the one hand, and to subaltern Blacks, on the other. These speak to concerns of new generations of adepts even as changes in the larger political and religious landscapes continue to transform the context of Zar.


1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
Henning Eichberg

Contradictions of Modernity. Conflicting Configurations and Societal Thinking in Grundtvig's »The Human Being in the World«A Worm - a God. About the Human Being in the World. Ove Korsgaard (ed.). With contributions of Niels Buur Hansen, Hans Hauge, Bosse Bergstedt, Uffe Jonas and Knud Bjarne Gjesing. Odense Universitetsforlag 1997.By Henning EichbergIn 1817, Grundtvig wrote »Om Mennesket i Verden« which can be regarded as a key to the understanding of his philosophy and psychology, but which is difficult to place in relation to his later folkelig, societal engagement. A recent reedition of this text together with some actual comments by Grundtvig researchers is an occasion to quest deeper about this relation.However, it is not enough to ask - as Grundtvig research has done for a long time - what Grundtvig wanted to say, but his text can be regarded as a document of how modem orientation in the world is characterized by conflicting linguistic and metaphorical patterns, which sometimes may tell another story than intended.On the one hand, Grundtvig's text speaks of a lot of dualistic contradictions such as life vs. death, light vs. darkness, truth vs. lie, God vs. devil, human fall vs. resurrection, body vs. spirit, nature vs. history and time vs. eternity. In contrast to the author's intention to produce clarity and lucidity - whether in the spirit of Christianity or of modem rationality - the binary constructions give rather a confusing picture of systematical disorder where polarity and polemics are mixed, antagonism and gradual order, dichotomy and exclusive either-or, paradoxes and dialectical contradictions. On the other hand,Grundtvig tries again and again to build up three-pole imaginations as for instance the threefold human relation to time, space and truth and the three ages of spiritual seeing, feeling and conceptualization resp. of mythology (childhood), theology (youth) and history (adult age). The main history, Grundtvig wants to tell in his text, is built up around the trialectic relation of the human being to the body, to the spirit and to itself, to the living soul.The most difficult to understand in this relation seems to be what Grundtvig calls the spirit, Aanden. Grundtvig describes it as Aandigt Samfund mellem Menneske og Sandhed, »the spiritual community between the human being and the truth«, and this may direct our attention towards samfund, meaning at the same time association, togetherness and society. Aanden is described by threefold effects - will, conscience and faith, all of them describing social relations between human beings resp. their psychological correlate. The same social undertone is true when Grundtvig characterizes three Aande-Livets Spor (»traces of spiritual life«): the word, the history and love. If »the spirit« represents what is larger or »higher« than the single human being and what cannot be touched by his or her hand, then this definition fits exactly to society or the sociality of the human being. Social life - whether understood as culture, social identity or folk (people) - is not only a quantitative sum of human individuals, but represents another quality of natural order. Thus it has its logic that Grundtvig places the human being in between the realms of minerals, plant and animal life on the one hand and the »higher« order on the other, which can be understood as the social existence.In this respect, the societal dimension is not at all absent in his philosophy of 1817. However, it is not enough to state the implicite presence of sociality as such in the earlier Grundtvigian thinking before his folkelig break-through. What was the sociality, more concretely, which Grundtvig experienced during the early modernity? In general, highly dichotomous concepts are dominating the modem discourse as capitalism vs. feudalism, materialism vs. idealism, modernity vs. premodemity, democracy vs. absolutism or revolution vs. restoration; Grundtvig was always difficult to place into these patterns. Again, it might be helpful to try a trialectical approach, transcending the dualism of state and market by civil society as a third field of social action. Indeed, it was civil society with its farmers' anarchist undertones which became the contents of Grundtvig's later folk engagement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 728-738
Author(s):  
E. E. Nechvaloda ◽  

Introduction: the article is devoted to the analysis of the early sources on the Udmurt ancient woman headwear. The chronological framework of the study is limited, on the one hand, by the very first confirmation of the ayshon (XVI century), and on the other hand, by the era of the first expeditions in Russia (XVIII century), which laid the foundation for future ethnographic research. Objective: to determine the degree of reliability and informativity of descriptions and images of the Udmurt headwear of the XVI–XVIII centuries. Research materials: works of travelers of the XVI–XVIII centuries, containing data about ayshon. Results and novelty of the research: the article provides a comparative analysis of materials about ayshon in the sources of the XVI–XVIII centuries. Texts, engravings with texts, and early sources with ethnographic materials of the end of the XIX – beginning XX centuries are compared. For the first time, all original graphic images and descriptions of this headwear related to the specified time period are published together. The characteristics of the ayshon in the descriptions generally correspond to each other, as well as its known images and later ethnographic data. The materials of the article can be used in ethnographic and source studies.


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