Chair’s Scope
The Chair “Anthropology of Traditional Music: Representing and Repositioning Intangible Cultural Heritage”
aims to map down and reassess the domain of intangible cultural heritage with an anthropological focus on traditional music. It intends to advance multidisciplinary research, analysis, policy, and strategic narrative regarding music as living heritage. The chair has three main objectives:
to showcase the domain of representing musical heritage through distinguishing between actually lived culture and invented tradition.
to safeguard longstanding cultural practices and traditional music in particular against state policies about culture.
to propose a new balance between musical heritage and institutional management of traditional culture by suggesting ways for sustainable development of musical heritage based on how indigenous people themselves perceive, express and communicate through music.
With its activities the Chair fosters the view that music heritage manifests itself as a unified and unifying field of orality, materiality, performativity and spirituality. By focusing on the long standing and systematic study of the singing cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Chair seeks to promote the idea of transculturation as a critical perspective that blends past and present, Self and Other, technology and globalization with a special focus on respecting the communities and safeguarding the people’s actually lived musical traditions.