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Cultures on the Margins: Anthropological Post-Graduate Research Conference

Queen’s University, Belfast April 24-25, 2015

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Conference Schedule Friday 24th of April

Venue: Room 0G/007, 71 University Street (School of Education)

13:00- Registration 13:15 — 14:10 Panel: Music in Society Chair : Amelia-Roisin Seifert ‘So much noise, so few songs: the deafening non-musicality of the Greek crisis’ Dr. Ioannis Tsioulakis, Lecturer in Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast ‘Singing in Silence’ Amadeu Corbera Jaume, Institute for Conflict Research, Belfast ‘Wolves in The Throne Room: Autochthony, Marginality and Transcendence in Contemporary Eco-Black Metal’ Dr. Kevin Murray, University of Essex/QUB 14:30 -15:00 - The Chinese Fan Dance in Belfast Wanting Wu, PhD Candidate,Queens University Belfast Chair : Amelia-Roisin Seifert 15:00-15:20 - Tea/coffee break 15.20 — 16.00 Panel: Contemporary Sri Lanka Chair: Kayla Rush ‘Missed calls and missed opportunities: The anti-social use of mobile phones amongst Sri Lanka’s youth’ Ranmalie Jayawardana, PhD Candidate, Queens University Belfast ‘Sufism and Interiority in Sri Lanka’ Chris Manoharan, MA Student, QUB Institute of Cognition and Culture

16:00— 17:00 Panel: Performance and Cultural Identity Chair: DingDing ‘Demanding to be Heard: Marginalisation and Musical Taste Amongst Ulster Loyalist Marching Bands from the 18th to the 21st Centuries’ Dr. Gordon Ramsay, Queens University Belfast PERFORMANCE: A poetic exploration of identity, art and community Poetry. Colin Dardis , Founder of Poetry NI Geraldine O’Kane, Poetry NI and the John Hewit Society 17:00 - Wine reception 19:00 Conference dinner at Villa Italia

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Saturday, April 25th

Venue: Performance Room, 13University Square,

10.30 – 11:00 Coffee and Registration 11.00 — 11.20 ‘Using Art to Empower Marginalised People’ Jude McVitty – Arts Facilitator Chair: Dev Pathak 11:20- 12:40 Panel: Contemporary Chinese Culture Chair: Dev Pathak ‘Space Conflict: The Effect of Tourism on the Nomadic Culture in Hemu Village on the Borderland of China’ Nan Zhao, PhD Candidate, Minzu University, Beijing ‘Power & Legitimacy in the New China: The Case of Bo Xilai’ Yuecheng Ding, Queens University Belfast ‘Chinese Migrant Children’s Chinese Language Learning in Belfast, Northern Ireland’ Sha Wang, Queens University Belfast 12:40-13:00 - PERFORMANCE: Poet John-Paul Patton will present

excerpts from his anthropology ‘"Lightning Bolts and Dew Drops: A Cauldron Poesy."

13.00 — 14:00 Buffet Lunch 14:00-15:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Dr.Suzel Riley, Queens Univesity Belfast Chair: Ranmalie Jayawardana

‘Brazilian Ethnomusicology, Recentering the marginality of disciplines and places’

15:00-15:20 ‘Indian Relay: Cultural Improvisation on the

margins of the global horse-racing industry’

Amelia-Roisin Seifert, PhD Candidate, Queens University Belfast

Chair: Ranmalie Jayawardana

15:20 – 16:00 WORKSHOP - Given and Gained Belfast Poet Claire McWilliams will facilitate the collaborative creation of a poem which sums up and responds to the theoretical and personal themes raised in this conference. 16:00 – Farewell Coffee

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Abstracts

Dr.Ioannis Tsioulakis

Lecturer in Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast

‘So much noise, so few songs: the deafening non-musicality of the Greek crisis’

Often in ethnomusicology and popular music studies we operate under the assumption that

music exists in a bilateral relationship with political circumstances: politics are sung (or

musicked, to be more inclusive) and music is politicised. While investigating the impact of

the Greek economic and political crisis on music in Athens, I have been amazed by the lack

of specifically political music-making, especially contrasted to the almost absolute dominance

of the crisis-related discourse in the public domain. The proposed paper will attempt to

explain this absence through a consideration of the position of organic intellectuals in the

state system, as well as an analysis of the role of more immediate outlets of political rhetoric

such as web-based social media and blogging. Additionally, through an examination of

examples of the few recent political songs that relate to the crisis, I will argue that issues of

musical genre and debates of authenticity (specifically connected to ‘commercialism’) hinder

the development of scenes with political potency. Finally, the paper will briefly examine the

conservative government’s systematic repudiation of the arts within a larger incentive to

instigate a ‘state of emergency’, and scrutinize the impact of this strategy on actual music

creativity, production, and circulation.

Amadeu Corbera Jaume

MA Student, Queens University Belfast

‘Singing in silence’

Singing had a crucial role in workers daily life until recent times. Most people who worked in

factories, textile mills, etc., were used to singing. It was a general form to communicate news,

tell stories or expressing identity or feelings over a circumstance or event: in short, it was a

way to create spaces of sociability and to draw the limits of the community’s reality; and all

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of that has to be seen as a remain of the rural society, and which clashed against the new

ruling capitalism and working time and socialization that factories did represent.

Despite of this fact, however, there was an intense singing activity into the factories

and workshops, activity that was even increased with the popularization of recorded music

systems like radio or discs, which provided new musical matter through which new songs

could be created.

In this paper, we explore the conflict between the worker's necessity to sing into the

industrial environment despite the prohibitions, and the diverse ways to do it, sometimes just

singing laugher and others, singing in silence; and also the estrategies developed by owners

and bosses to try to avoid all this musical activity in order to assure the new productivity

concept that the factory and the economic capitalist system required.

Dr. Kevin Murray

University of Essex

‘Wolves in The Throne Room: Autochthony, Marginality and Transcendence in

Contemporary Eco-Black Metal

‘I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots’. This idiosyncratic proclamation is

emblazoned on the merchandise of Wolves in the Throne Room, a US band who have, in

recent years, attracted considerable commercial and critical interest as an outfit exemplary of

the techniques and stylistics of the so-called ‘third wave’ of black metal. This paper argues

that the band’s stylistics are inseparable from the ethos of its members, an ethos which, in its

subcultural and musicological colourations, embraces marginality.

Aaron and Nathan Weaver, WITTR’s core members, subsist on an organic farm

situated among the verdant foothills of the Cascades mountain range in rural Washington.

Delineating their idiosyncratic living arrangements in promotional interviews and in press

releases, the band hold forth on the benefits of sustainable agriculture and environmental

awareness. Reflecting this ethos lyrically, WITTR eschew the nihilistic posturing of many

earlier black metal bands: whereas forebears as Mayhem, Impaled Nazarene and Beherit

evince scathing anti-clericalism, passionate (and frequently xenophobic) nationalism, and

hostility towards notions of masculine virtuosity1, WITTR’s own semiotically loaded brand

of black metal explores themes of nature, place and temporality. And indeed, while WITTR’s

stylistic repertoire is much indebted to the earlier ‘waves’ of black metal, the band’s

environmentalism and experimentations with the core features of the genre have rendered

them a contested and divisive property amongst the black metal community.

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Delineating the salient features of this movement, we examine how WITTR, as a so-

called ‘Cascadian black metal’ band, articulate a set of ideas which renders them exemplary

of black metal’s ongoing processes of reinvention and mutation. Arguing that a sub-cultural

theoretical lens is inappropriate in the case of WITTR, we assert that counter-culture theory,

with its acknowledgement of the possibility of counter-cultures holding distinct political

agendas and affecting political and social change, affords a theoretical methodology more apt

for considerations of this groundbreaking band. Looking, in particular, at the semiotics of

WITTR’s lyrics and promotional imagery, and taking on board the band’s own self-

fashioning via interview, we consider WITTR’s music as embodying a complex range of

opinions on three subjects: time, autochthony and transcendence. Drawing upon and newly

inflecting forms of anthropological and literary-cultural analysis, we delineate the romantic

but also politically engaged nature of WITTR’s music-making, arguing that the band—like

their literary forebears, the American Transcendentalists—advocate a return to an

autochthonous way of life. Quixotically and vehemently anti-modern in interview, the band

extol the virtues of Cascadia (a proposed semi-autonomous region of the Pacific Northwest)

as an agrarian utopia cut off from the noxious influence of the cultural and social mainstream;

and, as this paper shows, the band’s fixation upon the politics and place of Cascadia also

permeates their music. Ultimately, WITTR’s meditations on forgotten pasts and ecological

presents emerge as articulate expressions of what many perceive to be modern society’s lost

connection with the natural world.

Wanting Wu

Queens University Belfast

‘The Chinese Fan Dance in Belfast’

The Chinese community in Belfast has been well established since the 1970s, and dance plays

a significant role in communal ceremonies and festivals as a symbol of Chinese identity.

Much of the Chinese dance performed in Belfast, however, has diverged in significant ways,

from dance practice in China, including the participation of non-Chinese dancers. This

dissertation examines three forms of Chinese dance in Belfast, the Lion Dance, the Chinese

“traditional” dance taught at a multicultural dance studio, and my own performance of a

traditional fan dance. Participant observation, interviews with dancers and auto-ethnography

are used to discern the diverse ways in which dancers enact and understand Chinese identity

through the embodied experience of dance. Themes explored include the relationship of the

habitus of Chinese dance to the embodied competences of Chinese peopleʼs everyday life,

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differing orientations toward the dance amongst Chinese and non-Chinese dancers, and

varying conceptions of authenticity deriving from disparate tastes and cultural competences.

The dissertation shows how dancers form and transform their embodied identities, they create

and recreate communities and they define and redefine practices and selves through processes

of dance in the context of a multicultural city far removed from China.

Ranmalie Jayawardana

Queens University Belfast

‘Missed calls and missed opportunities: The anti-social use of mobile phones amongst

Sri Lanka’s youth’

This paper will explore the potentially harmful ways in which technology is used by young

people in Sri Lanka in attempt to form romantic relationships. Restrictions on physical spaces

young people are allowed to mix and socialise in will be explored as a possible cause of this

phenomenon, as well as the generational disparity in attitudes towards dating. This paper will

address how mobile phones and social media are harnessed to create new points of contact

between individuals but can have harmful social consequences, such as harassment, teenage

pregnancy and suicide, if abused.

Dr.Gordon Ramsey

‘Demanding to be Heard: Marginalisation and Musical Taste Amongst Ulster Loyalist

Marching Bands from the 18th to the 21st Centuries.’

Loyalist parades in Ulster have often been portrayed as triumphalist manifestations of

Protestant domination. Yet, when we examine these practices in detail, we find that most of

the participants have historically come from marginalised, rather than dominant sections of

the population, and that over the past three centuries, loyalist parades have been repeatedly

condemned, ridiculed, restricted, suppressed and sometimes completely outlawed by the

ruling-class. There was a significant period, however, from the Home Rule crises of the early

20th century until the beginnings of the Troubles in the 1960s, when members of the ruling-

class not only tolerated, but participated in such parades, and it appeared that loyalists really

had become part of ‘the establishment’.

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The change in status, from despised ‘trouble-makers’ to legitimate participants in state-

approved rituals brought significant changes in musical tastes and practices. With the

outbreak of the Troubles, the suspension of the Stormont government, the distancing of the

Protestant middle-class from working-class ideologies and practices, and the increasing

marginalisation of the loyalist working-class and their parading traditions, another radical

shift in musical tastes and practices occurred which shaped today’s parading culture in

Northern Ireland.

Drawing on work by Pierre Bourdieu on class and taste, Suzel Reily on transformations of

musical parading practices in Minas Gerais, and Desmond Bell on the flute-band scene in

1970s Londonderry, as well as on my own ethnography, this paper will explore changes in the

class-situation of Ulster loyalists through the prism of musical tastes and practices on parade.

Geraldine O’Kane & Colin Dardis

Poetry NI

PERFORMANCE

Geraldine will be presenting poetry on the theme of cultural identity, while Colin will

explore through poetry the idea of grassroots arts communities and outsider art.

Jude McVitty

Multi-disciplinary arts facilitator

A Reflection on Facilitating Creativity in Marginal Groups

As a multi-disciplinary arts facilitator working with learning, physical and social impairments

as well as intercultural dialogue, I have a specific perspective that will inform the academic

debates of the conference. I will talk about my work empowering people to find the

opportunities and abilities to foster and create their own work, touching on the correlations

between empowering someone with a disability and from a disadvantaged or otherwise

isolated background. I will examine the benefits my approach contains and the limitations

that are inherent to what I do with suggestions for how those limitations could be overcome

by other sectors and my own.

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Nan Zhao

Minzu University, Beijing

Space Conflict: The Effect of Tourism on the Nomadic Culture in Hemu Village on the

Borderland of China

Abstrac It is too hard to explain the relationship between people and space. In a traditional

Chinese saying “Fallen leaves return to the roots”, in this way, people and space belong to

one. When people communicate with each other, the conversational space is created and

different cultures exist in this space.

Hemu Village, at the crossroads of four countries, China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia,

has become the gorgeous sparkle of the tourism in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in

China. Two ethnic minorities, with different religious and languages, live together. After

2004, more and more Han and Hui Chinese, the majority group and another ethnic minority of

China, pulled into the village. Some of them became businessmen and lived in the village,

some of them became son-in-low and moved in the village, but most of them are the flow of

tourists.

At that time，the meaning of this space has changed. It is not the unreachable and

marginal land of the national state，but another center of the tourism in this country. With the

meaningful shift of this space, the connotations of a lot of places have changed, just like the

meadow, river, Lama Temple, police station, school, and even their own houses. All these

changes insinuate the conflict happened between the local people and the tourists, and the

melt of the Tuwa people’s culture.

The specific aim of the paper is to illuminate how the multiple spaces, which behind

the social interaction network, influenced the people’s daily life in the border area of China.

Facing the crisis consciousness of national culture, the answer will be found when original

meaning is endowed to the “place” on people’s homeland.

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Yuecheng Ding

Queens University Belfast

‘Power & Legitimacy in the New China: The Case of Bo Xilai’

In the Chinese single-party political system, leaders acquire and exercise power by

joining or organising a hierarchical faction. This paper will examine the case of Chongqing

Communist Party leader and Politburo member Bo Xilai, who fell from power in 2012 when

his police-chief, previously a loyal member of his clique, fled to the US Consulate and Bo’s

wife was accused of the murder of a British businessman. Bo was gaoled, losing overnight

his freedom, his good name and a political career many expected to lead to the highest office.

At his trial, a year later, historically open to the public, Bo was convicted of corruption,

embezzlement and abuse of power.

Through interviews with four officials, this paper sheds light on the unwritten rules

governing the acquisition and exercise of power in the Chinese bureaucracy by leaders such

as Bo, including the dyadic relationships established through personal networks (Guanxi) and

links between political factions and business (Quanzi) which were exposed in Bo’s trial. The

paper shows that a proliferating individual sphere is interwoven with the collective state as a

locus for such relationships, allowing influential leaders to extend their power beyond state

agencies.

Finally, the paper will show that in order to preserve the legitimacy of the state, the

full extent of such relationships was not allowed to emerge fully in the political performance

of Bo’s trial, prompting civic desires for a more transparent supervision of the power domain.

John Paul Patton

Belfast Poet

Exerts from his recent anthology "Lightning Bolts and Dew Drops: A Cauldron

Poesy."

My poetry explores many themes but central to this presentation is my work on Cultural

Margins such as my poem No Mans Land describing growing up in a mixed marriage in

1970's Ulster and themes exploring the marginal perspective as a Neo-Pagan living in Ireland

today with the poem for example called What's his Name? Referring to Mannann Mac Lir as

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a forgotten sea-god (written prior to his now infamous theft). I will also explore themes such

as the War Industry and dissolving gender dichotomy.

Amelia-Roisin Seifert

Anthropology PhD Candidate, Queens University Belfast

‘Indian Relay: Cultural Improvisation on the margins of the global horse-racing

industry’

Indian relay represents a powerful display of both traditional values and ongoing innovation.

This paper, drawing from my very recent fieldwork on the native American racing circuit,

presents a ‘notes from the field’ style case study of an emerging form of semi-organized

equestrian competition among Native American peoples in the plains and plateau culture

areas. Cultural heritage, competition and horses are all integral aspects of this reinvented

equestrian tradition. Subsequently, this case study is located at the nexus of indigenous

anthropology, sports ethnography and human-animal studies.

Indian relay is a unique, interspecies team sport, comprising teams of four humans

and three horses. While horse racing has been a popular form of competition amongst native

people in this area since the introduction of the horse around 400 years ago, Indian relay is a

relatively new form of race, having only really come to the fore in the early 1990s, a time of

wider cultural renaissance within the Native American community. It continues to gain

momentum as a sport, and 2014 saw the formation of an official national governing body.

Beyond being an impressive display of their historically famous equestrian skills, Indian relay

has become a resoundingly positive expression of cultural dynamism. As a new/traditional

Native American sport, Indian relay is ripe for analysis.

At a time when sport is rapidly globalizing, the opposite is also the case, as the

resurgence of culturally specific heritage sports evidences. How can a newly developing sport

be universally celebrated as an expression of traditional culture? As an introduction to a work

in progress, this paper will gesture towards some of the challenging themes that are played

out in the microcosm of the native horse racing scene. This analysis of contemporary,

indigenous multi-species sports – which will rely on an aboriginal inflection of Bourdieu’s

notion of cultural capital and a critical reading of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention of

Tradition – seeks to act as a corrective to the popular image of Native American heritage as

located in the pre-reservation past, providing instead an example of an arguably authentic

cultural innovation.

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Clare McWilliams

Belfast Beatnic

Workshop: Given and Gained

A fifteen minute workshop using interactive games and facilitation techniques to encourage

dialogue between delegates. We will discuss what knowledge they have gained and given

with regard to the conference. Using their words and phrases a Culture on the Margins

Conference poem will be constructed. This may be used by the organisers to show the

personal impact the conference has had on delegates.