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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

Jonathan H. Shannon
Jonathan H. Shannon*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York; e-mail: jonathan.shannon@hunter.cuny.edu
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Extract

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa in all disciplines can learn much about their favored topics of interest through the study of music and related cultural practices. However, professional and often personal limitations have precluded awareness of the rich potential that music offers for analyses of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Typically music and the performing arts have been the purview of specialists in ethnomusicology, anthropology of music, and performance studies. Music and other sonic phenomena have been routinely marginalized if not ignored by scholars in Middle East studies, who, to a surprising extent, have reproduced conservative Muslim opinion regarding music by leaving it out of their analyses. Even the majority of ethnographic texts on the region depict Middle Easterners as living in near silence. When scholars have explored the ways in which music and expressive culture might shed light on their areas of expertise, they have tended to apply the conceptual tools of their home disciplines to the study of music: hence we have the sociology and anthropology of music, the history and politics of music and performance, and so on. Music in these studies remains a (usually passive) expression of more fundamental forces, reproducing the marginal position that music, and the arts in general, typically enjoy in Western societies—at best serving as an analytic tool but too seldom understood as an agent itself.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4: Maghribi Histories in the Modern Era , November 2012 , pp. 775 - 778
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

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5 Danielson, Virginia, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For an analysis of similar roles for television drama in Egypt, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 See also, among others, Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

9 Shannon, Jonathan H., “Performing al-Andalus, Remembering al-Andalus: Mediterranean Soundings from Mashriq to Maghrib,” Journal of American Folklore 120 (2007): 308–34Google Scholar.