Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
resilience).
Though her ethnographic commitment is ultimately to affective (melancholic) depths, such a departure is suggested in Denise Gill’s work on Turkish classical music. Drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s notion that affective relations “involve the transformation of others into objects of feeling” (2004, 11), Gill argues that emotions “differentiate the boundary between the ‘I’ and other objects in our social worlds” (2017, 16). Paralleling her focus not on what melancholy “is” but rather on what it “is for,” I argue that sometimes such a culturally situated feeling is for avoiding (though not ignoring). This avoidance is just as central to differentiating boundaries: between oneself and an other who is perceived to embody that feeling, between oneself and an Otherness that is embodied feeling.
Sara Ahmed has more recently turned from the “I” to the collective “we” to consider diversity work and connections across such boundaries. She frames their challenges as a wall against diversity (“the feeling of coming up against something that does not move”) and a will that either “allows [diversity] to accumulate positive affective value” and “encourages people to do something” or else “is made out of sediment: what has settled and accumulated over time” (2012, 26, 67, 129). In the latter case, institutionalized resistance to including Others (racialized, affective, etc.) does not require individual actors to make the wall “into an object of will. No individual has to block an action that is not continuous with what has already been [collectively, institutionally] willed” (129). The feelings and intentionality undergirding a collective will for the status quo form a habit of continuation that needs no utterance or deliberate willing until “a decision is made that is discontinuous with the institutional will”; the “gap between the signs of will (the [discursive] yes or will to diversity) and institutional will (the no or the wall [internalized, affective block] to diversity) is noticeable only when one attempts to cross a limit” (129). Thus race-thinking also has a basis in feeling that is not coterminous with its ideological underpinnings.
This incongruence of feeling and thinking comes to a head at the crossing of a threshold. The “racial contract” regarding the social place of whiteness and diversity reveals itself most clearly in contestations of values and “the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage” (and other emotions) with respect to the disparate societal lots of racially differentiated groups (Mills 1997, 101). It is the tension between the collective, social will (particularly its affective dimensions) and individual agency of crossing limits that this book examines, emphasizing the boundaries of appropriate musical feeling, comportment, and technique—and how musicians (especially musical Others) expose these limits by crossing them.
Thus Playing It Dangerously examines musical affect as a cultural resource rather than essence—as an important but often overlooked instrument that individuals cultivate (block in aggregation) or stave off (block in delimitation) in order to jar larger social assemblages out of affective habitus that they perceive to be dangerous (in either a positive or a deleterious sense). Affect plays a critical role within what sociologist Ann Swidler, in retheorizing culture from the standpoint of strategy rather than values, called a “‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (1986, 273). Like discourse, affect as a cultural “tool” is subject to constraint and strategy as well as to excess and abandon. Approaching music’s relationship to race, nation, danger, and intimacy in diverse contexts within postwar Croatia and its neighboring and diasporic enclaves, this book argues that musical affect’s power and primacy lie in its flexibility: its alternate mobilization and denial in the conflicts, reconciliations, and becomings through which musical selves and societies emerge.
POSITIONALITIES AND THE ALTERITY OF REPRESENTATION
I myself felt and witnessed such conflicts, reconciliations, and becomings as I researched tambura music’s social and geographical movement between 2007 and 2015. My longest periods of intensive research were during the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 academic years, which I spent, respectively, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among the Steel City’s Croatian, Romani, and Serbian enclaves, and in the Croatian cities of Osijek and Slavonski Brod (I completed additional fieldwork in subsequent years and in nearby countries, including Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, and Serbia). The physical dangers of the 1990s conflicts, except for landmines remaining untriggered in a few rural areas, had largely faded by 2007 and were not directly a part of what I experienced in any of these countries, whose communities were exceedingly warm and generous in their hospitality. Simultaneously, I was continually impressed by two matters relating to my own racialized and ethnicized profile: (1) the territorializing effects of my presence in Croatia and elsewhere when I failed to confirm my interlocutors’ expressed assumptions that I was one of “theirs” from the diaspora who had come to study “our” music; and (2) the lasting effects of the years of war (1991–1995) on the diverse ways in which my interlocutors figured and felt me as a territorialized and racialized, or race-thought, being—as white, as a Scot, as an American, as an Australian, and so forth.
That I was born in Australia and that I had grown up largely in the United States, countries where large Southeast European communities maintain what literary scholar Svetlana Boym calls “diasporic intimacy” (2001, 253), informed in constantly shifting ways a number of important research modalities. These ranged from my reception into the tutelage of Jerry Grcevich and my mobility as his student and friend within musical circles in Europe, to my being invited to serve as the beginning tambura instructor for the Slavonian Tambura Society “Pajo Kolarić” in 2009 and 2010, to the coaching I received from Damir and musicians of various backgrounds on how to appreciate and feel the dangerous playing of Grcevich and Kosovec as well as “my own” musical heritage and the tambura styles of other specific peoples and territories. My surprising lack of familial connection to tambura music and Southeast Europe, as well as the fact that I had connections to both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches while being a practitioner of neither, facilitated to a certain extent my movement between different groups.
At times this cultural and religious distance seemed even to amplify the status that I held as a researcher funded by American institutions, for I was perceived as having come from a country of great economic wealth, musical variety, and global ignorance, and all rather improbably “because of the sound of the tamburica,” as one Osijek newspaper put it (Sekol 2010; my translation). That appreciation for tambura music’s sonic dimensions and an interest in its embeddedness in contemporary urban geography had attracted me against all odds seemed constantly to intrigue my tamburaši interlocutors. To an extent this was due to differing connotations of my professed field of ethnomusicology; many of my interlocutors expected that, as an ethnomusicologist, I had come to learn local folkloric knowledge that Croatian scholars had written up and/or that folklore ensembles had preserved in their arrangements (both written and performed), but the project that I outlined instead was, in the words of one tamburaš, “closer to sociology.” This pointed to another difference in my scholarly interest from that of many of my interlocutors, however: my expressed aim was to trace tambura music’s role and the instrument’s usage in particular in the geography of my research and in relations among diverse populations. I took interest in individual and group claims to the instrument and to particular music traditions as belonging to and representative of specific ethnic groups, but also strove to identify and offer an ethnographic platform for diverse perspectives within our lived local realities (which individual narratives of tradition sometimes left out). This work intensified as I came to recognize the importance of affect and other nondiscursive tambura relations. I have usually framed my study as examining the tambura’s role in the local area (“here,” as I would tell my interlocutors). Both in the research and in this ethnography I am ethically committed to representing the passions, generosity, desires, and challenges of people occupying distinct (and sometimes opposed) ethnic/racialized, gendered, religious, and socioeconomic positionalities.
Responding to this ethical challenge has required not just a careful representation of alterity but also a deliberate alterity of representation. My relationships with musicians and audiences were diverse and invariably affected by our “reciprocal witnessing” (MacMillen 2015) of differing degrees and dimensions of commonality