Wild Music. Maria Sonevytsky

       PREFACE

      Sovereignty, a key term of this musical ethnographic study, emerges from the exigencies of Ukrainian political instability. The revolutionary upheavals of the Maidan in 2013–2014 called Ukrainian political sovereignty into question for the second time in a decade, disrupting the lives of many of my interlocutors and demanding that I acknowledge how much the conceptual terrain had shifted since I began my research in Ukraine in 2004. As the previously unthinkable challenges to Ukraine’s territorial integrity increased in 2014 with Russia’s opportunistic seizing of Crimea and provocations on the eastern borders, I had the opportunity, as an ethnographer, to see my own investments in the project of Ukrainian statehood come into relief. Until then, Wildness—the other key term of this study—had been my focus; in the first iteration of this project, I studied two borderland populations (Crimean Tatars and Hutsuls), observing how modern-day discourses of civilization and barbarism were made audible through musical practices. After the borders of contemporary Ukraine became contested in the aftermath of the Maidan, I was forced to confront the ways in which I had been taking the political sovereignty of Ukraine as an overly convenient way to bound my comparative project.

      Apart from the fact that I had largely studied the musical practices of Ukrainian citizens for whom the state’s political sovereignty was meaningful and important, I had to reexamine the assumptions of my own politicized subject position as a child of the postwar Ukrainian-American diaspora, which carried with it a baseline belief that Ukrainian statehood was a legitimate project. (In Abu-Lughod’s [1991] memorable term, this split identity marks me as a “halfie.”) As Crimean Tatars were ordered to trade in their Ukrainian passports for Russian ones, as Hutsuls became newly caricatured by Russian media as part of a rabid neofascist takeover of Ukraine, as the Russian state vowed to defend its Russian-speaking compatriots abroad, I could no longer take the legitimacy of the state for granted. Pragmatic questions about how to continue research in certain regions led to conceptual ones, such as whether to refer to the people who were fleeing from Crimea or the conflict zones in the eastern Donbas and Luhansk regions as internally displaced persons (IDPS) or refugees—a difference in terminology that belied a larger political reality as to whether these territories of Ukraine had been, in fact, absorbed by another sovereign power.

      Inspired by Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo’s (2012) call that scholars situated in the West must strive to “learn to unlearn in order to relearn,” I offer this prefatory note to situate myself within this musical ethnographic study of Wildness and sovereignty, in the hope that it lays bare the continuing process of my own (re)education.¹ In Ukraine, people who get to know me well have sometimes referred to me as nasha Amerykanka (our American).² I have long recognized that this term of intimacy, while endearing, risks obscuring just how different my lived experience and horizons of opportunity—as a middle-class American citizen who was working toward and eventually earned a PhD at a prestigious university in New York City—were from the limited conditions I often encountered throughout Ukraine. At the same time, my inability to pass fully as Ukrainian in many contexts made me a target of