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Intimate Distance

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................ix1 Setting the Transnational Stage.............................................................12 "What's Up with You, Condor?" PERFORMING INDIGENEITIES.....................................323 "The Chinese Food of Ethnic Music" WORK AND VALUE IN MUSICAL OTHERNESS.....................604 A Hobby, a Sojourn, and a Job...............................................................915 Intimate Distance...........................................................................1226 Gringa in Japan.............................................................................1497 Conclusion ONE'S OWN MUSIC, SOMEONE ELSE'S NATION..........................................167Notes.........................................................................................179Bibliography..................................................................................201Index.........................................................................................219

Chapter One

"What are we going to do with your hair?" was the band director's worried comment when he met me at the airport in La Paz. He added this problem to his lengthy list of concerns that would have to be addressed before the band left to tour Japan. My shortly cropped hair thwarted any possibility that I might be asked to wear fake braids, a standard accessory in Bolivia's world of women's folklore costumes. Many women use these hair extensions to complete their look in an entrance parade like Gran Poder, a ritual in which numerous dance and music troupes take over the streets of La Paz, displaying colorful, kinesthetic, and sonorous splendor, as well as demonstrating religious faith and social power. When I danced in Gran Poder in the early 1990s, I had spent hours combing the outdoor shopping booths for blonde braids, definitely a rarity in La Paz. Wearing fake braids for an annual ritual dance in La Paz seemed quite different from the possibility of wearing them as part of a performance costume on a transnational music tour. The thought of putting them in and taking them out before and after each performance already had me exhausted, particularly since I've never had a knack for "doing things with my hair." Short hair meant freedom from this rather time-consuming aspect of dressing up as an indigenous or urban indigenous Bolivian woman.

I also felt somewhat strange about putting on costumes that in Bolivia were not part of our performances. In Bolivia we wore a uniform of black pants, black vests, white shirts, and black fedora hats, a more mestizo look even if our repertoire always included indigenous genres as well. The term "mestizo" might be glossed as a reference to mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage, but it often refers to a non-indigenous person, and thus it sets up a racialized binary that has deeply marked Bolivian history and to which I will return. Sometimes women in the group would exchange the pants for a skirt, but all other details of the outfits remained the same. It was when we traveled internationally that costume changes became an important part of the music performance, when women were asked to dress like women and everyone had to pack indigenous clothes. The Bolivian musicians on the tour took great pride in the different outfits they wore. Although most of them did not themselves identify as indigenous, the indigenous costumes as well as the mestizo ones were fully incorporated into their own nationalist sentiments about the project. While I was fully committed to the musical project of the group, as a US citizen my Bolivian nationalist sentiments were decidedly lacking. I also carried with me my white middle-class gringa reservations about representing indigenous peoples on stage, a process that, if transposed to my own country, could be heavily critiqued as something akin to the minstrelsy use of blackface or the scouts playing Indians. I asked myself, why couldn't we just play great music? I often had to remind myself that mimicry might be as easily an expression of admiration as one of disrespect.

In this book, I follow Bolivian and Japanese performances of Andean music—participating myself in these activities—in order to unpack the meanings behind playing what might be called "someone else's music." In different ways, Bolivians, Japanese, and I were all performing someone else's music, even though we all had strategies of making it our own. Bolivians played indigenous music as nationally identifying mestizos. The Japanese played Bolivian music as foreigners who claimed a closeness with Bolivia's indigenous peoples. And I played Bolivian music as a gringa anthropologist trying to make sense of this country's multicultural and indigenous politics. The story about my short hair indexes a myriad of issues about playing someone else's music. It points to the bodies that produce musical sounds of Others, the labor involved in the visual transformations of those bodies for the sake of performance, the perceived limitations of bodies that play the music of Others, the audiences' expectations for staged otherness, and the distinct racialized ideologies that shape interpretations of these shows. Short hair both marks the impossibility of using fake braids and reminds one of the fuzzy boundaries between the supposed interiorities of bodies—what is assumed to be there already in material form—and what is put on the outside of the body—the clothes, the dress, the costume. Short hair marked the contrast between my reluctance to dress indigenous on a transnational stage and Bolivian and Japanese expectations for precisely such costumed performances. The international presentation of Bolivian music was about the staging of an indigenous world, and the fascination with indigeneity had different meanings for all involved.

The experience of playing someone else's music points to a key theme of the book: that pull of desire toward difference and the contrasting distance that one still maintains while taking on the cultural trappings of an Other, about the multiple and contrasting stories of intimate distance—a key idea about which I will say more below. Here, I look at the staging of Bolivian music for Japanese audiences, as well as the Japanese fascination with Andean music. The Bolivian musicians, however, do not merely respond to exoticizing demands of foreign audiences. Nor do the Japanese simply appropriate this music for economic ends. Economies of affect are present in the playing of someone else's music, and in this work these affective exchanges revealed racialized narratives in which Japanese and Bolivians described a closeness to each other through an imagined common indigenous ancestor. What do these narratives mean for Bolivians and Japanese? While studies of transnational music and culture often draw attention to exoticism, commodification, appropriation, and tourism, I want to set aside these predominant interpretive frames, giving a more prominent place instead to the motivating factors of transcultural affect, the material effects of transnational cultural labor, and the racialized narratives of culture that reveal both new and old perspectives on questions of nationalism and transnationalism.

The "problem" of my short hair underscored the distinct performance demands of the...