Final Sarajevo Trip

I have just returned from a chilly Sarajevo trip which is to be my final one of this project. It was a pleasure as always to revisit this intriguing locale, despite the rain and the cold. I had my fill of Ćevapčići and coffee but did not manage to explore the surroundings hills like I hoped. I guess that gives me another incentive to return in the future.

My research site in Sarajevo has been Pontanima, an inter-religious choir, and there had been a few dramatic occurrences since my last visit. It had been problematic discovering just what had happened and what the choir was like now via internet communications hence the necessity of this visit. As always with these trips, my days were fairly free to roam around and to write (occasionally), since my informants were only available in the evenings. I did manage to fill all of my evenings with a combination of formal and informal ethnographic interviews and observations of yet another choir rehearsal. Most importantly, I think I now have a decent grasp of where Pontanima is now as a unit and how they got there.

An added bonus during this visit was that the MESS theatre festival was on and I was able to attend a performance by one of my friends. It was a piece entitled Land Without Words, and it was an intense bit of figurative theatre featuring Lucy Elllinson as the sole performer and directed by Lydia Ziemke. The plot, as such as it was, involves an artist who  has returned from a visit to Afghanistan where she had sought inspiration but instead found a hopelessness or impossibility of portraying such horrors in art. What followed on stage was essentially an uncomfortable break-down as the artist's sense of worth and identity are shattered and never reconciled. A case of Durkheimian anomie, perhaps? I'm not normally a fan of this type of theatre, but it was powerful and moving in ways I'm still trying to discern. The team behind the production were a little nervous about performing this in Sarajevo, the first place of recent war that they have performed, but the audience was  very receptive.  

ESA: Arts Branch - Conference @ University of Surrey, Guildford

In early September I presented at my first conference, the European Sociological Association - Arts Branch Midterm Conference at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. I think it went rather well. I'm now looking at places to publish the paper, but in the meantime here is the abstract:

Music as a Reflexive Process in Conflict Transformation Settings

Can music play a role in positive conflict transformation? Based on an examination of secondary sources that have addressed the contrasting musical conflict transformation projects of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Hip Hop and primary data collected from Pontanima, an inter-religious choir in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina with an explicit conflict transformation remit, it appears that the response to this question is either negative or at least not wholly positive. Some commentators have suggested that music is no better equipped to positively deal with conflict than any other social activity and that it is only the belief that it can that drives such projects. Likewise, recent publications on the topic have done nothing to suggest that music is particularly effective in this manner, despite claims to the contrary from some of these authors. This paper will argue that it is this very belief in the power of music that is essential for understanding why such projects continue to proliferate despite evidence to suggest they are not effective and how a future successful project might be conceived. This paper will attempt to illustrate the reflexive process that links music to our concepts of personal and cultural identity, memory, emotion, beliefs and behaviour. Primary and secondary sources will be drawn upon to illustrate this process and how it could be applied to conflict transformation scenarios.