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Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen
Читать онлайн.Название Playing It Dangerously
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isbn 9780819579034
Автор произведения Ian MacMillen
Жанр Социология
Серия Music / Culture
Издательство Ingram
Contemporary nationalisms owe much of their complexity to migrations and societal changes during the fall of imperial and colonial governing structures. In stable periods, they succeeded in subjecting and organizing populations into diversely mixed societies; Rogers Brubaker argues that subsequently, during imperial dissolution into nation-states, the “unmixing of peoples” was particularly tumultuous and formative (1995). This certainly was true of post–Austro-Hungarian Croatia and post-Ottoman Albania and Israel. Čapo Žmegač extends Brubaker’s observation to multinational republican (Yugoslav and Soviet) dissolutions and resultant “ethnic unmixing of hitherto mixed, multiethnic societies” ([2002] 2007, 27).
Yet the teleology of unmixing mixed societies once again assumes the ontological certainty of the nation, overlooking those who do not hold a (single) national frame of reference, including antinationalists, ethnically mixed individuals, and “nationless peoples.” For the latter, such as Roma, it is possible to trace, in Philip Bohlman’s words, “the alternative historical paths articulated by their music, which are no less political and crucial to the history of European nationalism if indeed they lie beyond the borders fixed by those with the political power and nationalist motivation” (2004, 213). Croatia still has both “nationless” and “nationed” minority communities and still avails itself of Croat minorities in other states. Furthermore, Croats’ affective relations to such groups and to one another are not static identifications but ever-emergent “minoritarian” becomings (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 291) whose musical flux and embodiments extend back nearly two centuries (MacMillen 2013). “National intimates” encapsulates complexities of nationally charged transnational connections that persist despite governmental, nationalistic, and even scholarly tendencies to reduce these networks to ethnically homogeneous homelands with geographically disparate diasporas.
Tambura music remains a diverse practice and site of contact across racial, ethnic/religious, and geopolitical divides. In playing dangerously, Serbian, Romani, and other non-Croat musicians have greatly impacted tambura music within Croatia, its intimates, and the greater international scene. A closely related study might well consider “Serbia and its intimates” as an overlapping and equally significant, albeit differently structured, zone of tambura performance. Professional and amateur Serb musicians have upheld the tambura as their own folkloric and national tradition in both the socialist and postsocialist periods. The few Serbian tambura ensembles active in Croatia in the 2000s entered the public folklore sphere cautiously (see chapter 3) but participated regularly in semipublic events for Serbs outside of Serbia that celebrate tambura music for rooting them in their territories of residence (Prosvjeta 2010, 3–5). In such cases, Serbia often constituted an “empty” center for its intimates, who solidify Serbian connections outside of—rather than with—their nominal homeland, where the tambura has never achieved true national symbolic status.23 Yet Croatia, too, remains merely a noncentral locus for music and networking to Serb performers there. In my fieldwork, Croatian ethnicity has surfaced as the single prominent precipitating factor for the intense intimacy examined here between tambura bands and autonomous Croatia.
Intimate Communities
In employing “intimate,” I avail myself of the noun’s connotation of a close personal friend as a metaphor or metonym that stands for a supportive, closely connected foreign community. In addition, I invoke its many adjectival nuances, expanding the concept’s resonance beyond a set of concrete actors to an array of processes and becomings. These communities are intimate with Croatia and its citizens in several respects: in sharing personal relationships; in recognizing closeness through mutual influence; and even through sexual relationships, as young men and women continue to find spouses and raise families in Croatian communities beyond their birth countries.
“Intimates” as an analytic also invokes recent scholarship theorizing these various sorts of intimacy in the close ties of people with shared investments and obligations, as well as at levels beyond personal relationships. Especially important here is Lauren Berlant’s examination of the “tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations” that people bring to intimate relationships (1998, 287). Although these tacit understandings often propagate “optimism” about the way things should be, Berlant notes that intimacy “is also formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain” (288; emphasis added). The war that accompanied Croatia’s split with Yugoslavia simultaneously assured its status as an autonomous center and threatened its accessibility to Croat communities outside of its borders; the sense of connection that formed or intensified across the new borders between these communities is key to their designation as Croatia’s intimates.
The sense of threat that Croats and other peoples experienced, particularly in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, is also key for understanding the intense feeling that musicians invest through dangerous performance in reestablishing their presence in occupied territories and formerly ostracized church buildings, refostering ties with communities and cultural and religious leaders beyond their state borders, and eliciting from their audiences an affective investment in a national becoming. As Martin Stokes argues in his work on Turkish popular music, postcolonial republics, “amongst which Turkey might be ambiguously counted”—as might post-Ottoman, post-Habsburg, and post-Yugoslav Croatia—have “deployed a sentimental language of affection and intimacy in the forging of independent national identities. This independence would often prove tenuous, provoking retrenchments into fantasies of racial purity and the (always threatened) authenticity of national cultural heritage” (2010, 30). Following Berlant, I might add that sentimental musical performance that effectively locates such a racially pure and independent nation draws its affective capacity from dangers to the very sonic world it seeks to create.
Moving from questions of threat to the realities of loss, Svetlana Boym refers to a “diasporic intimacy” that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but is constituted by it (2001, 253). Spanning gaps of physical displacement and cultural estrangement, such intimacy “is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging” (253). I qualify this only by suggesting that such longing and intimacy may also characterize peoples separated by processes other than migration. National intimates such as Croatia’s share an intimacy constituted through defamiliarization, dispersion, and separation from their second (symbolically primary) home, whether that separation results from resettlement or from the erection of national borders. This “intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection—no less deep, yet aware of its transience” (252), whether borne across histories of emigration or within homes that, though not lost, are now in the nominal homeland of another nation.
In his work on “dark intimacy” in Southeastern Europe, Alexander Kiossev notes that connection and identification “take place in an unstable field, where various identity models are in competition; […] such conditions could create a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety [or could afford] individuals more opportunities and more ‘free space’ for maneuvering” (2002, 178). Some Croats undoubtedly took advantage of separation, exploring alternative or plural models; maneuvering within freer spaces of identification accessible beyond Croatia’s borders; and aligning themselves with minority, regional, and broader European organizations. Others, however, readopted models of Croatian national identification from the 1980s, reestablishing physical contact with communities inside Croatia’s borders. These latter individuals are largely those who, working with their contacts in Croatia, have kept or made their own communities intimates of the young country.
As I argue elsewhere,