What is it about?
Everyday Musical Life among the Indigenous Bunun, Taiwan contributes to multidisciplinary research on music in everyday human life by pushing beyond the urbanized Western populations routinely featured in such writing. Based on ethnographic study in Buklavu, a village in southern Taiwan mostly inhabited by the indigenous Bunun, the book explores villagers’ contemporaneous musical engagements and pathways, paying heed both to imported music—such as TV theme tunes, karaoke singing, church hymns—and to the transformation of Bunun traditions through school and community interventions and folkloric festivals. The case study underpins a new, widely applicable, theoretical model for the study of music in everyday life in global society which is historically engaged, sensitive to individual and group diversity, cognizant of the interplay of the mundane and the exceptional, and primed to support applied research.
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Photo by Moralis Tsai on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Music remains widely present in everyday life worldwide in the 21st century but most studies in this field focus on the lives of urban Westerners. This study looks at a rural indigenous population in Taiwan and so opens up new questions with wide global relevance about how music contributes to human life. It is also the first book on Bunun music in a Western language, and provides fundamental information both on their inherited traditions and also on the many genres of music that Bunun people find useful and meaningful in the present situation.
Perspectives
The book is also a tribute to Chou Chiener, who was research assistant on the project and who subsequently passed away. That made it difficult to write, at times, and it took much longer to finish than warranted by the musical and social interest of the materials in the book.
Professor Jonathan P. J. Stock
University College Cork National University of Ireland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Everyday Musical Life among the Indigenous Bunun, Taiwan, April 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003159865.
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Resources
Kala-OK Nights: Voice, Embodiment and Society at Indigenous Bunun Karaoke in Southeast Taiwan
In this online lecture given at Helsinki University talk, Prof. Jonathan Stock focuses on the regularly recurring social and musical practice of karaoke singing in an Indigenous Bunun village in southeastern Taiwan, which formed one part of his wider research into everyday music. These occasions, which take several contrasting formats, engage many villagers, involving them in the development, display, and appreciation of skill in performance, the use of diverse repertories and languages, and the building of musical and emotional co-presence. Music contributes to the sustaining of several kinds of cultural inheritance and personal gift, yet is also part of situations involving loss, conflict, and pain. Movement turns out to play a key role, too: karaoke events are far from being oriented around sound alone. In this presentation, Prof. Stock explores how sounds and actions embody the traces of others, past, present, and occasionally even future for Bunun singers and their audiences.
Publisher's website
The page at Routledge for this book, including table of contents, preview and further information, ordering form, etc..
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