Hearing Berlin's Diversity - Detailseite

Berlin, named at its 775th Anniversary in 2012 as „City of Diversity“, expresses its multiculturalism not only through faces, clothes and restaurants, but also through sounds. Berlin’s soundscapes (Shafer 1969, 1977) consists of various musical traditions of migrants, which have the opportunity to show it and celebrate together every year at the Karneval der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures) in an allegoric way. However, its soundscapes go much more beyond the co-existence of different music genres in one sole city: they are constantly shaped and dissolved in the everyday of passers, tourists, audiences by an overlapping of urban noises, nature sounds, languages and street cultural practices.

The sonorous discovery of the German capital of Berlin shall work as starting point for the widening of auditory and thereby cultural perception of the students. Confronting Otherness and questioning the own Self enable processes of acceptance and cultural openness. In this way the seminar will approach recent theories and concepts on culture and cultural diversity, both intellectually and practically – through listening –, which corresponds to the aims of the Performance Studies.

What does hybridity, multi-, inter- and transculturality mean in a cosmopolitan city like Berlin? Do music and sound cultures represent products of human action or much broader and complex dynamic, ever-changing processes? What do the sound of Berlin tell about her diversity?

Objectives and Methods

The seminar will discuss concepts of culture while making an introduction into Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology, as well as to their fieldwork methods. Furthermore, contemporary approaches to cultural diversity (UNESCO 2005), transculturality (Welsch 1992) and to Performance Studies (Turner 1987; Schechner 1994) will be presented. The idea of closed and fixed cultural identities, of culture as product and not as a dynamic process, shall be deconstructed by literature discussion and by intensive listening experiences – to which students will contribute with their own field recordings.

An excursion to the Karneval der Kulturen on 8^th June is part of the seminar. Students will be able to practice and discuss the learned methods there.

Requirements

Apart from participating actively in the class, students may choose between two kinds of evaluation (5 credit points):

-          Development and presentation (20-30 min.) of a creative project on Berlin’s Soundscapes (sound installation, short film, event concept, etc.), with written description (3-5 pages);

Aubert, Laurent. The Music of the Other. Trad. Carla Ribeiro. Farnham, Inglaterra: Ashgate, 2007.

Baumann, Max Peter. Musik im interkulturellen Kontext. Nordhausen: Trautgott Bautz, 2006.

Blacking, John. How Musical is Man?. University of Washington Press, 1973. 

Canclini, Nestor Garcia. Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis u.a.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Clifford, James; Marcus, George. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics”, In: COMMUNICATION MONOGRAPHS 58 (Juni 1991).

Feld, Steven. “Ethnomusicology and Visual Communication”, In: Ethnomusicology 20/2 (Mai 1976). 293–325.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Performativität: Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript. 2012.

Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs ‘Identity’?, in: Identity: A Reader, ed. by Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 2000.  15–30.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Just, Peter. Social and Cultural Anthropology. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press. 2000.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 2005.

Knecht, Michi; Soysal, Levent. Plausible Vielfalt: wie der Karneval der Kulturen denkt, lernt und Kultur macht. Berlin: Schiller. 2003.

Kohl, Karl-Heinz. Ethnologie – die Wissenschaft vom kulturell Fremden. Eine Einführung. München: C. H. Beck. 2012³.

Kubik, Gerhard. “Das ‘Eigene/’ und das ‘Fremde’”, In: Rastlose Brückenbauerin. Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Ilse Storb, hrsg. Ulrich J. Blomann,und Hans-Joachim Heßler. Duisburg: NonEM-Verlag. 2009.

Kuper, Adam. Culture: The Anthropologists' Account. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999.

Kurin, Richard. “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: a critical appraisal”, in: Museum International 56/1–2 (2004). 66 -77. 

Merriam, Alan P. The Anthropology of Music. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964.

Moebius, Stephan: Kultur. transcript, Bielefeld 2010 (2. Auflage)

Robben, Antonius C. G. M.; Sluka, Jeffrey A. Ethnographic Fieldwork. An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012².

Sahlins, Marshall. “‘Sentimental Pessimism’ and Ethnographic Experience; or, Why Culture Is Not a Disappearing ‘Object.’”, In: Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by L. Daston, 158–202. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

Schafer, R. Murray. New Soundscape. London: Universal Edition, 1969.

________________. The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993.

Schechner, Richard. 2004. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge Classics, 2004².

Schieffelin, Edward L. Problematizing Performance. In: Ritual, Performance, Media, hrsg. von Mary M. Crain und Felicia Hughes-Freeland. New York: Routledge, 1998. 194-207.

Titon, Jeff Todd. “Knowing Fieldwork”, In: Shadows in the Field. New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, hrsg. von Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. Oxford und New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008².

Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life. The Politics of Participation. Oxford und New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.

Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Sage, 1987.

Welsch, Wolfgang. „Transkulturalität. Lebensformen nach der Auflösung der Kulturen“. Information Philosophie 2 (May 1992). 5–20.

Wulf, Christoph. Anthropologie kultureller Vielfalt: Interkulturelle Bildung in Zeiten der Globalisierung. Bielefeld: Transcript. 2006.

UNESCO. Übereinkommen zur Erhaltung des immateriellen Kulturerbes. 2003. http://unesco.de/ike-konvention.html

UNESCO. Übereinkommen über den Schutz und die Förderung der Vielfalt kultureller Ausdrucksformen. 2005. http://www.unesco.de/konvention_kulturelle_vielfalt.html

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