Speaker: Dr. Jonathan P.J. Stock

Biography

Jonathan P.J. Stock is Professor of Music at University College Cork. An ethnomusicologist specializing in the music in China and Taiwan, he has written books on traditional Chinese instrumental music, local opera, and on the everyday musical lives of the Bunun Indigenous people in Taiwan. He was co-editor of the recent Oxford Handbook of the Music of China and the Chinese Diaspora and the Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology. 

Abstract: “Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in East Asian Musical Contexts”

Much ethnomusicological study occurs in locales where traditions of music and dance of diverse and discrete origins meet, fuse, hybridize, jar, compete, or thrive in distinct cultural niches. In dealing with the artistic expressions of these diverse sites, ethnomusicologists have regularly referred to cosmopolitanism, but we’ve deployed this term more often as a descriptor of setting than as analytical concept. Meanwhile, philosophers, historians, and others across the humanities and social sciences have inquired more deeply into what it means to conceive of oneself as a “citizen of the world”, a notion that carries clear political and ethical force an involves the activation of reciprocal responsibilities and hospitable relationships, not simply a recognition of a situation of multiculturalism. Chinese thinking from Mozi onward embraces related notions too. More recently, for example, the term tianxia (天下, all under heaven), which once mostly referred to empire, has also been used in formulations pointing toward intercultural modernity. The concept is not without its critics: for instance, its use may hide the injustices and asymmetries of empire or the inequities surrounding power relations around factors like race, religion, wealth, class, education, (dis)ability, gender, or sexuality.

In this presentation, I look at cosmopolitanism as discussed in the wider (anglophone) ethnomusicological literature, asking how we have employed the term so far and providing examples from my own research and that of others relating to East Asia). Then, I go to recent music studies that focus on the concept itself, aiming to draw out characteristics that help us define new questions and research priorities.