ABSTRACT
In this primarily conceptual article I offer some answers to the question: how does music materialize identities? I will argue that music is instructive in relation to conceptualizing the materialization of identity because it opens up new perspectives with regard to theories both of materiality and of affect; and moreover, that these perspectives are intimately related to the copious socialities of music, which themselves necessitate a novel social analytics—one that responds to current interests in re-theorizing the social. I will suggest that together these developments offer a framework for understanding the generative nature of the imbrication of musical formations and social formations.1 I open with four observations that situate music as a distinctive medium in relation to common thematics in the anthropology of material culture and art. First, beyond the visual and artefact-centrism that characterizes theories of art and material culture, music indicates that there need not be a physical artefact or a visual object or symbol at the centre of the analysis of materiality, mediation and semiosis. Indeed, music has its own particular material and semiotic properties. Musical sound is non-representational, non-artefactual and alogogenic. In most human cultures, in the absence of a denotative or literal level of meaning, musical sound engenders a profusion of extra-musical connotations of various kinds—visual, sensual, emotional and intellectual. These connotations are naturalized and projected into the musical sound object, yet they tend to be experienced as deriving from it. Ethnomusicologists, in the face of such a profusion of signification, have analyzed the universal existence of linguistic metaphors for music (Feld 1984, Feld and Fox 1994). In my own ethnographies I have extended this approach through a focus on how metaphors for music combine and cohere into wider discursive formations, raising questions of power—the differential power to define, circulate and institutionalize the meanings attributed to music (Born 1995).
