David Pier
Biographic Data
| ID | 146695 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Pier |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Pier |
| SIGNATURE | PIER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0449-8171 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Covid-19 and the Ugandan Presidential Election
The COVID-19 pandemic struck when Uganda was in the middle of an acrimonious campaign season, in which longstanding president Yoweri Museveni was being challenged by Bobi Wine, a reggae singer turned politician. When Museveni imposed a strict lockdown, musicians sympathetic to Wine responded with songs about COVID-19 that challenged the government's short-term, biopolitical demarcation of the national emergency. Pier and Mutagubya interpret a sel…
Digital influencers and beer-branding folk dancers
Ugandans are being engaged in diverse participatory marketing projects in which they are asked to creatively promote brands to their friends and neighbours. This article compares two scenes of participatory marketing: a rural beer-branding campaign which took the form of a traditional dance competition, and the emergent field of digital influencers, who do freelance social media marketing. Both scenes strikingly demonstrate new modes and intensit…
Rote Entrepreneurialism and Fraud in Neoliberal Rwanda and Uganda
The spectre of rootless urban youth (bayaaye) inKulyennyingi,a novel of Amin-era Uganda
Bayaayeis a Luganda word meaning 'hooligans' used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era,Kulyennyingi(1984), diagnosed the ri…
Song for a King’s Exile
In 1971, Uganda’s President Idi Amin arranged for the return of the body of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II from Britain, where it had been temporarily interred since the king’s death in that country two years earlier. That year, Dan Mugula, pioneer of the kadongo kamu pop music genre, composed “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda,” a song that expressed the grief and resentment people of the Baganda ethnicity had been feeling since their king was forced i…
Language ideology and kadongo kamu flow
Kadongo kamu is a Ugandan guitar-based genre recognisable by its dense storytelling lyrics in Luganda language. This article offers a close analysis of kadongo kamu musical style, focusing on the interface between speech rhythm and musical rhythm. The style's poetic-musical 'flow' to be structurally analysed is interpreted with reference to a historically evolved language ideology which construes Luganda to be exceptionally 'rich' and 'deep'. I s…
Dance, Discipline, and the Liberal Self at a Ugandan Catholic Boarding School
In the last years of Idi Amin's reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali's former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa's historical modernity…
Women’s Groups and Their Politics of Musical Promotion
Many of the performing groups in the Senator Extravaganza were self-described “women’s development” groups. One cannot travel far in Uganda without encountering one of these local women’s associations, whose members convene to assist one another financially, make crafts for sale, socialize, welcome visiting politicians, and lead NGO-sponsored development workshops. They are the organizations one thinks of first when picturing civil society in the…
“Discover Our Land, Our Cultures”
With its slogans “Discover Our Land, Our Cultures” and “Discover the Taste of Our Land,” the 2006 Senator Extravaganza tied the Senator brand to a historical project of Ugandan national self-discovery, in which the artistic field of “Traditional Music, Dance, and Drama” (MDD) has played an important role (Table 2.1). In this chapter, I chronicle the century-long institutional development of Ugandan musical folkloristics, with attention to the way…
Interlude
The bus careers down the pitted highway, kicking up red-orange dust. Within, we are packed shoulder to shoulder—businessmen from Kampala visiting their families in the villages, women with sacks of sugar, salt, and soap to trade or give away. On the return trip, they will carry produce from their home farms: sweet potatoes, plantains, groundnuts, mangoes, pineapples, and passion fruit, as well as live goats and chickens. Some will also bring larg…
Conclusion
The keyword of this book has been “promotion,” a term I heard frequently and in various usages during my research on the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza. In today’s Uganda, what exactly does it mean to “promote” oneself, one’s community and culture, a development message, and a consumer brand? I have suggested that the contemporary meanings of promotion are complex and overlapping. On the one hand, there are signs that we have entered a ne…
The Music of a Senator Performance
In the introduction, I highlighted the deep historical importance, in the east African region, of the ng’oma complex. “Ng’oma,” in Bantu languages, means “drum” or “dance event,” but these definitions do not adequately capture the breadth of the concept. Historically, ng’oma has had profound social implications; it is a major “institution” (Janzen 1992) by which east African communities have known and shaped themselves, according to an understood…
Beyond the Senator Extravaganza
In 2013, East African Breweries Ltd. (EABL) ended its relationship with Akram Kintu and Godfrey Alibatya, shuttering the Senator Extravaganza, which had been running since 2005. The brand managers pointed to the bottom line: sales of beer attributable to the event were not enough to justify its expenses and logistical hassles. In truth, I was surprised that the project had survived as long as it had, given the tepid attitude the brand managers ha…
The Senator Extravaganza as a Marketing Project
Curled up on the grass, draped with leafy garlands, young men and women are sprouting like seeds, their movements flickering in the shadows of a string of generator-powered light bulbs. Now their arms are outstretched, hands shivering like new leaves in a stop-motion film. Other dancers, in red-yellow-black flag-striped uniforms, move from one seedling to the next, harvesting the leaves from their heads. The crowd presses in on all sides, recedin…
Missionaries for Capital
This chapter is about branding as a rising trope in the present-day culture of capitalism in Africa. It draws upon interviews and observations from ethnomusicological fieldwork conducted in Uganda in 2006–2007 and again in 2010. My focus was on the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, an annual, corporate-sponsored, national-scale event, whose title referred to Senator Extra Lager, a cheap brand of beer that participants in the competition wer…
Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era
David G. Pier offers an ethnographic study of the Senator Extravaganza traditional dance competition in Uganda, and the performers, marketers, and other actors who were involved in it. Pier illustrate
Living the Hiplife
Ouganda
The Branded Arena
Brand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience-'provider' relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of 'branding' are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have …
War Dance
Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era
David G. Pier offers an ethnographic study of the Senator Extravaganza traditional dance competition in Uganda, and the performers, marketers, and other actors who were involved in it. Pier illustrate
The spectre of rootless urban youth (bayaaye) inKulyennyingi,a novel of Amin-era Uganda
Bayaayeis a Luganda word meaning 'hooligans' used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era,Kulyennyingi(1984), diagnosed the ri…
Covid-19 and the Ugandan Presidential Election
The COVID-19 pandemic struck when Uganda was in the middle of an acrimonious campaign season, in which longstanding president Yoweri Museveni was being challenged by Bobi Wine, a reggae singer turned politician. When Museveni imposed a strict lockdown, musicians sympathetic to Wine responded with songs about COVID-19 that challenged the government's short-term, biopolitical demarcation of the national emergency. Pier and Mutagubya interpret a sel…
The Branded Arena
Brand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience-'provider' relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of 'branding' are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have …
Language ideology and kadongo kamu flow
Kadongo kamu is a Ugandan guitar-based genre recognisable by its dense storytelling lyrics in Luganda language. This article offers a close analysis of kadongo kamu musical style, focusing on the interface between speech rhythm and musical rhythm. The style's poetic-musical 'flow' to be structurally analysed is interpreted with reference to a historically evolved language ideology which construes Luganda to be exceptionally 'rich' and 'deep'. I s…
Digital influencers and beer-branding folk dancers
Ugandans are being engaged in diverse participatory marketing projects in which they are asked to creatively promote brands to their friends and neighbours. This article compares two scenes of participatory marketing: a rural beer-branding campaign which took the form of a traditional dance competition, and the emergent field of digital influencers, who do freelance social media marketing. Both scenes strikingly demonstrate new modes and intensit…
Song for a King’s Exile
In 1971, Uganda’s President Idi Amin arranged for the return of the body of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II from Britain, where it had been temporarily interred since the king’s death in that country two years earlier. That year, Dan Mugula, pioneer of the kadongo kamu pop music genre, composed “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda,” a song that expressed the grief and resentment people of the Baganda ethnicity had been feeling since their king was forced i…
Dance, Discipline, and the Liberal Self at a Ugandan Catholic Boarding School
In the last years of Idi Amin's reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali's former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa's historical modernity…
War Dance
Ouganda
The Branded Arena
Brand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience-'provider' relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of 'branding' are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have …
Living the Hiplife
Women’s Groups and Their Politics of Musical Promotion
Many of the performing groups in the Senator Extravaganza were self-described “women’s development” groups. One cannot travel far in Uganda without encountering one of these local women’s associations, whose members convene to assist one another financially, make crafts for sale, socialize, welcome visiting politicians, and lead NGO-sponsored development workshops. They are the organizations one thinks of first when picturing civil society in the…
“Discover Our Land, Our Cultures”
With its slogans “Discover Our Land, Our Cultures” and “Discover the Taste of Our Land,” the 2006 Senator Extravaganza tied the Senator brand to a historical project of Ugandan national self-discovery, in which the artistic field of “Traditional Music, Dance, and Drama” (MDD) has played an important role (Table 2.1). In this chapter, I chronicle the century-long institutional development of Ugandan musical folkloristics, with attention to the way…
Interlude
The bus careers down the pitted highway, kicking up red-orange dust. Within, we are packed shoulder to shoulder—businessmen from Kampala visiting their families in the villages, women with sacks of sugar, salt, and soap to trade or give away. On the return trip, they will carry produce from their home farms: sweet potatoes, plantains, groundnuts, mangoes, pineapples, and passion fruit, as well as live goats and chickens. Some will also bring larg…
Conclusion
The keyword of this book has been “promotion,” a term I heard frequently and in various usages during my research on the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza. In today’s Uganda, what exactly does it mean to “promote” oneself, one’s community and culture, a development message, and a consumer brand? I have suggested that the contemporary meanings of promotion are complex and overlapping. On the one hand, there are signs that we have entered a ne…
The Music of a Senator Performance
In the introduction, I highlighted the deep historical importance, in the east African region, of the ng’oma complex. “Ng’oma,” in Bantu languages, means “drum” or “dance event,” but these definitions do not adequately capture the breadth of the concept. Historically, ng’oma has had profound social implications; it is a major “institution” (Janzen 1992) by which east African communities have known and shaped themselves, according to an understood…
Beyond the Senator Extravaganza
In 2013, East African Breweries Ltd. (EABL) ended its relationship with Akram Kintu and Godfrey Alibatya, shuttering the Senator Extravaganza, which had been running since 2005. The brand managers pointed to the bottom line: sales of beer attributable to the event were not enough to justify its expenses and logistical hassles. In truth, I was surprised that the project had survived as long as it had, given the tepid attitude the brand managers ha…
The Senator Extravaganza as a Marketing Project
Curled up on the grass, draped with leafy garlands, young men and women are sprouting like seeds, their movements flickering in the shadows of a string of generator-powered light bulbs. Now their arms are outstretched, hands shivering like new leaves in a stop-motion film. Other dancers, in red-yellow-black flag-striped uniforms, move from one seedling to the next, harvesting the leaves from their heads. The crowd presses in on all sides, recedin…
Missionaries for Capital
This chapter is about branding as a rising trope in the present-day culture of capitalism in Africa. It draws upon interviews and observations from ethnomusicological fieldwork conducted in Uganda in 2006–2007 and again in 2010. My focus was on the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, an annual, corporate-sponsored, national-scale event, whose title referred to Senator Extra Lager, a cheap brand of beer that participants in the competition wer…
Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era
David G. Pier offers an ethnographic study of the Senator Extravaganza traditional dance competition in Uganda, and the performers, marketers, and other actors who were involved in it. Pier illustrate
Song for a King’s Exile
In 1971, Uganda’s President Idi Amin arranged for the return of the body of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II from Britain, where it had been temporarily interred since the king’s death in that country two years earlier. That year, Dan Mugula, pioneer of the kadongo kamu pop music genre, composed “Muteesa, Baalaba Taliiwo Buganda,” a song that expressed the grief and resentment people of the Baganda ethnicity had been feeling since their king was forced i…
Language ideology and kadongo kamu flow
Kadongo kamu is a Ugandan guitar-based genre recognisable by its dense storytelling lyrics in Luganda language. This article offers a close analysis of kadongo kamu musical style, focusing on the interface between speech rhythm and musical rhythm. The style's poetic-musical 'flow' to be structurally analysed is interpreted with reference to a historically evolved language ideology which construes Luganda to be exceptionally 'rich' and 'deep'. I s…
Dance, Discipline, and the Liberal Self at a Ugandan Catholic Boarding School
In the last years of Idi Amin's reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali's former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa's historical modernity…
Rote Entrepreneurialism and Fraud in Neoliberal Rwanda and Uganda
The spectre of rootless urban youth (bayaaye) inKulyennyingi,a novel of Amin-era Uganda
Bayaayeis a Luganda word meaning 'hooligans' used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era,Kulyennyingi(1984), diagnosed the ri…
Digital influencers and beer-branding folk dancers
Ugandans are being engaged in diverse participatory marketing projects in which they are asked to creatively promote brands to their friends and neighbours. This article compares two scenes of participatory marketing: a rural beer-branding campaign which took the form of a traditional dance competition, and the emergent field of digital influencers, who do freelance social media marketing. Both scenes strikingly demonstrate new modes and intensit…
Covid-19 and the Ugandan Presidential Election
The COVID-19 pandemic struck when Uganda was in the middle of an acrimonious campaign season, in which longstanding president Yoweri Museveni was being challenged by Bobi Wine, a reggae singer turned politician. When Museveni imposed a strict lockdown, musicians sympathetic to Wine responded with songs about COVID-19 that challenged the government's short-term, biopolitical demarcation of the national emergency. Pier and Mutagubya interpret a sel…
Political science (16 works) · Art (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (9 works) · Visual arts (8 works) · Advertising (6 works) · African history and culture studies (6 works) · Business (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works)