Michelle Bigenho
Biographic Data
| ID | 74829 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michelle Bigenho |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michelle |
| FAMILY NAME | Bigenho |
| SIGNATURE | BIGENHO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hampshire College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9360-3158 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Relationality, the relational, and the curricular value of ‘Performing Bolivian Music’
This article explores an alternative form of cultural exchange, not based on the idea of touring Bolivians who perform for passive listening foreign audiences, but rather on a model of Bolivian musicians who, in an intensive course, teach US college students how to play Andean flutes and panpipes. Through the course, ‘Performing Bolivian Music’, students learn what it means to work in entangled interdependence with others – an ethos that contrast…
Heritage Fever
Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State takes lawmaking around cultural heritage as a window through which to view the decentered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State. The early twenty-first century brought to Bolivia its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws—many ratified at the highest levels of government—that recognized individual music and dance expression…
Rocking the Cradle
Chapter 2, “Rocking the Cradle,” explores how declaring a particular place as the “cradle” of a dance or music genre has become commonplace in Bolivian heritage-making politics. Through the case study of a dance figure that marks ongoing movement between rural and urban spaces (the ch’uta), the authors argue that cradle declarations are not about propertied claims, but rather about competing and sometimes purposeful ambiguities that surround terr…
Interlude
In “Interlude: Keywords for UNESCO Heritage,” the authors introduce the UNESCO apparatus, applying—à la Raymond Williams—a keywords approach, and providing the reader with an introduction to contested vocabulary that is well known to heritage studies scholars: “community,” “intangible heritage,” “inventory,” “member states,” “representative list,” “safeguarding,” “UNESCO,” and “World Heritage.” Each entry concludes with reflections on the keyword…
Unsettling the return
In this article, we complicate the notion of sonic return in the context of postmillennial digital media technologies that have transformed how Indigenous people of the Bolivian Andes engage self-reflectively with their own music and dance practices. We take a capacious approach to the notion of the archive and argue that these media interactions, where people make and circulate their own audiovisual materials, represent a space of counterarchiva…
Gender-marked heritage and intersectionality
This article charts a yet unsuccessful attempt to have a gender-marked musical expression legally recognised as heritage: ‘women’s singing’ of Potosí, Bolivia. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivian contexts, the authors read the gender-marked status of this initiative as a symbolic site of intercultural disjunctures. Conflicting gender politics sit at the crux of this difficulty to assemble ‘women’s singing’ as a heritage o…
Grasping Cacophony in Bolivian Heritage Otherwise
A “fever” of heritage registration (patrimonialización) is raging at multiple levels of Bolivian society. Under the pro-indigenous government of Evo Morales, many laws have moved specific cultural expressions into legal framings as intangible cultural heritage. In part, this booming interest in heritage may be related to desires to capitalize on cultures, to support cultural rights claims, and/or some combination of these economic and cultural ri…
The Devil in Nationalism
In 2006, Bolivians began living under their first indigenous president and undergoing an explicitly pro-indigenous "process of change," alongside much rhetoric of indigenous autonomy and state "decolonization." However, this article suggests that this same government's twenty-first century policies regarding intangible heritage and "culture" hardly mark a departure from mid-twentieth-century mestizo-dominated liberal nationalist projects. Through…
Intimate Distance
What does it mean to play "someone else's music"? Intimate Distance delves into this question through a focus on Bolivian musicians who tour Japan playing Andean music and Japanese audiences, who often go beyond fandom to take up these musical forms as hobbyists and even as professional musicians. Michelle Bigenho conducted part of her ethnographic research while performing with Bolivian musicians as they toured Japan. Drawing on interviews with …
Outside the Music Box
commentary, Music and Sound, ethnomusicology, linguistics, history of anthropology, subdisciplines
Performance, Revolution, Pedagogy
Augusto Boal, perhaps best known for his Theatre of the Oppressed (1985 [1979]), critiqued Aristotelian aesthetics that left spectators in passive states. He turned to Brechtian proposals that would move spectators to revolutionary action, but also became critical of any straightforward didactic approach to revolutionary theatre. The whole world was indeed a stage and all spectators were also potential actors or “spect-actors.” Boal’s work was sh…
Indigeneidades contemporáneas
Durante los últimos siglos, muchas sociedades tribales han sido aniquiladas por la guerra, la enfermedad, la explotación y la asimilación cultural. Sin embargo, lejos de desaparecer, como alguna vez se vaticinó, los pueblos nativos hoy se muestran fortalecidos e incluso crecen en términos demográficos. Así, los pueblos indígenas han afirmado su lugar en la cultura, la economía y la política mundial del siglo XXI, a pesar de lo heterogéneo de sus …
Gran Poder
Laboring in the transnational culture mines
Since at least the 1970s Bolivian musicians have been touring Japan on short-term contracts, developing in that country one more niche market for an Other’s music, much like the cases of jazz (Atkins 2001), blue grass (Mitsui 1993), salsa (Hosokawa 2002), hip hop (Condry 2001), or tango (Savigliano 1995). For Bolivian musicians, these flexible transnational contracts with Japanese companies offer a remuneration that is near impossible for musicia…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Embodied Matters
Embodied Matters
Presento un nuevo análisis del indigenismo boliviano, basado en una investigación de la revista musical "Fantasía Boliviana" de los años 50. Trabajando a partir de historias orales de quienes participaban en esta producción musical, el artículo plantea una visión compleja de cómo funcionaba el discurso del indigenismo en la ciudad de La Paz durante la época del gobierno Revolucionario. A diferencia de la literatura o pintura indigenista, en esta …
Inter-area Ethnography
Inter-area Ethnography:A Latin Americanist in Japan Michelle Bigenho For some time now anthropologists have been engaged in critical discussions about the multisited nature of their fieldwork (Marcus 1995; Starn 1999; Gupta and Ferguson 1997), discussions that emerge along with the demands that anthropology grasp the interactions of a globalized world (Appadurai 1990; Ebron 2002: 2-5; Gupta and Ferguson 2002; Hannerz 2002 [1989]; Meisch 2002: 5-7…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Sounding Indigenous
Sounding Indigenous explores the relations between music, people, and places through analysis of Bolivian music performances: by a non-governmental organization involved in musical activities, by a mu
The Devil in Nationalism
In 2006, Bolivians began living under their first indigenous president and undergoing an explicitly pro-indigenous "process of change," alongside much rhetoric of indigenous autonomy and state "decolonization." However, this article suggests that this same government's twenty-first century policies regarding intangible heritage and "culture" hardly mark a departure from mid-twentieth-century mestizo-dominated liberal nationalist projects. Through…
Embodied Matters
Presento un nuevo análisis del indigenismo boliviano, basado en una investigación de la revista musical "Fantasía Boliviana" de los años 50. Trabajando a partir de historias orales de quienes participaban en esta producción musical, el artículo plantea una visión compleja de cómo funcionaba el discurso del indigenismo en la ciudad de La Paz durante la época del gobierno Revolucionario. A diferencia de la literatura o pintura indigenista, en esta …
Sensing Locality in Yura
In this article, I discuss how an indigenous population in highland Bolivia established a sense of locality through participation in two different rituals: the musically based rituals of carnival and the bureaucratic practices or rituals of state that resulted from the initial implementation of a decentralizing law. Through a privileging of visually perceived representations, the logic behind the new law assumed populations were attached to conti…
Grasping Cacophony in Bolivian Heritage Otherwise
A “fever” of heritage registration (patrimonialización) is raging at multiple levels of Bolivian society. Under the pro-indigenous government of Evo Morales, many laws have moved specific cultural expressions into legal framings as intangible cultural heritage. In part, this booming interest in heritage may be related to desires to capitalize on cultures, to support cultural rights claims, and/or some combination of these economic and cultural ri…
Intimate Distance
What does it mean to play "someone else's music"? Intimate Distance delves into this question through a focus on Bolivian musicians who tour Japan playing Andean music and Japanese audiences, who often go beyond fandom to take up these musical forms as hobbyists and even as professional musicians. Michelle Bigenho conducted part of her ethnographic research while performing with Bolivian musicians as they toured Japan. Drawing on interviews with …
Gender-marked heritage and intersectionality
This article charts a yet unsuccessful attempt to have a gender-marked musical expression legally recognised as heritage: ‘women’s singing’ of Potosí, Bolivia. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivian contexts, the authors read the gender-marked status of this initiative as a symbolic site of intercultural disjunctures. Conflicting gender politics sit at the crux of this difficulty to assemble ‘women’s singing’ as a heritage o…
Outside the Music Box
commentary, Music and Sound, ethnomusicology, linguistics, history of anthropology, subdisciplines
Gran Poder
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Coca as a Musical Trope of Bolivian Nation-ness
Coca as a Musical Trope of Bolivian Nation-ness
Sensing Locality in Yura
In this article, I discuss how an indigenous population in highland Bolivia established a sense of locality through participation in two different rituals: the musically based rituals of carnival and the bureaucratic practices or rituals of state that resulted from the initial implementation of a decentralizing law. Through a privileging of visually perceived representations, the logic behind the new law assumed populations were attached to conti…
Identidades representadas
Political Economy of Pleasure
The Mexican American Orquesta
The Mexican American Orquesta: Music, Culture, and the Dialectic of Conflict. Manuel Peña. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. xi. 350 pp., notes, selected discography, references, indexMúsica Tejana: The Cultural Economy of Artistic Transformation. Manuel Peña. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999. ix. 239 pp., photographs, selected discography, references, index
Codas, Despedidas, and Kacharpayas
I n 1995, the ensemble Kjarkas underwent a significant makeover: Kjarkas became Pacha . While the name “Kjarkas” invoked pre-Conquest fortresses built by the Incas to protect against invasions (Wara Céspedes 1993), the name “Pacha” invoked all the expansiveness of both space and time of the Andean world. The makeover consisted of more than a change of names. In their transformation, the ensemble went to Los Angeles and recorded a CD of their clas…
Sonorous Sovereignty
D uring the Carnival tour Yureños never hurried. 1 When people told me about the tour, I had originally feared physical exhaustion from walking. But my own exhaustion stemmed more from the apparently slow progress toward the village of Yura. The flauta troupe might spend two or three hours in a single house before continuing the tour to another house. In the morning hours, the tour moved along, but as the level of inebriation rose throughout the …
Authenticity Matters
The musicians were sweating under heavy wool ponchos—not the most comfortable attire in the late morning French summer sun— but the Bolivian delegation made sacrifices at the July 14 parade for the international folklore festival in the town of Saintes. For the most important event of this festival the Bolivian musicians wore their gala costumes, two different styles traditionally donned for the interpretation of Italaque panpipes—a highland Boli…
Indigenous Cool and the Politics of Aesthetics
W hile members of both the Bolivian Workshop of Popular Music, “Arawi” and Música de Maestros made references to indigenous cultures in their music performances, they were for the most part members of the mestizo-Creole culture of La Paz. The two musical projects followed a long historical pattern in which some Bolivians have represented other Bolivians—that is, Bolivia’s mestizo-Creoles have represented Bolivia’s indigenous peoples. These kinds …
What Makes You Want To Dance
M any Bolivian musicians in La Paz expressed absolute disdain for cumbia music, and yet during my fieldwork, this genre was probably the single most popular music in both urban and rural contexts. Its presence was ubiquitous in almost any social gathering that involved dancing. While the cumbia genre is usually associated with Colombian origins, many of the recordings that made their way to Bolivia emerged from recording productions in Mexico. Th…
The Burden and Lightness of Authenticity
W hen I began my fieldwork in 1993, I remember a brief conversation with a woman in a remote community of Toropalca. As I explained to her that I wanted to study the music of the area she quickly responded, “Oh, you want to study folklore and culture. But there is no culture here. If you really want to study culture you should go to Northern Potosi.” I was intrigued by this statement, which summarily negated the existence of culture in Toropalca …
“Time!”
D ressed in our white shirts, black vests, and black pants, the members of Música de Maestros stood backstage in anticipation of another performance for a French audience. In France we accompanied a Bolivian dance troupe, Conadanz , and its members were both our most loyal supporters and our sharpest critics. One of the dancers surveyed us in our standard performance garb and yelled: “Look at yourselves. What is the difference between you and the…
The Indigenous Work and Its Authorship
The Yureño ayllu of Wisiqsa had gathered in Pelqa for their annual meeting under the auspices of the local NGO, ISALP (Investigación Social y Asesoramiento Legal, Potosí, Social Research and Legal Advising, Potosi). The agenda of the meeting was filled with discussions of specific projects—potable water, land recuperation, canal construction, and so on. The discussion of a cassette production was added to the agenda at my request. I had produced …
Sounding Indigenous
Sounding Indigenous explores the relations between music, people, and places through analysis of Bolivian music performances: by a non-governmental organization involved in musical activities, by a mu
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Anthropology (23 works) · Citation (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Library science (12 works)