ERMeCC Lunch Seminar

Steelband music and Decolonial Love
Charissa Granger - Marie Curie postdoctoral Leading Fellow

Discarded 55-gallon oil barrels were used for music-making in 1930s colonial Trinidad and Tobago; a period deeply shaped by discrimination of its performers. Often standing at the beginning of personal and political consciousness, music empowered participants, giving a sense of self-regard and -respect by mixing and transforming materials and musical structures, forming symphonic steelorchestras.

Many music-making practices throughout the Caribbean are tightly connected to discourses of resistance. Such attempts to understand music always depart from a conception of music in response to hegemony, marginalization, and colonial oppression. I want to delink from exclusively understanding music as resistance and to create alternatives that reflect a border practice (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006) that embraces a love-ethic (hooks 2000; 2001) that is not solely in response to the colonial matrix of power, but moves beyond it through performance and music. I seek to analyze musical performance as the epistemology of the exteriority. Such an exploration engages with self-knowledge, self-determination, self-critique and self-possession and how this takes place in the communion generated by performing together. I examine steelpan music and performance as a decolonial epistemology, asking: Can music, approached as a practice of knowing, offer other perspectives to ongoing scholarly debates and theoretical problems about the impact of colonialism, the residue of slavery, and ongoing processes of decolonization?  What would an understanding of coloniality, decoloniality and border thinking contribute to understanding steelband music and performance? How can we take into account non-textual forms of knowledge, generated by marginalized people, in the distribution of intellectual and political labor? 

Considering steelband as a decolonial practice and thereby examining the epistemology of the exterior necessarily entails understanding the creation of strategies in music not to simply respond to the colonial matrix of power, but to disengage from it, particularly through recomposing/arranging music.

Current topics in research on cultural capital in Finland
Jarmo Kallunki - PhD researcher,  Tampere University

Research on cultural capital and cultural stratification in Finland centers at the Tampere University. The first part of the talk presents an ongoing project DYNAMICS, led by prof. Semi Purhonen, that focuses on temporal dynamics of cultural stratification both in long-term, middle-term, and short-term. Current topics and work-in-progress within the DYNAMICS engage the debate on omnivorousness, the culinary taste patterns, and the connections between cultural consumption, political orientation, and social networks.

The second part of this talk focuses on the inheritance of cultural capital in Finland, and draws from two comparable survey datasets and one interview dataset. First, I present results showing both the relative strength of parental cultural capital upon the cultural capital of their children, and how this strength is rather stable in time. Secondly, from the historical standpoint, I ask what in fact ‘the content’ of inheritance is, and I present preliminary results for a tentative answer. Finally, I discuss the factors contributing to the inheritance.

Jarmo Kallunki works as a researcher in an Academy of Finland funded project DYNAMICS. His current research themes are inheritance of cultural capital and the development of cultural capital during one’s life course.