In this ethnography, I prioritize a balance between representing tambura discourses narrated from different ethnic positionalities and mediating data gleaned from alternative sites as I examine the broader material geography (affective, sonic, and spatial) that connects musicians and audiences of diverse backgrounds. Such an analytical move, though by no means unilateral or permanent, aims at making overt representations Other, alter, even subaltern to the material realities that so often channel them in lived experience (but that so often evade the representation-oriented, hegemonic hermeneutics of both musicians and scholars). While the interest of many Croatian Serb and Roma minorities in representing tambura music’s role singularly within their own bounded ethnic traditions paralleled that of numerous Croat counterparts, many minorities also demonstrated a vested interest in a project that would focus ethnographic attention on their contributions to the diversity of tambura music in Croatia. My research engaged with some individuals whose politics of identifying as Croats could not support this vision of Croatia’s tambura landscape, but I was encouraged by the number who did support it. This book examines the discursive tropes in which ethnic (typically racialized) positionalities have become entrenched, as well as the potential of affective strategies and counterdiscourses to block them and advance the alternative, progressive postwar politics of reconciliation that many of my interlocutors have been promoting.
Beyond race and ethnicity, however, it was the dimensions of me as an individual that were unsurprising—and perhaps least challenging—that were often most important to my integration into tambura scenes. Like most tamburaši, I was a white, male musician with enough time and economic resources (albeit paid in advance as research funding rather than received as compensation for performance) to dedicate ample amounts of my attention to the trade and to the jovial, often reckless carryings-on of the bećar (“bachelor” or “rake”) lifestyle associated with playing dangerously and with tamburanje more generally. However salient, these aspects of my selfhood often went unspoken and registered most prominently in the affective exchanges and bonds in which musicians included me. These constituted some of the most important field experiences of my project.
HISTORY, MATERIALITY, AND SPACE
If, as I argue, it is necessary to consider the limits to the autonomy of such affect and to the saturation of musical feeling, it also became clear through my interactions and communications with musicians that a study of this nature could too easily veer dangerously in the opposite direction, examining solely the roles of ideology and discourse, as though these, too, were autonomous. Studies of music’s role in the structures and physical events of Croatian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Blažeković 1998; Majer-Bobetko 1998; March 2013), particularly during and since the war following Croatia’s 1991 secession from Yugoslavia (Bonifačić 1998; Pettan 1998; Ceribašić 2000; Baker 2010), have largely focused on the power of songs and musicians to articulate specific nationalist ideas, narratives, discourses, rhetorics, and systems of thinking. In this they engage a large body of ethnomusicological literature concerned with the ideological constitution and discursive construction of nations around the globe (Turino 2000; Wade 2000; Askew 2002; Radano 2003; Bohlman 2004; Largey 2006; Brinner 2009; Kotnik 2010; McDonald 2013). This book similarly takes discourse and ideology seriously, analyzing how expressed conceptualizations of race, danger, and intimacy have guided performance practices undertaken in the name of nations and states.
Within such integral elements of immaterial nationalist culture, however, loom very concrete, material consequences for citizens. They must constantly negotiate ideology as they confront the repression of state apparatuses (Althusser 1971, 142) and also deal with the procedures by which “the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and canalized [in order] to subdue the powers and dangers of discourse, to evade its heavy and threatening materiality” (Foucault 1984, 10–11). To acknowledge that such materiality nonetheless undergirds ideologies and discourses requires, first and foremost, a recognition of their constitution in affective, embodied perception. As Tim Ingold has argued, “any attempt to separate out the discourse surrounding vision” or “any other sensory modality” from “the actual practices of looking, watching, and seeing is unsustainable. […] For what is discourse, if not a narrative interweaving of experience born of practical, perceptual activity?” (2000, 286).
This acknowledgment requires, second, an appreciation for ideologies’ and discourses’ mutually constitutive relationship with physical space. Rather than taking national territory as a given material dimension whose assumedly limited and static nature implicitly justifies focusing on the deconstruction of dynamic nationalist discourses and ideologies, this book follows musicians’ (and my own ethnographic) mobility across bounded territories. It examines how physical movement in space and within/between musical bodies variously produces, shapes, delimits, and subverts material experiences and discursive understandings of the nation in flux. Interrogating a priori assumptions by both academics and nationalists about immaterial culture’s rule over physical action, it situates narratives of musical nation-building, discourses on dangerous racial aesthetics, and ideologies of gendered and religious power in the material bases of sonic affect and intimate musical spatialization (Krims 2007). The latter are in turn shaped by narratives, discourses, and ideologies, but significantly, they operate also at the level of desire, motivating the transnationalisms, transracialisms, and other transgressions that characterize the paradoxically centripetal pull of playing it dangerously. Thus the analyses that follow comprise a study of intimacy—of national intimates—rather than an examination of the machinations of musical nationalism in the context of a particular folk and its state.
The book’s chapters focus primarily on the transnational engendering of and threats to such intimacy since the outbreak of war in 1991, a period that I examine ethnographically and through histories of the recent past researched through interviews and in archives. Tambura music is not the only medium of these intimacies, and the book also considers how competing genres have eclipsed tambura music in Croatia over the past two decades. These genres reveal what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has called “cultural intimacy” within the tambura’s persistent yet ambivalent mobilization as a national instrument but also a source of “external embarrassment” (1997, 3). Nor is tambura music alone within such complex webs of signification and feeling; since Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the less violent but politically and economically turbulent changes of late socialism and postsocialism elsewhere in Southeast Europe, musical performance practices ranging from Bulgarian folk orchestras (Buchanan 2006) to Serbian turbo-folk (Rasmussen 2007) to Croatian rock bands (Baker 2010) have emerged as important sites of ambivalent engagement with state nationalism and majority identity politics. In focusing on affect within and beyond the ubiquitous yet ambiguous role that music has played in this region’s politics (as in others’), I offer new perspectives on the conflicting attachments to nation, state, and bureaucracy that are particularly common during regime change.
MUSIC AND DANGER
Ethnomusicologists have often celebrated music for opposing danger and for its ability to comfort during periods of uncertainty. Alan Lomax claimed that “the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work” (1959, 29). When scholars have, conversely, considered “the danger of music” (Taruskin 2008, 168), they have typically situated it within the reactionary ideologies of oppressive regimes. They highlight