Music during the Covid-19 pandemic

Anthropology is an academic discipline that combines sciences and humanities.

From sciences, it derived the need to ask questions that can be answered with data that can be systematically obtained and analyzed. With the arts, anthropology shares the flexibility to explore any aspect of human life, transforming the ways in which people express themselves in information that can be the object of theoretical and ethnographic analysis.

Cultural anthropology, the field of study of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, studies all aspects of human culture, that is, the ways in which humans live collectively and think about the world.

Her lecture will focus on music during the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of cultural anthropology. Music, in fact, is a cultural expression. It is often said that "music is a universal language", but that is not completely true. In the recent past in fact, not all societies had an area that collected their sound productions which could be classified as music.

Even today, for example, in certain geographical and cultural contexts, it is difficult to distinguish between prayer and music, or between the call of a street vendor and music, if you are not a local. On the other hand, the commercial globalization of music has made it easier to identify some general traits of music and to associate them with that artistic dimension, which today we usually call "music": sounds that have a rhythm and a melody which make them recognizable as musical pieces.

In short, music is what some social group, somehow legitimized, has decided to call music. However, to make this music globally recognizable, it needs to have some rhythm and melody, and it usually includes the sound of musical instruments.

The Covid-19 epidemic highlighted the importance of music as a social activity: many families found themselves sharing the home space for long hours and found in music a space of coexistence and fun for all. Musicians and the public have seized the opportunities offered by the old analogue and new digital means to be together, and thus make the confinement less stressful and suffocating.

Opening address:

• Paolo Carta - President of Collegio Clesio

Lecturer:

• Gabriela Vargas-Cetina - Faculty of Anthropological Sciences, Autonomous University of Yucatan

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is a cultural anthropologist. She has done field research in Canada, Italy, Mexico and Spain. She is Full Professor of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences of the Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico. Her publications covered the pow wow ceremonies of the First Nations of Alberta, Canada; cooperation and cooperatives in Sardinia, Italy; organizations and cooperatives in Chiapas, Mexico; the music known as "Trova Yucateca" and the organizations that support it in Yucatan, Mexico. She is currently doing field research in Spain on the marching bands that accompany street processions in Andalucia. Her books include Anthropology and the Politics of Representation (University of Alabama Press, 2013) and Beautiful Politics of Music (University of Alabama Press, 2017).