Anecdotal Thinking:

Musicianship in the Process of a Concert Production in Bolivian Folkloric Music

Abstract

  In recent years, music has rapidly become an important topic in cultural anthropology. Influenced by groove studies in American ethnomusicology and the debates on embodiment in cultural anthropology in general, anthropology of music has been intensively focused on the micro level analysis of the musical activities, namely the bodily interactions that take place at the moment when music is being performed. However, these studies fail to capture the biographical scale of musical practice where musicians negotiate with each other and the memories of those negotiations themselves affect their musical activities. In response to this problem, this article aims to focus on the Bolivian folkloric musicians’ view towards music as “anecdotal thinking”; this will allow a new understanding of their alternative logic of musical practice. Specifically, this article takes a project of organizing a concert of Bolivian folkloric music, in which I myself was a part of, as an example and describes the process of planning, preparation, and implementation of the concert, paying a particular attention to the interactions of two middle-aged musicians in the project. Through the analysis of this description, this article discusses the Bolivian folkloric musicians' musicianship and proposes an alternative way to regard musical practices.