Heung-wah Wong

June 9th - Studying Cross-cultural Migration of Goods as a Historical Event:

                 the Spread of Japanese Popular Music to Hong Kong and China (1980s & 1990s)

Heung-wah Wong is the Director of the Global Creative Industries Programme of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, at the University of Hong Kong. He has degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (BA) and Oxford University (PhD). He is a member of Advisory Board of The Japan Anthropological Workshop, Vice-Chairperson of the Hong Kong Association of Asian Studies, member of Board of Director of Japan China Sociological Society, Japan, Associate General Editor of Chinese Journal of Applied Anthropology, member of editorial board of Journal of Business Anthropology, series editor of Global Connections, SMLC Book Series with Hong Kong University Press, series editor of Routledge Culture, Society, Business in East Asia, series editor of East Asian Civilizations with Peking University, series editor of Bridge 21 Creative Industries in East Asia (Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) book series and series editor of Bridge 21Consumer Culture in East Asia (Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) Book Series. Heung Wah Wong is university guest professor of Zhejiang Gongshang University, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and Beijing University of Foreign Studies. He is also guest professor of the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Guizhou University for Nationalities and the Center for Japanese Studies, Fudan University. Dr. Wong also serves as Research Fellow, Institute for Cultural Industries, Beijing University. He is the author of Japanese Bosses, Chinese Workers: Power and Control in a Hong Kong Megastore (Curzon Press, 1999), Friendship and Self-Interest: An Anthropological Study of a Japanese Supermarket in Hong Kong (Fukyosha, 2004; in Japanese), the co-author, with Hoi-yan Yau, of Japanese Adult Video in Taiwan (Routledge, 2014) and editor, with Keiji Maegawa, of Revisiting Colonial and Postcolonial Anthropological Studies of the Cultural Interface (Bridge 21, 2014).  He is currently working on a manuscript about the popular music in Hong Kong (Bridge 21, forthcoming).

Studying Cross-cultural Migration of Goods as a Historical Event:

the Spread of Japanese Popular Music to Hong Kong and China (1980s & 1990s)

In his article “Some Observations on the Study of the History of Cultural Inter-actions in East Asia”, Professor Chun-chieh Huang (2010) has made several related observations about a new field of historical study: regional history. To simplify enormously, the first observation was the incorporation of the study of the cultural interactions in East Asia into the field of regional history and global history. This requires us to make several methodological shifts of academic attention, in Huang’s own words, ‘from a structural to a developmental perspective’, ‘from the center to the periphery’, and ‘from texts to political environments’ (Huang 2010: 18-20), against which there emerged two general research themes: the interactions of self and other, and those between cultural exchange and the power structure in East Asia (Huang 2010: 24-27). These two research themes, as Huang observed, can be examined through the study of the exchange of people, goods, and ideas (Huang 2010: 27-30). Inspired by Huang’s observations, this paper is to examine the cultural interactions between Japan and Hong Kong in terms of the cross-cultural migration of goods through the study of the spread of Japanese popular music to Hong Kong and Mainland China in the 1980s and 1990s as a historical event. The major implication of this study is that East Asia can no longer be seen as a geographic area in which there are only national histories; but a region where trans-cultural and trans-national historical processes unfold themselves. This way of conceptualizing East Asia requires new methodological and theoretical frameworks that can capture such historical processes. Sahlin’s event theory (2000) that can address the reciprocal mediations between foreign goods and socio-cultural order of local societies definitely is one possible candidate, as this paper will show.  

References:

Huang, Chun-Chieh 2010 Some Observations on the Study of the History of Cultural Interactions in East Asia. Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia, 1: 11-36.

Sahlins, Marshall 2000 Return of the Event Again. In Marshall Sahlins Culture in Practice: Selection Essays, New York: Zone Book, 293-352.

John Baily came to ethnomusicology with a D.Phil. in experimental psychology. In 1973 he became a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen's University of Belfast, and in collaboration with John Blacking conducted two years of ethnomusicological fieldwork in Afghanistan. In 1978 he was appointed Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Queen's. From 1984-86 he trained in anthropological film making at the National Film and Television School, and directed the award-winning film Amir: An Afghan refugee musician's life in Peshawar, Pakistan. From 1988-1990 he was Associate Professor in the Centre for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University, New York. He joined Goldsmiths in 1990, and is now Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit. John Baily is acknowledged as a world authority on the music of Afghanistan, and music in the Afghan diaspora. His publications include Music of Afghanistan: Musicians in the City of Herat (1988); "Can you stop the birds singing?": The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan (2003); Songs from Kabul: The Spiritual Music of Ustad Amir Mohammad (2011); and War, Exile and the Musico f Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale. He has also published numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, compact discs and films about Afghan music. John Baily is a strong advocate of learning to perform as a research technique in ethnomusicology and has been playing the Herati dutar and the Afghan rubab for more than 40 years.

​

Music in Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora, 1978–2016

​

In this lecture John Baily outlines the movements of musicians in Afghanistan during the period of turbulent conflict that started with the Communist coup of 1978, followed by the Coalition government of the Mujahideen in 1992, the rise of power of the Taliban in 1996, and the post-9/11 era of Karzai. The narrative is the subject of Baily’s recently published monograph War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale. The data show that music is a sensitive indicator of broader socio-political processes; music making in Afghanistan varied widely in frequency and intensity according to the dominant ideology of the time, fluctuations that often involved the movements of musicians from one place to another. Underlying these movements was a deeper conflict between ideologies of traditionalism and modernization in Afghanistan that started at the beginning of the 20th century. Baily’s lecture is illustrated with clips from four of films about Afghan music that he made in this period, with occasional interventions of live music played on the Afghan rubab.

​

John Baily

June 8th - Music in Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora, 1978–2016

University of Hildesheim and Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media

Keynote Speakers

Michael Fuhr is assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He studied Ethnomusicology, Philosophy, and Art History at University of Cologne and received his PhD from Heidelberg University, where he was awarded a fellowship of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe: Shifting Asymmetries in a Global Context.” In 2009/10 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. He was a research assistant with the EU project Dismarc at the Berlin Phonogram-Archive and has since then worked as a lecturer at universities in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Göttingen. Michael integrates the direction of the Eighth International Doctoral Workshop in Ethnomusicology along with Prof. Dr. Philip V. Bohlman and Prof. Dr. Raimund Vogels, which will take place at the Center for World Music at the University of Hildesheim and Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media (21st – 25th June 2016). His research interests include issues of identity, migration, and globalization, (Korean) popular music, aesthetics, cultural theory, and the history of ethnomusicology. Publications include: Popular Music and Aesthetics: The Historic-philosophical Reconstruction of Disdain, Bielefeld: trans. in German (2007);  Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop. New York/London: Routledge (2015), and Asian Pop Music In Cosmopolitan Europe: K-Pop Fandom in the Age of Globali-sation [co-authored with Haekyung Um and Sang-Yeon Sung]. London / New York: Routledge (forthcoming).

Borders, what’s up with that?

Musical Encounters and Transnational Mobility in K-Pop

The question of music and identity is sitting at the core of ethnomusicological studies about globalization. At this juncture, migrants play a significant role in negotiating processes of musical encounter and exchange and also in yielding new musical genres. They often hold a key position as ‘cultural brokers’ at best acting as symbols of successful social integration (e.g., as ‘model minorities’) and at the same time signaling the shifting boundaries of discourses about nationality and ethnicity. In the realm of contemporary South Korean idol pop music, also known as K-Pop, second and third generation overseas Koreans have been increasingly flowing back to their ‘home country’ since the early 1990s to work in the music industry. Due to localization strategies in recent K-pop music production and growing K-Pop fandom around the globe, more and more foreigners have also been intruding into the domestic star system. By capitalizing their specific status as cultural brokers, immigrant K-Pop idols enjoy transnational stardom and are part and parcel of the industry’s ‘globalization’ activities. But they can also easily fall prey to othering inclinations unleashed through the K-Pop specific star production system or by hyperbolic patriotism of the public. The paper highlights the productive intersections of music studies and globalization theories and sheds light on the multiple entanglements of K-pop stardom, transnational mobility, identity politics, nationalism, and transnational consumption. These will be illustrated with examples taken from recent field research in South Korea and Germany.