Relationality, the relational, and the curricular value of ‘Performing Bolivian Music’

This article explores an alternative form of cultural exchange, not based on the idea of touring Bolivians who perform for passive listening foreign audiences, but rather on a model of Bolivian musicians who, in an intensive course, teach US college students how to play Andean flutes and panpipes. Through the course, ‘Performing Bolivian Music’, students learn what it means to work in entangled interdependence with others – an ethos that contrasts with what one finds in many US college classrooms. The course, team-taught by an anthropologist/musician and the founder/director of a Bolivian music ensemble, depends on a multidecade relationship between the instructors. Taking cues from Native American and Indigenous studies’ focus on relationality and feminist studies’ focus on the relational, the article argues that such a course moves beyond a consumptionist mode of cultural exchange and towards an encounter that emphasises multilevel relationality – among the instructors and among the students who become involved in playing Bolivian music. These relational practices assumed a place within a credit-bearing course, not in the disciplines, but rather in an interdisciplinary space. The article considers the curricular values assigned to the knowledge of performing Bolivian music, as well as cultural translation challenges that were posed along the way.