n Anthropology as Cultural Critique George Marcus and Michael Fischer pose a dilemma for those human sciences which rely upon ethnography as a mode of inquiry and representation, that is: to represent the embedding of richly described local cultural worlds in larger impersonal systems of political economy. This dilemma suggests a repositioning of ethnomusicological cliches about the continuity of change within an analytical framework concerned with global networks, the creation of nation-states and peoples, and the invention of tradition. What makes representation challenging, they continue, is the perception that the 'outside forces' in fact are an integral part of the construction and constitution of the 'inside,' the cultural unit itself, and must so be registered, even at the most intimate levels of cultural process (1986:77). In this article I deal with the role of contemporary popular music in the production of cultural identity among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. My argument rests upon the axiom that all human identities, no matter how deeply felt, are from an historical point-of-view mixed, relational, and conjunctural (Clifford 1988:10-11). Ethnomusicologists concerned to demonstrate the depth and authenticity of the traditions they study have
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Christopher A. Waterman (1990) studied this question.