As the title suggests, Making Music Indigenous suggests something processual – the music in question is not some kind of organically indigenous product, but rather becomes that way through a series of interventions. In this sense, it might be useful to reframe Joshua Tucker's title as a series of questions: ‘When does music become indigenous?’; ‘Who decides the definition of indigenous in a given context?’; ‘Where does “indigenous”, as a term, become a utility for social change and what are the risks involved with it?’ Tucker takes up all of these questions and others in his excellent ethnographic work on musical life in the Peruvian Andes.
On the surface, the book presents an historical account of the musical genre chimaycha from the rural communities of Chuschi and Quispillaccta in Peru's Ayacucho province. The chapters unfold chronologically over a period of more than 50 years and they document the development and evolution of this music from its role in rural courting ceremonies called vida michiy (Chapter 2) to a popular and commoditised genre performed in major Peruvian cities and disseminated through recording and radio (Chapters 4 and 5). The first two chapters document the foundations of this musical history, the way it was shaped early on by political forces and violence during the years of the war between the Peruvian military and The Shining Path, and its geographic and cosmological relationship to cultural life in this area. Tucker describes this relationship with particular elegance in the second chapter, which thoroughly examines the shaping of the vida michiy through the natural world. He states, ‘Moving along and between ecological boundaries, performers organise environmental perception, giving cultural and political significance to major geophysical distinction and weaving them into the social’ (p. 51). This serves to localise a more general understanding of a broad-based indigenous ontology.
This history and Tucker's theoretical reflections surrounding it center around the stories and lives of two principal interlocutors: Marco Tucno Rocha and Óscar Conde. Tucker acknowledges the potential limitations of tethering his work so closely to just a few key representatives rather than a larger group of people (pp. 28–30). However, the author makes it clear that these cultural representatives are not meant to stand in as a synecdoche for indigeneity writ large and he notes that the foregrounding a few key voices is methodologically consistent with much ethnographic writing (ibid.) as it creates opportunities for deeply engaged work owing to the close relationships he established with them. The most exciting example of this is in the seventh chapter, which outlines Tucker's instrument-making apprenticeship. The author worked with Tucno Rocha who is one of the premier luthiers specialising in the construction of the chinlili, the signature instrument in chimaycha music. He documents how changing trends in chimaycha performance have necessitated updates in instrument construction (e.g. developing equal-tempered fingerboards to allow ensemble performance with non-pentatonic instruments and the addition of electronics) (pp. 196–9). Similarly, owing to deforestation and changes in availability of wood materials, Tucno Rocha has developed new structural innovations in his instruments (pp. 200–2). These developments reflect not only practical developments in a musical genre, but also how icons of indigeneity in this region adapt and evolve, thereby continually redefining the conceptual understanding of the term as a marker of identity.
Chapters 5 and 6 present the two most complex theoretical interventions. They deal respectively with large-scale global indigenous movements and more local, personal responses and reflections of indigenous identity in chimaycha performance. He traces the development and migration of the genre from of a localised practice to a national musical commodity through its integration at the Quechua-speaking radio station, Radio Quispillaccta. Tucker develops a sophisticated theoretical position that underscores the tension between a local and global understanding of indigeneity. Both radio and global indigenous solidarity organisations ‘adopt[ed] traditionalist forms of strategic essentialism’ (p. 131) to promote an ‘historical’ presentation of indigenous culture. However, this music was simultaneously undergoing development and modernisation as it became more popular throughout the country. These developments contribute to the personification of Andean migrants as Lo Cholo, an industrious, neo-liberal and adaptive framing of migrants shedding markers of indigeneity through ‘modernization’ of culture (pp. 156–8). Tucker addresses a national understanding of cholidad in relation to the self-identificatory practices of Andean migrants to situate a more nuanced understanding of how terms like ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ are used to accomplish different goals depending on who is deploying them.
This book represent a significant contribution to the ethnomusicological literature and specifically to ethnographies of Andean music and musical studies of indigenous identity. Tucker approaches each chapter from a unique theoretical vantage point and demonstrates exciting correlations to work in areas of scholarship as diverse as ecology and sustainability, formation of publics and public identity, and psychology and memory. However, this book underscores a significant historiographic issue in scholarship on indigeneity: the ironing-out of hemispheric and regional difference among native communities around the world to promote a narrative of ‘native lifeways’ or ontologies (p. 15). This work has often been intended to produce positive consequences (see especially Chapter 5), but often reduces indigenous experience to something ‘legible’ to Western NGOs, governments and solidarity groups. Furthermore, North American indigenous solidarity movements, which have often been the most prominent markers of indigenous activism, do not hold the same consequences for communities in the Andes. While Tucker is clearly vocal and cognizant of these issues (pp. 15–17), it is important to consider the ways that his own use of ‘indigenous’ as a theoretical shorthand, figure into this history and the questions raised at the top of this review. He inhabits this complicated space deftly and reminds us that ‘indigenous’ is not one thing, but many things, defined from the vantage of many distinct spaces, and constantly evolving in a processual way.
