Original scientific paper
IN BETWEEN ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL CANONS: HISTORICAL SOURCES ON WOMEN PLAYERS OF FOLK MUSIC INSTRUMENTS IN CROATIA
Naila Ceribašić
orcid.org/0000-0003-3578-8515
; Intitute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The basic stimulus for this research was the widely disseminated
conviction that women do not play folk music instruments, and
particularly that they did not play them in the past. It turned out that
both components of this thesis are faulty and that the in/visibility
of the women players depends on (ethno)musico-logical and social
canons. Their invisibility in ethnomusicology has been an outcome
of the ethnomusicological limitation to folk music, its products and
its most prominent representatives.
Women players' positions as members of a family and as
participants in national-integrating and modernizing processes
during the second half of 19th and the first half of 20th century made
it possible for their musicianship to prevail over their gender. These
were also the positions which women players shared with men
players. The remaining women's positions were based precisely on
certain stereotypes on women (from the woman player as a member
of so-called fairer sex, to the woman player as a shameless woman,
and the reverse of the stereotype in the woman player as a mannish
woman) or on the (self)negation of serious musicianship (the woman
player as a substitute for an absent man player, and the woman
player of handy and substitute instruments).
Keywords
folk music; women musicians; history; Croatia
Hrčak ID:
33360
URI
Publication date:
4.6.2001.
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