In this article we examine the way local, national, and regional politics affect the policies and practices of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH)—a notion derived from the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage—in two detailed case studies from the Republic of Macedonia. While our conclusions are particular to our case studies, we hope that researchers in other national settings will find them useful for describing and analysing their own situations. We begin with a discussion of heritagization and recontextualization, which are inherent in ICH safeguarding processes. Next, we provide background on the external contestation of a distinct Macedonian ethnic and national identity, and the ways that UNESCO ICH safeguarding processes have been perceived and applied in Macedonia. Against that backdrop, we then describe and analyse two contrasting cases of ICH—the social dance “Kopackata” and the Galicnik Wedding—both of which illustrate how the cultural heritage concept itself can sometimes be used for national, commercial, and political ends.

Over a decade ago, UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage professed that “the processes of globalization and social transformation” along with “the phenomenon of intolerance” were giving rise to “grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage” of the world (2003a). The Convention represented an international acknowledgement of the precarious predicament of many cultural expressions across the world, from languages, music, and dance traditions to worldviews and traditional environmental knowledge. While ethnomusicologists have been engaging for many decades with preservation and protection mechanisms for musical traditions, particularly those of ethnic and minority peoples, the 2003 Convention (and the suite of subsequent UNESCO and UN treaties around culture and heritage) provided further impetus for ethnomusicological engagement in safeguarding and sustainability work. Theoretical and applied research in this area has grown significantly in the last ten to fifteen years on topics ranging from music and tourism (e.g., Connell and Gibson 2005), music as heritage (e.g., Howard 2006), music and cultural rights (e.g., Weintraub and Yung 2009), and music revivals (e.g., Bithell and Hill 2014), to activist or community-oriented approaches to music sustainability (e.g., Pettan and Titon 2015; Schippers and Grant 2016).

Since 1976, [our] goal has been to fight against the Franco/tourist mono-culture with its flamenco, bulls, sangria and the Phalangist Sección Femenina regional folklorism with its coros i danzas and white shirts and red kerchiefs that are still part of the San Fermin costume to this day. As we became interested in [the xeremies], we found ourselves with a problem: the majority of the musicians were very old people, and in order to restore its dignity, we decided [that] we would collect what was left of the musical formation and ensure its secular presence in village celebrations. And I think that something came out of it. Otherwise, look around you. What it used to be and what it has become: what a difference! (Rotger and Rubio 2015)

In ethnomusicology and related fields, an encounter in fieldwork with discourses of authenticity is an alert to issues of representation and the need to take the reach of one's conceptualization and analysis beyond the authorizing voices of a limited number of stakeholders. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for recent scholarship on the musical aspects of Sikh sabad kīrtan (sung sacred poetry). In this article I argue that bringing in multiple voices of listeners and musicians enables both a better understanding of this devotional practice as well as an expanded and dynamic conceptualization of authenticity.

Traditional musical instruments make useful symbols of identity because they are often unique to a particular social group and therefore serve as markers of distinction from other groups. This is true of the ekonting (see figure 1), a three-stringed plucked lute that is played almost exclusively by people of the Jola ethnic group in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. One player of the ekonting (pl. sikonting) describes the instrument much like an identification badge: “No matter where you go, if you see someone playing the ekonting, you will know that person is a Jola.” Ethnomusicological literature abounds with similar cases, where there is said to be a one-to-one relationship between a musical instrument and the social identity of the performer. However, constructivist models of social identity, emphasizing multiplicity, changeability, and relationality, complicate this apparently straightforward relationship, even if ethnomusicologists too often treat the subject of identity in contradictory ways (Rice 2007). In this paper, I approach the ekonting through sociologist Margaret Somers's (1994, 1992) paradigm of narrative identity, which emphasizes the relational and ontological qualities of narrative production. I argue that the ekonting serves not as a signifier of an a priori social identity, but instead as a site for the narrative production of Jola ethnicity. This narrative production both differentiates Jolas from—and associates them with—other regional, national, and transnational identity narratives. After an explanation of this paradigm and a contextualization of the cultural stakes, I demonstrate this argument through two vignettes describing different directions of narrative production around the ekonting.

In 1995 Norwegian archaeologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl went public with his theory that Scandinavia had been populated by people who had, in the distant past, migrated from present-day Azerbaijan in the Caucasus (Heyerdahl 1995). While academic archaeologists and historians scoffed at Heyerdahl's theories and dismissed them as pseudoscience, the idea that there was an ancient connection between Azerbaijan and Norway, and that the people living in those two nations today might have common ancestors, captured the imaginations of people in both countries. Despite being dismissed by the academic scientific community, Heyerdahl's theories became a source of inspiration for artists, especially musicians. Heyerdahl's speculative approach to research may not have conformed to accepted methodologies for the scientific study of history, but musicians found in Heyerdahl's theories a fruitful point of departure for exploring their purported common past through collaborative artistic projects that prioritized collective creativity based in a common historical imagination. In effect, Heyerdahl's theories became the basis for ways of doing and aestheticizing history through musical practice where the standard for success was based on the production not of verifiable facts, but of aesthetic experiences. This paper provides an account of two of these initiatives. But first I offer some brief remarks on the nature of history, and then a quick overview of Heyerdahl's theories and their critiques.

This article deals with two examples of a large number of computer-assisted investigations of Central Asian and Caucasian traditional music conducted over a twenty-year period at the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory. The main objectives of these investigations have included: (1) analysis of sound spectrum structure and timbre; (2) melody extraction and the subsequent analysis of its pitches and intervals; and (3) analysis of performing style. Today, the study of performance style is common in both modern musicology and ethnomusicology. In oral traditions, performance style and individual interpretation are of primary importance because they form the final product. Usually, descriptions of performance of traditional music contain some colourful but inexact terms that try to portray the style of performance, the timbral palette, and the pitches and intervals. A properly designed computer programme, on the other hand, can provide accurate and exact measurements and indications of basic features of the sound.

This article addresses the pitches, intervals, and scales of the dombra and kyl-kobyz, the most prominent two-stringed lutes of the Kazakh people (see figure 1). The dombra has tied-on frets and is plucked; in the past the strings were made from gut, but now they are made from artificial string (usually fishing line). The kyl-kobyz is a bowed, fretless lute with horsehair strings. Both instruments have an important place in the music culture of the Kazakh people. The dombra is one of the most important cultural symbols of Kazakhstan. In the lives of the Kazakh nomads of the past and present, no family celebration was complete without it, and today it is featured at public holiday and observances. The tones of the dombra— warm and velvety, like the sounds of their native language—are familiar to every Kazakh from childhood. Whereas the dombra is ubiquitous in the Republic of Kazakhstan, the sphere of the kobyz is more limited. It belongs to the category of sacred instruments, and in the past it was the province of baksy (the Kazakh term for healers and shamans). As a consequence, during the Soviet era the instrument was forgotten for ideological reasons. Only since the 1960s and 1970s has the kyl-kobyz tradition been revived.

The sounds of percussion, guitar, singing, and clapping guide us from the heat of the summer pavement of the parking lot to the cool shade of the trees in the garden. Parents, staff, children, youth—we all gather here first thing in the morning. Some children immediately sit on the ground in front of the musicians, others navigate their canes or walkers to find a seat on a chair or bench or find a good spot for their wheelchairs. Some parents linger. The singing continues as everyone gathers and joins in with voices, clapping, and percussion to participate in the familiar “The boat goes down to the river, it takes me to my home …” This was our place of arrival at Spiral Garden.

The panel, “Negotiating the Personal and Professional: Ethnomusicologists and Uncomfortable Truths,” presented at the Forty-third ICTM World Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, grew out of informal conversations common among ethnomusicologists. As practitioners in our discipline, we are involved in complex webs of experience, relationships, and representations focused around music, broadly defined. Our work is inherently social and, when in the field, we develop close relationships with our teachers and consultants as we become comfortable in our sites of research. We are grateful for priceless access to communities and individuals. The intensity and combination of certain relationships and circumstances, however, can lead to conflicting expectations, unanticipated misunderstanding, and situations of personal and professional conflict.