I finally decided on a topic about two weeks ago, although it’s too big for honours. I hope to pursue it in my PhD (haha, I said with such confidence!). Although, again, it’s enormous. I may never ever get ethics clearance. A Monash ethnomusicology alumni just got pretty badly injured by a suicide bomber in the field where I want to be working, and women (and Australians for that matter) are strongly advised not to travel there.
ANYWAY. Here’s the plan. Pardon me while I make a bloody mess of being politically correct.
I’ve been engrossed in the issues surrounding Islam and the West, and how they fundamentally differ on a basic level, one of values, the extremes of which are exemplified by Islamic extremism and the rise of ISIS on one side and hyper-consumerism and “hyper-financialism”/capitalism on the other. One is oil, the other water, and in the midst of the mixing that is globalisation and the effort of trying to balance these immiscible extremes are some very angry, violent, and psychologically imbalanced people. These people are apparently concerned with obtaining power by any means and it is this obsession that is driving societies to collective psychological sickness. A sickness that puts vulnerable people under their power in an even more vulnerable state, with little to believe in, and little hope. In many of these places music is either haram or, equally worse, just another commodity to be sold to consumers who can afford it. But (and this is where I’ll have to watch how much of a hippie I sound like) music is food for the soul, and necessary for a functioning society not unlike universal free healthcare. Dancing doesn’t just feel good, it connects us; it makes us feel community.  This sense of community is diminishing in our 21st century maze of cultures and technology, diminishing as far as my eye can see, but it is just what we need to survive all the problems we’ve created for ourselves, such as rising CO2 levels, ideological wars, and I COULD sound more idealistic, but collective music making/participating is a possible avenue to begin to achieve a renewed balance.
More on the how later…