Exploring transnational sentiment through embodied practices of music and migratory movement

Abstract

This paper employs ethnographic material from an anthropology doctoral thesis that explores the relationships between music, place and embodiment in the context of transnational migratory movement. More specifically, the study brings place into focus through practices of migration and music as embodied practices. Phenomenological lenses assist in exploring how relationships between body and the social world are forged through music. The fieldwork for this study was conducted among migrants from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds in a major regional inland city. For these migrants, music links people and people to place. Employing Jackson‘s view of metaphor (1983), these migrants verbally articulate the unity of bodily being in the world in the recurring metaphorical correspondence between music and life. Such a correspondence articulates part-whole relations in the most frequent and recurring statement that ‗music is part of life‘. In this paper, I focus on migratory movement and music as occasioning reflection on habitual being involving transnational sentiments through emotional links to place. Persson‘s recent critique (2007) of Casey‘s phenomenological perspective (1993) in which the void occasions anxiety would appear to suggest space as a more appropriate concept, especially in consideration of the fluidity of migratory places. However, these migrants' metaphorical correspondence between music and life demonstrates the instrumentality of music, restoring unity to disruptions of habituated ways of being. Music and migration are mutually occasioning bodily practices of place, for which I argue that the principal emotion is desire. Taking Persson‘s work as a point of departure, and following Casey (1996), such practices entail a series of interconnected places, linking part and whole, autonomy and unity, isolation and connection and constraint and freedom.