Anthropology, digital music and the contemporary

How can anthropology help us to understand the epochal social and cultural changes catalysed by the take up of digital media and the internet? This lecture readdresses classic anthropological concerns, among them the nature of time and, as befits the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, of social relations, drawing on a global programme of ethnographic studies of art and popular digital music cultures in Argentina, Canada, Cuba, India, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The lecture indicates how doing anthropology through music can revitalize these fundamental concerns, opening up new conceptual directions, while reshaping what has been called an anthropology of the contemporary.

Speaker:
Professor Georgina Born FBA
University of Oxford

Georgina Born FBA is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Fellow of Mansfield College. She directs the ERC-funded ethnographic research programme ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’ which examines the transformation of music by digitisation. She holds visiting professorships at McGill University and Oslo University, and was previously Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Chaired by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA, University of Cambridge

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This lecture was repeated at the University of Edinburgh on 11 February 2016 at 5pm (Screening Room G.04, University of Edinburgh, 50 George Square, Edinburgh  EH8 9LH).