Anthropology of Music, Part II - Word of the Editor

Abstract

The relationship between music and culture in the broadest sense is the central field of study of anthropology of music, a discipline with a growing number of researchers, study programs and published works in the world, within which the interpretation of music in itself, meaning the process of its creation, structure, sound analysis or aesthetic values, is not represented, rather emphasis is placed on studying the meaning that music creates and communicates in everyday life and its perception within a particular culture or globally. During the last thirty years, popular music has become an increasingly important subject of anthropological interest, and this tendency is, to some extent, also present in the local scientific production. In the 1980s, the first studies of newly-formed folk music began in Yugoslavia, and a growing range of topics in contemporary Serbian anthropology of music, especially in the last decade of the twentieth century, includes both theoretical considerations, such as problematizing the classification of popular music by genres or the conceptualization of the term world music in the local context, as well as concrete studies of music festivals and performances and anthropological case studies within musical genres, such as rock and roll, new wave, hip-hop and sevdalinka. With the idea of popularizing the study of popular music in the local anthropological community and opening this field to researchers who have not dealt with this topic thus far, as well as to exchange ideas and opinions among researchers from various related socio-humanistic disciplines who have long been studying music, the national academic conference Anthropology of music was held at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, on March 23, 2018. At the conference, 24 papers were presented, a selection of which will be published in the second and fourth issue of the Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology for 2018.