Anthropology of Music, Part I - Word of the editor

Abstract

Music represents an important aspect of identity of both individuals and groups and an inevitable part of everyday life impregnated with cultural codes that are a part of the symbolic system of our society. Through the analysis of these manifest and latent meanings, a holistic understanding of the musical product within a culture that consumes it is acquired and a better understanding of the wider social, cultural, political and historical processes within the studied community is achieved. Music can therefore serve as a prism for studying a number of anthropological topics that can be conceptualized through it, such as identity, gender, ethnicity, religion, globalization, urbanization, migration, economics, markets, popular culture, symbols, performance, dressing, etc. 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.