Cosmopolitical Performances: Enacting authority and ordering the world through spatial music in the pre-contact Andes

Abstract

Archaeomusicological efforts to reconstruct tonal sequences, musical genres, and musical experiences of the pre-contact Andes face great challenges given a lack of written musical notation. We suggest that a sociomusicological approach focusing on the “social organization of resources, makers, and occasions of musical performance” (Feld 1984: 383) offers an alternative analytic more amenable to standard archaeological reconstruction. This emphasis on production, organization, and shared social space also sheds light on the historicity of performance, its social context, and its political implications. In fact, musical performances in many contemporary Andean communities express cosmological principles that underpin authority and enact principles of political organization in charged ritual settings. The highly spatialized and kinesthetic nature of these performances function as key elements, mapping performance spaces onto cosmopolitical landscapes. We seek neither to project this model into the past nor to identify its origins. However, we argue that a sociomusicological approach attuned to social space allows us to identify similar elements of musical performances in the Andean past while exploring the role of musical performance across broader sociopolitical contexts. Without reducing music to its politics or explaining political organization through music, we suggest that studying both together offers important insights.