Standing Up: Violin Performance Technique and Ethnic Resurgence in Saraguro, Ecuador

Abstract

With greater participation in formal education and increased occupational diversity and mobility, young, cosmopolitan Saraguro musicians in the southern highlands of Ecuador are working to reconstitute their Saraguro Quichua ethnicity in a creative and selective process by which they discard, amplify, and reinvent the aspects of what they perceive to be authentic Saraguro musical culture. Young Saraguro violinists use the bodily movement of performance technique as a key resource with which to reconstitute their ethnicity. Through visual analysis of performance technique and theories of ethnic renewal and bodily movement, I argue that, though older Saraguro violinists sit down low to play their violins, these young Saraguro violinists break from tradition and stand up when they play not only to index their aspirations to do something with their lives other than what tradition and stereotypes dictate for them, but also to index their real opportunities to do so as Saraguros.