Kohti ihmisenjälkeistä musiikintutkimusta

Grönlannin (Kalaallit Nunaat) inughuitien musiikkikäsityksen inspiroimia pohdintoja

Abstrakti

Towards posthuman music scholarship:

Reflections inspired by Inughuit music of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat)

This article argues, in the spirit of pluriversalism, for parallel statuses of Indigenous onto-epistemology and western humanistic research in the academy. Posthumanist theorization has often drawn on indigenous knowledge without proper reference to it. We consider this to be knowledge colonization. The reciprocal relationship between Earth, human, nature and the nonhuman has lived in Indigenous ways of life and thought for millennia. To inform solutions to the intensifying ecological crisis, posthumanism now seeks to develop a resonant “posthuman” epistemology. 

We demonstrate the discrepancy between western human-centred and Indigenous musical ways of thinking and being by juxtaposing approaches to Inughuit music by Danish eskimologist and music researcher Michael Hauser, and Inughuit drumsinger Hivshu. Hivshu’s conceptualization of music is closer to a posthumanism that takes distance from representational theory. The discussion is contextualized in Indigeneity, the Inughuit philosophical tradition and in disciplinary developments of music research.