Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory
Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around <i>songlines</i>: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling me...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2023-06-01
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| Series: | Humanities |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/12/3/52 |
| _version_ | 1827737110766944256 |
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| author | Les Roberts |
| author_facet | Les Roberts |
| author_sort | Les Roberts |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around <i>songlines</i>: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel <i>with</i> music memory and to map/unmap the travelling <i>of</i> music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to <i>memorialise</i> it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-11T02:23:36Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-8f6381f326bd414bad5c4bc273ea0355 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2076-0787 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-11T02:23:36Z |
| publishDate | 2023-06-01 |
| publisher | MDPI AG |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Humanities |
| spelling | doaj.art-8f6381f326bd414bad5c4bc273ea03552023-11-18T10:42:01ZengMDPI AGHumanities2076-07872023-06-011235210.3390/h12030052Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling MemoryLes Roberts0Department of Communication and Media, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 4ZG, UKPutting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around <i>songlines</i>: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel <i>with</i> music memory and to map/unmap the travelling <i>of</i> music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to <i>memorialise</i> it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory.https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/12/3/52memorypopular musiccultural mappingspatial anthropologyliminalityeveryday |
| spellingShingle | Les Roberts Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory Humanities memory popular music cultural mapping spatial anthropology liminality everyday |
| title | Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory |
| title_full | Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory |
| title_fullStr | Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory |
| title_full_unstemmed | Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory |
| title_short | Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory |
| title_sort | songlines are for singing un mapping the lived spaces of travelling memory |
| topic | memory popular music cultural mapping spatial anthropology liminality everyday |
| url | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/12/3/52 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT lesroberts songlinesareforsingingunmappingthelivedspacesoftravellingmemory |