In a contemporary Western world quick to prescribe binaries between the living/non-living, organic/inorganic, and animate/inanimate, Animism provides an alternative, even antagonistic worldview which prescribes spirit, life, and agency into the beings and land around us. Animism establishes and cultivates a mode of relation-building to the world we inhabit, and thus has been gaining more popular attention and imagination in recent years as an antidote to these modern ideological binaries which enable the exploitation and abuse of the non-human realm. In search for evidence of animism in European cultural heritage, traces of animism and animist worldview are indeed present throughout ancient Nordic history in the myths and sagas, and have received increased attention from scholars in recent years. However, the relationship between animism and the region's centuries-old fiddling tradition has been left out of the conversation, despite the fiddler’s customary role as tradition bearer or cultural custodian of their community, and thus a living source of lore and legend. River and waterfall weaves throughout the lore of Nordic fiddling and its legends such as Myllarguten and Ole Bull, with the river even serving as a sacred place of refuge for fiddlers targeted by the pietist movement. By investigating this animist agency of the river spirits fossegrim, bäckahäst, and näck, and their roles as teachers, mentors, and antagonists to aspiring fiddlers, this paper aims to bring the animist story-world of Nordic fiddlers into the ever-growing conversation of Nordic animist perspectives and broader discussions of ecomusicology.

This paper locates the experiences of German Irish traditional music practitioners in the broader framework of modern European history. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, it illustrates the ongoing centrality of class privilege, cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), acquired technical prowess (Slominski 2020) and socially sustained practices of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005) when it comes to installing gatekeeping mechanisms of inclusivity in the primary performance and transmission settings of German Irish traditional music sessions and workshops. As is shown, while still adapting some regulations of belonging shaped in the music’s place of origin, such arrangements ultimately serve to decouple the trans-local German community of practice from its Irish authenticating center. Moreover, this presentation interrogates such instances of anxious control as part of a much larger cultural anxiety, tied to the abuses of German folk music for extreme nationalist and racist propaganda during the Nazi regime (1933–45). The author posits that nostalgic German gazes upon Ireland have accomplished the transferal and sublimation of patriotic German sentiments onto the canvas of a proximal, white European musical tradition. Further, unraveling distinctions between historical, anti-colonial and expansive-imperial, registers of Irish and German musical exceptionalism (Applegate 2017; White 1998) proves key to comprehending the political alignment of former German post-war revival artists with Irish folk songs of rebellion against a colonial master. In the current moment, such critical inquiry reminds ethnomusicologists of music’s remarkable capacity to sound contemporary strains of extreme nationalism, while potentially hiding its disguised racist and hegemonic masculine undercurrents behind a seemingly benign façade.

In the workplaces of tea plantations in Assam, India, including tea fields and processing factories, the laboring Adivasi tea tribes engage in listening, sounding, and music. As descendants of communities deceitfully migrated from eastern India as indentured laborers during British colonial rule, their sonic practices reflect the enduring legacies of colonial exploitation, and ongoing postcolonial racial and capitalist violence. Drawing on theories of Plantationocene (Barua 2024; Moore and Arosoaie 2022; Haraway 2016) and world-making (Tsing 2017), and sound studies’ exploration of the interplay between sound and sociocultural life (Samuels et al. 2010), I analyze how everyday sounds and music of Adivasi tea tribes reveal both the persistence of exploitative practices, and their narratives of survival and belonging within Assam’s plantations. I focus on the voices of Adivasi women pluckers—talking and singing—the commands of superiors and Adivasi responses, and the ways of listening and sounding within tea processing factories. I ask, what do the communication and singing of Adivasi daily wage workers sound like? What do their sounded interactions with non-human agents reveal about their shared experiences of exploitation in plantations? How do the Adivasi engage in world-making through listening and sounding amidst machines, rigid schedules, and market demands? To answer these questions, I employ “acoustemology” (Feld 2015) and “deep hanging out” (Geertz 1973) during ethnographic research conducted across three tea plantations, spanning busy and slack seasons of tea production. By centering Adivasi sounds and music, this paper connects postcolonial struggles for survival and belonging to broader conversations on planetary change.

This paper explores intersections of end-stage capitalism and celebrity iconography through an analysis of venues owned by country music artists. From multi-destination empires like Dollywood and Margaritaville to the expanding series of artist-branded venues in and beyond Lower Broadway, the star-owned country bar provides intriguing insight into how the industry brands its own celebrity capitalism. Through and beyond music, bars like Lainey Wilson’s “Bell Bottoms Up Bar,” Dierks Bently’s “Whiskey Row,” and Kid Rock’s “Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse” perpetuate country music’s symbiotic music-tourism industry and continually define the recognizable symbols of the genre through coding and branding. I employ ethnographic inquiry and reference my ongoing practices of being-in-community in these spaces as a fiddle player building relationships and musical community in these spaces.

This paper continues a thread of discussion from my previous work on country music and changing cultural perceptions of violence, where I examined sites of country music performance where recent mass shootings had occurred. Across multiple sites of violence and industry, a significant theme was a marketed push to “return to normal” and continue business operations in the wake of tragedy; this theme became perhaps even more apparent in the larger country music industry’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of many 21^st-century reckonings and controversies facing the genre, the celebrity capitalism found within these bar and venue operations provides a lens through which to analyze the ways country stars and businesses mitigate controversy through a multi-faceted brand approach.