This week we’re taking a look at Sean’s dissertation. Sean is a 3rd year Geographer and one of our Editors-in-Chief at Compass. His dissertation focusses on music from the Sahara desert and how it is represented and marketed to global audiences.
What is your dissertation about?
Bands and artists from the Sahara desert such as Tinariwen and Mdou Moctar have taken off in popularity among Western audiences through their adaptations of traditional Tuareg music to the electric guitar, using riffs and chanted melodies to convey the nomadic relationship with the desert and often very political messages about Mali and Niger, mostly in the Tamashek language. The existing literature on Tuareg culture and identity and the rise of Tuareg musicians explores how a local culture is manifested on a global level, critically engaging with the genre known as ‘world music’ and how this genre is marketed to Western audiences, emphasising their political status, the guitar as an instrument and musical connections with American blues. My dissertation aims to further explore the portrayals of the music of Tinariwen and its marketing as ‘desert blues,’ examining the promotional material released by the record company, the music videos and album artwork of the band and reviews and reception among music critics.
Why is your dissertation important?
During my research for this study I came across many concepts worth unpacking and which seemed to me inherently geographical. The concept of culture and authenticity as local identities are somewhat repackaged and explained to a global audience by record companies and music reviewers seems important to me. While I love music and think sharing it can undoubtedly be a good thing, this never happens in an equal way and there are always problems to be found when local cultures are performed on a global level. What is lost and what is gained from this process? The transnational element is also important from a geographic and musicological standpoint. Blues music already has a distinct geography and lots of academic literature tracing its movement and origins, so claims that it has ‘returned’ to the Sahara, mainly made by record companies and magazines should be unpacked and examined. Blues music as referring to the style associated with the Mississippi delta often articulated a specific set of socio-economic conditions experienced by African-Americans, so while the lyrics may portray a life of hardship, this is not to be easily conflated with and compared to the political and religious imagery used in Tuareg music, featuring traditional instrumentation and evoking a particular cultural relationship with the desert.
How did you find conducting your fieldwork remotely?
In some ways conducting remote fieldwork can take the pressure off. There is no set period of time in which you have to complete data collection and if you make a mistake there is no dismay that you can’t travel back to wherever your study took place in the middle of term to amend it. For me the pressure came from having to change ideas completely from a study on the regulation of busking in Singapore that I had read and planned for to something that could more easily be conducted online. The prospect of having to completely set my own deadlines for data collection then dawned on me and was daunting at first. Finalising the methods I would use and having an established reading list was the hardest part but after getting it done I feel a lot better about the direction the dissertation is heading in.
Often over summer I had to remind myself why I enjoyed the topic and listened to lots of the music as the soundtrack to my reading. Engaging with non-academic sources like youtube videos, while not necessarily useful for the write up helped immerse me in the topic as much as possible from home and kept it interesting.
What would be your advice for the current second years planning their dissertation?
I think it is useful to try and articulate your ideas and arguments about the topic as early as possible to supervisors, friends and family. Sometimes for me it is easy to get lost in academic jargon and being forced to explain the study in simple terms to people who haven’t read about it was really useful in giving me more of a sense of direction and I gained some useful insights and different perspectives about aspects of the study I hadn’t considered before.
Being able to explain your topic not just in writing but through conversations with supervisors is important to communicate efficiently with them so you are both on the same page about what the dissertation should be about.
Image Credits: Sean Cobb
DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR ONLY AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OR OPINIONS OF COMPASS MAGAZINE AS A WHOLE OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY.