Michael Jackson—‘Billie Jean’

Kirjoittajat

  • Martyn Wemyss Goldsmiths College, Anthropology

Abstrakti

In the first few months of my fieldwork in Bolivia the death of Michael Jackson prompted a shift in the soundtrack to daily life: for a brief window his music was everywhere. In the weeks that followed, I witnessed two Michael Jackson impersonators perform, one outside a church and one outside a school in the days that followed. Here I set the encounters with these two Michaels within the sonic world I had previously experienced, and frame them as ‘stagings’: momentary performances where cosmopolitan figures and frames are brought into local performances. I recount other such stagings and suggest that Michael Jackson’s death made him available to be danced in different contexts in which the new Bolivian modernity is produced.

Osasto
Special section

Julkaistu

2019-02-06

Viittaaminen

Wemyss, M. (2019). Michael Jackson—‘Billie Jean’. Suomen Antropologi, 43(2), 109–113. https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v43i2.78147