Music and Marginalisation: Beyond the Minority-Majority Paradigm

Music making among marginalised individuals and communities has received extensive investigation in ethnomusicology. Much of this research was advanced by the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Music and Minorities Study Group, formed in 1997 on the initiative of mostly European scholars. The group originally focused on Romani and Jewish music cultures but later expanded as it attracted members from other regions.

A key point of discussion has been the definition of "minority," as it shapes the group's identity and research approaches. The working definition until 2018 described minorities as "groups of people distinguished from the dominant group out of cultural, ethnic, social, religious or economic reasons." This relational concept assumes groups emerge as minorities only in relation to the majority. While the specific power dynamics vary, unequal relationships remain central to defining minorities, as Adelaida Reyes clearly explained.

Debate about terminology intensified within and beyond the study group after 2018, particularly following the establishment of the Music and Minorities Research Center in Vienna. The revised definition retains the relational approach but shifts focus: "The term minority refers to communities, groups and/or individuals that are at higher risk of discrimination on grounds of ethnicity, race, religion, language, gender, sexual orientation, disability, political opinion, displacement, and social or economic deprivation. These identity markers may and often do intersect." The definition emphasises that minorities can only be understood in relation to a dominant group, with power relations governing the dynamic rather than numerical comparisons.

The symposium that generated this volume sought to reassess fundamental assumptions by expanding the research base and refining conceptualisations of minority status. Keynote speaker Ricardo Trimillos advanced two analytic domains—lived experience and performed identity—as effective tools for understanding music making among minorities. Trimillos encouraged participants to question the minority-majority binary and critically examine ethnomusicologists' roles in determining who counts as minority or majority. He also challenged the assumption that minorities lack power, based on his fieldwork evidence.

Previous definitions of minority status relied heavily on the European nation-state framework. Topics have since grown to include immigrants, indigenous groups, discourses around race, class, and gender, and sexual minorities. Recent proposals use ethnomusicological methods focused on musicking itself, making the process of defining minority status ongoing and continually refined.

Another symposium issue involved the critical lack of attention given to majority groups. While the study group understands minorities only through their relationships with majorities, scholarly interest has mostly concentrated on minority groups, taking majorities for granted. The essays in this volume provide concrete case studies as groundwork for such analysis.

The volume aims to complicate current narratives about minority-majority relations through specific case studies. It begins with Trimillos's revised keynote, followed by fifteen essays organised into six parts: 1) Empowerment, 2) Beyond the Minority-Majority Binary, 3) Interaction and Negotiation, 4) Tourism, 5) Gender and Sexuality, and 6) Minorities in Japan.

Empowerment

Music provides one of few avenues for minorities to empower themselves. Identifying music's potential and limitations in empowerment has been essential. The three essays in this section offer fresh perspectives on how and when music can empower.

Johannes Brusila explores humour in a Finland Swedish minority music video, demonstrating that humour empowers minorities beyond constructing identity alone—it negotiates multiple identities against established self-images.

Lin Wei-Ya examines how post-1950s Taiwanese government policies affected the Tao indigenous group, assimilating them into Han-Chinese culture and eroding traditional music and dance. She describes two Tao vocalists who critique government policies through their songs while advocating for social change, alongside her own intercultural work bridging Tao singers with Austrian and Taiwanese collaborators.

Nakamura Mia offers a disaster and music case study, questioning hasty links between music and power after the 2011 East Japan Earthquake. Her analysis of musical activities empowering people suffering massive human and material losses concludes that cooperative, empathetic human creation enables music to empower disaster victims.

Beyond the Minority-Majority Binary

While the study group relies on the minority-majority relational definition, the binary model has both advantages and limitations. It provides a general conceptual framework for understanding power relationships but can conceal complex, multi-layered relationships across individuals and communities.

Mashino Ako demonstrates how local minority-majority categories can reverse at national levels. Her study examines Sasak Muslim music tradition in predominantly Hindu Bali, where national cultural policies favour surviving traditions but neglect traditional Sasak performing arts. With increasing access to global digital media, the community shifts between local, national, and global Muslim identities.

Chow Ow Wei explores multi-layered minority identity among Malaysia's Chinese, categorised as Buddhist, Chinese-speaking, and vegetarian or vegan—what he calls a "syncretic Buddhist group." He analyses Imee Ooi, a female Chinese Malaysian composer aiming to spread Buddhist dharma while the Ten Precepts constrain music making. Chow traces the "mainstreaming" process and how intersecting identities shape individual music activity.

Minority groups themselves face internal divisions over origin, class, belief, or migration timing. Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda shows how Malaysian censuses treat Indians as uniform despite deep divisions in religion, origin, and ancestral migration context (northern migrants arriving as clerical officers, southerners as plantation workers). Malay majorities respect and adopt northern Indians' Hindustani practice while showing what the author terms "selective tolerance" based on religious and skin-colour factors.

Interaction and Negotiation

Minority communities negotiate identity through music when interacting with majorities and other minority groups. Key concepts such as authenticity, tradition, and heritage shape how that identity develops.

Gisa Jähnichen highlights how postcolonial economic development drives cultural policies affecting minority performance in Vietnam. She identifies three interacting perspectives—majority, performing minority, and other minority groups—and suggests state policies standardise while using minority cultures as manifestations of national heritage. Global commentary on UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage supports these findings.

Suwa Jun'ichiro examines Roma musicians in Romania, linking philosophy and sociology perspectives with fieldwork evidence. He coins the term "ethnic cultural capital," referencing Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital, and appropriates Erving Goffman's faciality concept to illuminate corporeality among Roma musicians in post-socialist environments.

Tourism

Previously criticised as disruptive, tourism received scholarly attention as researchers recognised its significance for minority groups whose music and dance act as tourism resources. Relationships between ethnography and tourism display complementarity, compromise, and conflict affecting cultural practice, musician livelihoods, and local valuation of music traditions.

Yves Defrance researches Moroccan Gnawa music-tourism links since the 1800s. Tourism expansion since the 1990s has shifted musicians from ritual specialists toward secular performers marked by invented folkloric costume, added choreographic movement, and adopted Arabic singing over traditional Bambara.

Bożena Muszkalska analyses how Polish tourists visiting ethnic Polish-Vershina artists in Siberia reshape repertoire about one hundred years after initial settlement. Tourists arriving from Poland seek heritage nostalgia and unintentionally hybridise local musical tradition while to some extent revitalising it.

Gender and Sexual Minorities

After decades as an important ethnomusicology topic, gender research has been recontextualised within the marginalisation framework. Sexuality, by contrast, has been one of ethnomusicology's least examined areas and urgently needs theoretical treatment together with gender, given how these dimensions of identity often inseparably interconnect.

Marko Kölbl investigates gendered lament form among Austria's Burgenland Croat minority. Although lament discourses emphasise publicly mediating profound emotions, repeatedly performed lament texts maintained binary heteronormative gendered norms until the form's worldwide disappearance connected to modern mourning styles reduced such function.

The first minority group, the Ainu, had received more academic attention than the other two, yet earlier studies of their performing arts mostly adopted historical or musicological perspectives, largely ignoring the marginality they experience daily—though a few exceptions exist (Hunter 2015). From her fieldwork among the Ainu, Kumiko Uyeda (Chapter 14) examines the premise that power dynamics between dominant and dominated groups are frequently articulated by individual artists and collectives. She analyzes the activities and interview accounts of three Ainu musicians to gauge how legislation has affected Ainu performance. Uyeda traces their politically engaged performances back to their parents, all influential activists in the arduous struggle for justice and equal rights. Together with Lin Wei‑ya’s chapter (Chapter 7), her study centers on individual community members, affirming their importance in ethnographic inquiry—especially amid the ongoing debate over the “individual–collective” dyad in music making (Stock 2010; Shelemay 2011; Ruskin and Rice 2012, et al.), which is crucial for representing minority groups. Uyeda also argues that the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (CPA), a law advantageous to the Ainu, was enacted to showcase the modernity of a state that values multiculturalism.

Turning to music education for children from ethnic minority communities, Arisawa Shino (Chapter 15) investigates curricular and textbook changes at overseas Chinese schools in Yokohama, Japan, from the 1950s onward. She discovers that these shifts mirror political and social transformations in the People’s Republic of China: socialist‑ideology songs from the 1950s gave way to revolutionary songs during the Cultural Revolution (1960s–1970s), and these were succeeded after the 1970s by songs reflecting new social values, especially those idealizing China as the “homeland.” Arisawa suggests that schools’ efforts to strengthen children’s ability to engage with Japanese society through music encountered during their formative years may stem from an education policy aimed at raising children who can more readily adapt to the host society.

Finally, Fujita Rinko (Chapter 16) focuses on kamishibai, the performers of a neglected genre of Japanese popular entertainment, whom she classifies as a “socio‑economic minority” in modern Japanese history—the profession emerged during the 1920s in depressed urban districts of Tokyo. Through analysis of their performances and repertoire, she contends that while drawing extensively from diverse musical genres, kamishibai performers cultivated distinctive styles, musical idioms, and playing techniques. Despite their association with social marginalization, middle‑class youth displayed an unexpected fascination with kamishibai in the 1980s, and some even became performers themselves.

We consider the sixteen essays in this volume to represent a significant portion of recent scholarship on music and minorities. The study group incorporated communities and musician groups never before examined, thereby widening the scope of investigation. The volume also introduces novel concepts to the minority discourse within the study group—such as “humour,” “ethnic cultural capital,” “selective tolerance,” and “mainstreaming”—each meriting further attention and analysis for their potential to enrich the group’s narratives. All the subjects and concepts put forward here seem to advance the study group’s ongoing efforts to deepen and refine our understanding of music making among minority populations.

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks to the members of the symposium’s Programme Committee (Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks, Inna Naroditskaya, Adelaida Reyes, and Terada Yoshitaka) and the Local Arrangement Committee (Fukuoka Madoka, Fukuoka Shota, Ito Satoru, Ko Jeongja, Takemura Yoshiaki, Terada Yoshitaka, Yoneyama Tomoko, and Yoshida Yukako) for their dedicated service. We are grateful to all participants for their excellent presentations and lively discussion. Some papers presented at the symposium are not included in this volume for various reasons, but we acknowledge their contribution by listing the authors here: Marija Balubdzic‑Makivic, Barbara Hampton, Nancy Hao‑Ming Chao, Dan Lundberg, Lonán Ó Briain, Elena Shishkina, Sheen Dae‑Cheol, Tom Solomon, and Takiguchi Sachiko. We also appreciate the generous assistance of Ota Kyoji, former curator of the Osaka Human Rights Museum, for his enlightening lecture on the Buraku community. We express gratitude to the TaikoMasa Company for allowing us to observe drum making, as well as to the Ikari Taiko Group and its director, Asai Akehiko, who led a hands‑on drumming workshop for participants. Finally, we thank the National Museum of Ethnology and its then Director‑General Sudo Ken’ichi for providing the venue, partial funding, and sponsoring a reception.

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