Producing the Andean Voice: Popular Music, Folkloric Performance, and the Possessive Investment in Indigeneity

Abstract

This article explores the way that different popular musical genres stage distinct visions of Andean experience in contemporary Peru. It argues that the varying notions of aesthetic and social legitimacy attached to competing musical genres can be traced to dissimilar ideologies of indigenous difference, which emerged at different historical moments and are therefore tied to distinct politics of cultural identity. By exploring the way that individuals of various social backgrounds value two unrelated musics, one a self-consciously "modernized" folk genre and the other a traditional folkloric genre, the article weighs the potential and the limitations of a theoretical stance that celebrates the Peruvian culture industry for its determinative role in the development of a "hybrid" Peruvian identity that is ostensibly averse to the celebration of indigeneity itself.