* Please note that due to the ACT's current lockdown, this seminar will be held online

Trans-Pacific Musical Influences in the Cultural Revitalisation of Easter Island

Dan Bendrups, Graduate Research School, La Trobe University

Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) has a remarkable and enduring presence in global popular culture where it has been portrayed (somewhat misleadingly) as both a place of mystery and a cautionary tale in social collapse. These portrayals often overlook the remarkable survival of the Rapanui people who rebounded from a critically diminished population of just 110 people in the late nineteenth century to what is now a vibrant community where indigenous language and cultural practices have been preserved for future generations. This cultural revival has drawn on a diversity of trans-Pacific musical influences that combine indigenous heritage with contemporary cultural, colonial and missionary influences from both South America, and elsewhere in Polynesia.  This presentation provides an overview of these influences in Easter Island music, with the aim of stimulating a discussion about how notions of heritage tradition and indigeneity are understood, by whom, and to what cultural ends. In doing so, it provides a counterpoint to deficit discourses of collapse and disappearance to which the Rapanui people have historically been subjected.

Dan Bendrups is an ethnomusicologist and multimodal performer, and former Deputy Director (Research) at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. He now works at the Graduate Research School, La Trobe University, where he specialises in academic development for graduate researchers and graduate research supervisors.

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Meeting ID: 864 9883 0235
Password: 116497