NEW FACULTY: ANTHROPOLOGIST AMANDA WEIDMAN BRINGS ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, SOUTH ASIA TO BMC CURRICULUM

For Assistant Professor of Anthropology Amanda Weidman '92, an evening's diversion on campus led to a career. Weidman, who as an undergraduate played violin with the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Orchestra and the Bryn Mawr Chamber Music Society, was captivated by a performance of Indian classical music she heard in the Campus Center. After the concert, she asked the violinist if he would teach her. Since then, Indian music has become not only her artistic passion, but also the primary focus of her anthropological research.

Weidman earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001; her dissertation explored the role of Indian nationalism in the way certain Indian performance traditions came to be considered "classical" and assigned to a high-art category. That manuscript is currently in production at Duke University Press and will be published this summer as Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India.

"I spent about three years in South India doing research, which included studying classical Indian violin," Weidman says. "The violin was introduced to India in the early 19th century by the British and retuned in an Indian mode. The violin, with its sound thoroughly transformed, became so central to Indian classical forms that many Indian musicians don't realize that the instrument originated in the West."

Playing Indian classical violin, she says, was a distinct advantage in ethnographic research: "It gave me credibility. There's a fair amount of secrecy in the music business in India, and Indians see the oral transmission of musical knowledge as a mark of its authenticity as distinctively Indian. Once I began participating in that tradition by becoming someone's disciple, the people I interviewed were much more forthcoming. And developing musical knowledge was integral to my research. There are some aspects of performance that can be understood only by doing."

Her current research interests include a project that investigates changes in the way female performers are viewed. "As nationalism and Indian identity became important," Weidman explains, "upper-caste women began to participate in certain performance traditions that had previously been the preserve of lower-caste women who were considered disreputable. The performance of these traditional forms by 'respectable' women helped legitimate them as part of indigenous, uncolonialized Indian culture."

Weidman is also pursuing research into the effect of sound-reproduction technology on modes of teaching Indian music and ideas of authenticity. Another project involves film musicians in South India. "I'm especially interested in the 'playback singers' who record the vocal tracks that actors and actresses lip-synch in films," she says. "This practice provided an opportunity for women to sing in a respectable way, because they would not be seen on screen. It's part of a general interest in the possibilities for new social formations and new kinds of subjects that technology enables."

That interest motivates a new course Weidman is developing; she plans to offer "Cultures of Technology: Aesthetics, the Senses and the Body" for the first time next year. She is also working on an introductory course in ethnomusicology. Last semester, she taught "South Asian Ethnography" and co-taught the Senior Conference in anthropology. This spring, she continues with senior conference, as well as the second semester of the introductory course in anthropology and "Language in Social Context," a course she has redesigned and reintroduced to the department.

Weidman, now a promising young scholar with an 18-month-old daughter, says that she is delighted to be back at Bryn Mawr. "It was a little strange at first," she acknowledges. "I would stumble into a corner of campus that I hadn't seen for 15 years, and a flood of associations would come back to me. That's beginning to wear off after a semester on campus. And academically, it's wonderful. I appreciate so much more about Bryn Mawr now that I've spent time in other educational contexts. I'm so grateful for the deep respect that both faculty and students are shown here. That's no empty display: it's real, and it's great to be working in this environment."

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