The Sound of Welsh Patagonia

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The Sound of Welsh Patagonia: Performance, Subjectivity, and Music in Y Wladfa, Patagonia, Argentina

This book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative.

This book draws on data gathered during eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Chubut Province of Patagonia, Argentina. It focuses on the formation of Welsh subjectivity through sight and sound, seeking to unpack the multiple and multisensory ways in which identity is constructed in this context. The chapters analyse a series of encounters, in choir rehearsals, the Eisteddfod and in film nights, to consider the usefulness and limitations of theoretical concepts that have been developed and used to theorise the self. This is a book about power, music, tourism and the self. It argues that the creation of Welshness in Y Wladfa was not only explicitly foregrounded in performances for tourists under an imagined Welsh gaze, but also for a Welsh ear, with subjectivities created and re-created through musical encounters. It is the first anthropological monograph of its kind that provides an insight into the significance of music in the Welsh Patagonian context. 

‘This volume constitutes an elegantly-written and evocative portrait of the performance of “Welshness” among Welsh Patagonians in Argentina. Through sensitive ethnographic description and analysis based upon years of fieldwork, the author reveals how a particular kind of diasporic Welsh subjectivity emerges both through music and in everyday life.’

Magnus Course, Professor of Creative Anthropology, University of Edinburgh