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Showing posts from October, 2011

Studying Flamenco in Sevilla, Spain

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Jumping back to my Cotlow which, as I detailed above, couldn’t in reality be about conservation and primates: I went online and found an abstract of my project that I wrote on GW’s Anthropology website. Here goes: Flamenco has emerged as a product of the dialectic confrontation between Gypsy and non-Gypsy societies in Andalusia. This project addresses how flamenco works to undergird Spanish and Gypsy identity; how flamenco performers consciously/unconsciously conceptualize it/its origins; how Spanish society comes to terms with a performance culture that intensely appropriates and may even co-opt the cultural traditions of its much-maligned "other." It investigates whether there is a distinction — from emic (the performers) and etic (the tourists) perspectives — between flamenco puro and that which is performed in the commercialized venues. Reading over that abstract again after five years, it sounds so gosh-darn dry? The flamenco idea came about after Dr.