International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Palau became an independent nation in 1994 after nearly a century of external domination. During this long period of colonialism, Palauan society underwent drastic changes that had a lasting impact on the cultural production of this small society, which today has a population of about 19,000. Palau is part of the larger Pacific cultural region that has often been accused with alienation from indigenous culture and music, even though musicological research in Oceania has been comparatively sparse and the factual basis for such judgments is far from sound. In my book, therefore, I document the musical genres of Palau and their social contexts to provide a basis for my evaluation of the musical developments that took place during the islands’ colonial past. The diachronical perspective is made possible by several corpora of historical sound recordings: wax cylinder recordings made during the Hamburg South Seas Expedition in 1909, by a Protestant missionary in 1934, and during a Japanese anthropological excursion in the 1930s, and tape recordings prepared by Hawai’ian ethnomusicologists in the 1960s. Additionally, I made numerous recordings during my fieldwork on Palau in 2005-2007.
The objective of this book is three-fold. First, I provide a thick description of Palau’s musical culture (including dance). I discuss the various musical styles that can be heard on the islands today and contextualize them within their referential world. Second, I describe to what extent this music has been changing, identify tangible moments of musical transition, explain why this development took place, and show how the sonic discourse of Palauan music relates to the verbal discourse of Palauan identity and identification. In doing so, I discuss how, in this particular case, (ethno)musicology as a discipline can contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural flow in the globalized and globalizing world of the twenty-first century. This discussion contributes to the ongoing musicological debate about how to make sense of globalization—the name for an omnipresent but intangible phenomenon that has been regarded by musicologists in purely negative terms for so long.