In fall 2009, I approached anthropolgy assistant professor Denise Nuttall with the intention of making flamenco music and culture the focus of my independent study course. The story of flamenco starts with the Roma people (commonly known as “gypsies”) fleeing persecution in their homeland of northern India and migrating west through the Middle East into Europe. The exact nature of their arrival in Spain is unknown, but by the 15th century, a sizeable population of Roma existed in Andalucía, the southern region of Spain.

When the Kingdom of Castilla attempted to rid Spain of minority groups and to expel or convert all non-Christians within its borders, the oppressed Roma, Muslims and Sephardic Jews became united in their oppression by the Spanish Inquisition, creating, through cultural diffusion, the evolution of a new musical form. In this sense, flamenco is an art of the repressed, an expression of grief and emotion and a cosmopolitan blend of several musical traditions intertwined through a history of persecution. An intricate blend of singing, dance and guitar, flamenco serves as a reflection of a culture that rests on the fringes of society.

I decided to study the culture through the actual “doing” of flamenco, music I had come to appreciate over years of listening without truly understanding its meaning. My methodology basically consisted of weekly meetings with a local flamenco guitarist to learn the art of flamenco guitar accompaniment. Originally, I thought I could use guitar study and discussions with my teacher as a way to gain insight into Roma culture as a whole. Upon discovering that my field was too small for such an undertaking, my focus eventually shifted to the methods used in understanding the musical culture. In particular, I set out to explore the concept of embodied knowledge and deep apprenticeship in ethnography.

While I did learn quite a bit about the struggle of the Roma and the history and culture of the music, the real benefit of my study was the solidification of my views toward the vastly understated value of embodied knowledge, feeling and emotion in ethnographic research. Why the aversion to feeling and phenomenon in academia? Ethnographers study the abstract concept of culture and the dynamic and often unquantifiable nuances of human life, values and emotions. Traditional scholarship operates under the false ideal of objectivity, rejecting the essential abstract aspects of human consciousness, in what I feel is a response to an inherent inferiority complex to other “hard” sciences.

In traditional flamenco culture, there were no passive observers of flamenco performance — those who were not singing, dancing or playing guitar would clap, shout and experience the emotion of every verse, step and falseta. Traditional scholarship is wrong in thinking we can learn any other way.

There’s a concept in flamenco called duende, which is a Spanish term that relates to the soul and emotion of an art form. Regarded as the most important aspect of true flamenco performance, duende cannot be learned in scholarly articles, books or instructional tapes. An abstract concept so crucial to the understanding of the culture can only be understood through the true embodiment of flamenco performance, deep listening and participation. Traditional scholarship leaves a gap in the understanding of abstract yet essential concepts such as these.

 The only way to truly understand a culture is to adopt a consciousness that parallels one’s own. Only through a paradigm shift in the importance of phenomenological ethnography can this be accomplished. In blending scientific methods of tradition with the intimate learning methods of embodiment, our understanding of a culture can go beyond the superficial.

David Bevilacqua is a senior anthropology major. E-mail him at dbevila1@ithaca.edu.