Brown University anthropology doctoral student Yana Stainova, advised by Dr. Kay Warren, is researching whether state-sponsored efforts to build moral and ethical communities are successful in reducing violence in contexts of radical socioeconomic inequality. The researcher will focus on the growth and impact of a state-sponsored educational and ethics program that aims to combat socioeconomic marginalization by providing cost-free music education to half a million young people. Envisioning music as a model and enactment of a non-partisan ideal society, this program purports to foster a social concern for others through aesthetic forms. This project asks what significance this collective learning strategy has had in a context marred by violence, socioeconomic inequality, and political polarization.
The researcher will be carrying out a year of ethnographic research in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and in a lower-middle class neighborhood in the northwestern city of Coro. She will collect two forms of data: (1) the macro-level of state power and forms of governance; and (2) the micro-level of the way learning in this environment cultivates specific kinds of individual and interpersonal experiences. She will employ a variety of qualitative social science research methods including semi-structured interviews with the music program's leadership and teachers, interviews, participant observation, and archival research.
Findings from this research will contribute to social science research on the place of ethical and moral questions in everyday life, as well as the formation of new moral communities. The research also will also illuminate the concrete benefits of state funding for the arts as a way of combating extreme socioeconomic segregation and explore the applicability of the program to other countries. Supporting this research also supports the advanced education of a graduate student allowing her to gather data that will be the basis of her doctoral dissertation and future publications.
In the crime-ridden slums of Venezuela, where small houses are precariously balanced on steep hills, one frequently sees young children with musical instrument cases on their backs flocking to their local music schools in the afternoons. They are members of El Sistema, a state-funded classical music program that aims to combat socioeconomic exclusion by providing cost-free music education and instruments to half a million young people across Venezuela. Founded in 1975, El Sistema has weathered the volatile political climate of seven changes in government and has been adopted in 35 countries around the world. Today, as Venezuela sinks into a severe economic and sociopolitical crisis, El Sistema continues to flourish. How do people continue to explore different worlds of experience and self-expression in the midst of suffering, sociopolitical crises, marginalization, and social injustice? How does beauty sustain us? What is the nature of community? How are social trust and solidarity built, maintained, sometimes fractured? In asking these questions in the context of Venezuela, my project makes several important contributions to contemporary social concerns. Venezuela is a country, which has some of the highest homicide rates in the world. Violence disproportionately affects young men between the ages of 15 and 24, and 83% of these men are from the lower social classes (Zubillaga 2013). El Sistema targets a similar section of the population: 1) the majority of El Sistema’s 500,000 participants are between the ages of 2 and 18, while most of the teachers and the participants in professional orchestras are in their 20s and 30s; 2) Sixty seven percent of El Sistema students are from the lower classes (IADB). I explore the lives of musicians and their families as they are suspended between the networks of violence and music, each exercising a strong magnetic pull over the musicians. Scholars in Venezuela and beyond have found that youth perceive violence and gun ownership as a medium for gaining respect within their communities (Zubillaga and Briceño-León 2002; Bourgois 1995). I came to recognize that membership in El Sistema – by offering scholarships and belonging to an international musical community – provides a competing avenue for garnering social respect and upward social mobility. On a worldwide scale, educational institutions reproduce class structures, hierarchies, and segregation (Bourdieu 1984). Venezuela’s El Sistema creates a mixed-income social setting, offers cost-free music education, and provides opportunities for upward social mobility through scholarships and professionalization. My dissertation explores the creative, aesthetic, and collaborative potential of music to act at times as a counterweight to violence, economic marginalization, and political ideologies imposed from state leadership. It contributes to a better understanding of the benefits and challenges of state support for music education, in a time when the importance of music education is downplayed (Barenboim 2009). The collective practice of music in an orchestra requires each instrument to listen to and coordinate with the others. This is especially meaningful since the musicians in El Sistema's orchestras come from diverse – though mostly lower – social classes, and correspondingly different political convictions. I argue that the exercise of listening performed in an orchestral setting surfaces as a subtle ethical force, which is largely absent in a deeply divided social environment in contemporary Venezuela. El Sistema addresses the most pressing socioeconomic problems of Venezuelan society, problems echoed across the globe. Understanding how El Sistema functions in the particular context of Venezuela will also allow me to explore the potential applicability of the program for other countries, which might inspire similar initiatives specific to other social contexts. Finally, this work will draw attention to the rights of children, and answer questions about how children and adolescents are empowered and disempowered. I hope that my writing will serve as a window on the inner lives, dreams, hopes, fears, and ambitions of these young people and their families; that it will heighten our awareness of the human potential inherent in them; and highlight the urgency of exploring conditions of possibility for the development of that potential. Works cited: Barenboim, Daniel. 2009. Music Quickens Time. Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Richard Nice, tran. Harvard University Press. Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Cambridge University Press. Briceño-León, Roberto and Verónica Zubillaga. 2002 (50: 19). Violence andGlobalization in Latin America. Current Sociology. Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). www.iadb.org. Zubillaga, Verónica. 2013. Menos desigualdad mas violencia: la paradoja de Caracas. Nueva Sociedad N 243, enero-febrero. www.uso.org
