Mutual Supports: South <> North

Abstract

In this chapter we will investigate an almost completely undocumented relationship existing or emerging between actors in civil society movements and socially engaged Malagasy and North African musicians. The civil society organizations in question are European-based NGOs and other more loosely structured associations and their transnational offshoots or links, whom we’ve encountered as a result of our work with individual musicians. Our own awareness of such links and what we will be able to document empirically in this chapter comes as one of the surprising results of our theoretical and methodological approach to the study of transnationalism. As discussed before, we are describing and analysing transnational networks as flows of individual actors rather than focusing on clustered diasporic groups in fixed locations. Only by extending beyond a study of spaces, places and localized groups of people were we able to discover links which at first sight had little to do with the musicians’ primary activity as transnational artists. Hence the combination of following individuals and conducting multi-sited ethnography at what we defined as ‘hubs’ was particularly fruitful in uncovering artists’ links to civil society movements and associations.