Boeremusiek’s Liturgy of Whiteness

At the most intuitive level, music confronts us with one of the great mysteries that powers social life: our individual and collective capacity to be moved by something outside of us. How is it that our bodies respond to a groove in a certain way, or not at all? What does it mean when we say we love certain kinds of music and abhor others? Is there a social basis for our musical pet hates, commitments, identifications, and desires? In an era of political demagogues and viral post-truths, and against the centuries-long backdrop of violence in the name of collective energies, what moves us and how are trenchant political questions. In this lecture, I use boeremusiek as a lens to consider white aesthetic experience as a particular kind of “collective effervescence”. Precisely because the genre is so widely ridiculed and derided, it opens up a window on the racial pathologies of white pleasure in South Africa. The focus is on a 2010 boeremusiek event which, so I argue, enacts a liturgical scene of whiteness that can help us understand the ritual coordination of white feeling on a much broader scale. In doing so, I make a case for the importance of music research in the university and how it can help us understand ourselves, our societies, and our collective past.