Title: Deciphering movement and stasis: touring musicians and their ambivalent imaginings of home and belonging

Authors: Anna Lisa Ramella

Addresses: DFG Research Training Group 'Locating Media', Universität Siegen, Am Herrengarten 3, AH-315, 57072 Siegen, Germany

Abstract: This article explores a reconceptualisation of movement and stasis in the narrations of contemporary touring musicians in Europe and the USA. Within these two music markets, touring has become a necessity that derives from and simultaneously pushes commercial success. By analysing the experiences of touring via the embodied and the imaginative, and drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with musicians on tour, the article contributes to an understanding of ambivalences regarding home and belonging in a 'mobile' setting. For musicians spending much of their time on the road, categories of immobility and mobility can no longer be framed as synonyms of home and away. Rather, both can be conceptualised as familiar and alien, depending on the individual, temporal and structural circumstances. The very blurring of the boundaries of movement and stasis enables a shifting of perspectives in which 'home' and 'tour' may be experienced as either a source of stability or transience.

Keywords: mobility; immobility; touring musicians; belonging; rhythm; movement; stasis; transience; home; practices.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTA.2018.096361

International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 2018 Vol.6 No.4, pp.323 - 339

Received: 28 Dec 2016
Accepted: 22 Apr 2017
Published online: 27 Nov 2018 *

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