Pictures from Ethnia: Peepholes into Otherness A brief analysis of pictures used in Norwegian music textbooks for the 8th Grade

Abstract

In the Norwegian national strategy plan Equal Education in Practice it is stated that “To ensure proper subject and linguistic learning outcomes, it is also important that multicultural reality should be reflected in the teaching materials” (2007:16). This means that the multicultural society should also be reflected in textbooks for music.
One might think this would be relatively easy, as the subject itself is “cultural”. For other subjects such as mathematics, I suppose it could be claimed that they are socially and culturally neutral (although I also would argue against this view). But the very nature of music is culture; as a result the (multi)cultural perspective is not as subtle as it is in some other subjects. On the other hand, an analysis of this is not just a simple case of pinpointing the multicultural, such as counting the black people, or the use of artists and examples from different parts of the world. It must delve more deeply into the conception that representations of “cultural otherness” create in the mind of the reader
those represented through pictures.

This article deals with my own uneasiness when encountering pictures and text about non-western culture and music in some music textbooks. I will explore how otherness and exotism can be said to represent an imaginary nation, a particular geographical place corresponding to a Western fantasy, which I will call Ethnia. I will use some of the pictures and a small passage of text from Tempo (Hjertass and Johansen, 2000) and Opus – Musikk for ungdomstrinnet (Andreassen, 2006), which are two music textbook (8th – 10th grade), to reveal how an educational discourse manifests itself when constructing and representing cultural otherness. There is a danger of focusing on race, ethnicity or otherness, even if it is done with a will to improve the situation for “the Other,” because it can instead separate and exotify this “Other” even more; not liberate or empower them, but colonize them in a new way. I hope that my critical intentions here will be so clear that it will account for a possible cognitive enlargement of the gap between a we-majority and a them-minority.

Music is traditionally one of the school subjects that uses textbooks less often (Bachmann et al., 2004), so it is important to look more closely at the praxis in classrooms if one wants to say more about the way these texts are experienced by the pupils. Nevertheless, I believe a textbook, containing a type of distilled knowledge, does tell us something; as monuments in a society’s discourse about ethnicity, youth culture, music and school. The aim is therefore more to investigate certain discursive formations within the Norwegian society, than to be specific in terms of what the textbook’s influence are or could be in the schools.