Perceptions of ganga
prof. dr. sc. Ankica Petrović, etnomuzikologinja i socijalna antropologinja te profesorica na Odsjeku za etnomuzikologiju na uglednoj američkoj Herb Albert School of Music (UCLA)
1. Introduction
The purpose of this article is to describe my radical transformation as a young ethnomusicologist under the tutelage of John Blacking during my study with him at The Queen's University of Belfast in the mid-1970s, That transformation meant switching from the rigid and orthodox ethnomusicology of Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries to a more revolutionary way of interpreting traditional music. In spite of official "humanistic" proclamations relating to their treatment of culture and society, many cultural phenomena and processes of the past and present were neglected, hidden, misrepresented or misinterpreted by Yugoslav scholars and leaders of cultural politics. I would like to devote this article to explaining the crucial differences in scholarly interpretation of the musical genre known as ganga, as a component of rural culture in the former Yugoslavia. Previously, traditional music was interpreted by Yugoslav musicologists as a cultural phenomenon existing as a thing in itself, a self-contained system, a kind of "action autonomous".
