Sakakeeny Roll With It Analysis

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In Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, Matt Sakakeeny explores how New Orleans is very different from the other stereotypical American city as he writes about it as “utilize voices and instruments as technologies for producing subjectivity, identity, and culture” (p.6). Sakakeeny also uses fieldwork to learn about and explain different power-related processes, such as personal and professional mobility, which will be discussed in greater detail. Because Sakakeeny’s approach of fieldwork has multiple potential benefits and few drawbacks, when exploring the theme of personal and professional mobility and how that relates to power, our conception of New Orleans society shaped into a fuller picture.
To understand how Sakakeeny’s field work works, it is important to understand a few concepts. The word “mobility” means being able to move in a physical sense, and in the context of Sakakeeny’s book, specifically personal and professional mobility, means being able, or not able to, move within a hierarchy with changes in income and occupation. Simply said, it is just how people could or could not move out of their niche. Through Sakakeeny’s book, mobility is important to understand the situation of brass bands in New Orleans. Some people in New Orleans could achieve some personal and professional mobility while many more encounter some shady economics and infrastructure that could affect the black musicians in education, housing, etc. Because musicians in New Orleans is a versatile job; music is a something that can induce personal and professional mobility, which leads to a contradiction, because musicians are also are exploited in the process (p. 85). There are only limited opportunities for those musicians to actually move up in the hierarchy. Sakakeeny explored both sides of the spectrum: those that succeeded to move up in the hierarchy and those that failed. In his book, he mentions that New Orleans is now a tourist economy with music playing an important part. He explains that “creative labor [is] a means of turning a knowledge strength into cash. Surprisingly, perhaps, to anyone clinging to the notion that art should ideally remain autonomous from politics and economics, there
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the local people on-site. There are both effectiveness and limits to his approach of field work. One of the things he did while doing his field-work was using interviews with the local cultural workers in New Orleans to get information and perspectives, which ultimately leads him to a conclusion. His approach to understand many different people increases the viability of his conclusion, but these interviews are ultimately subjective, meaning that these are the accounts of how people are feeling, which is not hard evidence when using to prove something. In the end, it felt to me as if Sakakeeny is using these accounts from different people in New Orleans to try to find reasons to justify those accounts. Another limit, but also somewhat beneficial, to his field-work is that because “the subjective experience of those that [Sakakeeny] encountered varies greatly, but each of them has exerted agency through words, through action, and above all, through music” (p.179). The varied subjective accounts are very different, so it is very hard to pinpoint anything specific that might have an impact how New Orleans’s system work, but the way they there is umbrella theme over these different accounts is what defines New Orleans, and makes it

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