Christopher Robert Batterman

CHRISTOPHER BATTERMAN, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, was awarded funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Life on a Musical Lake: History, Environment, and Song in Pátzcuaro, Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Philip Bohlman. The project is a study of Indigenous music and multicultural governance in Michoacán, Mexico. Specifically, the project concerns pirekua, a music in Indigenous P’urhépecha language on/around Lake Pátzcuaro and the ways it lays bare the temporal regimes to which multiculturalism is tethered. How are Indigenous subjects in Mexico made to feel and experience history and historicity? Pátzcuaro sits at the confluence of many histories and conflicts: from debates over national patrimony to concerns over ecological degradation wrought by state-sponsored monoculture. The grantee places pirekua at the center of these conflicts, asking how multiculturalism becomes sensed in social forms and bodily practices and in unruly temporalities and historical feelings. Support funded 10 months of fieldwork between 2023-2024. A prior 14 months were completed 2022-2023. On one level, this project is a fine-grained ethnographic-historical account of an Indigenous musical practice and the ways Indigenous communities negotiate the political cunning of multiculturalism. On another level, the project offers a commentary on the historical grammar and contemporary machinations of governance in Mexico. This project offers a revision of existing theories of Indigeneity and difference and propose a framework for examining the experience of time and history for racialized subjects in Mexico and beyond.