Down the Rabbit Hole : an Anthropology of Thai Media Circulation in the Age of Digital Globalization
Author: Degay Delpeuch, Edouard
Under the direction of : Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Pierre Petit
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris
Texte français
Keywords: Anthropology, Thailand, Media, Modernity, Thailand, Digital anthropology, Cryptocolonialism, World music, Recommender system (computer).
Abstract
How far can a recommendation algorithm go ? What hidden face of globalization is it likely to reveal ? This thesis focuses on a network of actors organized around the redistribution of recordings from Thailand since the turn of the 2010s. Based on ethnographic fieldwork spread over more than two years in Thailand, France and several East Asian countries, I trace the international circulation of a video released in 2011 by the group Khun Narin, discovered by a North American Internet user "down a YouTube rabbit hole" before being shared as “Thai psychedelic music”. Through this case, I first propose a critical reflection on the notion of "world music" and on the transformations that this musical field undergoes through digital networks (“world music 2.0”). Long structured by asymmetrical relations between artists and Western producers, world music is evolving with the Internet and the possibility for musicians to publish their own media. This thesis aims to question the musical imaginary and the relationships that emerge from these new possibilities of sharing. Thai recordings that circulate in the world music 2.0 network are characterized by a strong formal musical identity in common with music from the West. Unlike previous world music regimes, however, these are either directly made by musicians or collected within regional music industries. The media experience that occurs "down a rabbit hole", through YouTube recommendation, is that of a contact with musical modernities that no longer result from Western technological appropriations. I question original modernities that are revealed through this experience and I observe ways in which they can be mobilized by a public in Europe or in North America to de-center global musical imaginaries from Western-centered representations. But is it even possible to think of musical modernities without thinking "with" or "against" models that are rooted in Europe or North America ? Listeners and their listening habits that I observe evoke issues at the crossroads of postcolonial studies, Thai studies and digital anthropology and allow us to study how these issues develop on an ethnographic field. As key players in alternative fields of musical and sonic globalization, they reveal Thailand’s historical relationships with the rest of the world and question the ability of a country that has not experienced direct colonization to determine its own modernity. Through all these dimensions, they show digital networks’ capacity to transform different social worlds or to reproduce them.
