Emeritus Professor of NKUA, Pavlos Kavouras, is the holder of the new UNESCO Chair entitled “Anthropology of Traditional Music: Representing and Repositioning Intangible Cultural Heritage”.
The Chair aims to advance multidisciplinary research, analysis, policy, and strategic narrative regarding music as living heritage. The Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory of NKUA and the Chair’s partners (universities, organizations and other relevant networks) will carry out joint research regarding the structural and cultural impediments to sharing and preserving traditional music. By cultivating research contributions and collaboration across fields, the main focus of collaboration with all the stakeholders will be on understanding how structures and systems of representing and repositioning intangible cultural heritage work across domains to produce exclusion and inequality, and inclusion and equality. Moreover, by building relationships among diverse groups and across disciplines, we purport to align our research efforts with the needs of community organizers, policymakers, and other stakeholders in the domain of music as living cultural heritage. Community-centered collaborations will help inform our research while our scholarship will help community partners and policymakers with strategies and policy, which may increase our mutual effectiveness at many levels. This type of relationship building may move beyond just coalitions toward deeper synergy, and will be strengthened by time and interaction, and ultimately yield a greater capacity to effect change regarding intangible cultural heritage.
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Pavlos Kavouras is professor emeritus of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). His scientific work blends anthropology and sociology, musicology, history, philosophy and cultural studies. He was Founder and Director (2007-2022) of the Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory of the NKUA. He has participated as principal or collaborating partner in many international projects related to lecturing, teaching and ethnographic research, as well as numerous other institutional synergies in art and education management. Since 2016, he has been visiting professor at UCLA, Department of Ethnomusicology, and in 2015, he, as Onassis Foundation Greek Scholars Fellow, gave a series of invited lectures in the United States of America, at the universities of California (UCLA), Stanford, Illinois, Michigan and Harvard. Since 2012, his academic, artistic and philosophical interests are focused on migration and otherness in a broad geo-cultural perspective employing music and film as venues for understanding otherness and as vehicles for attaining Self-awareness. In 2019 he was appointed by the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs to represent Greece in the Ancient Civilizations Academic Forum in La Paz Bolivia. Since 2020, he is a founding member of the NKUA Center for Excellence dealing with “Inter-religious Dialogue.” He has done extensive ethnographic research in Greece, the USA, Southwest India and Egypt. He has published numerous books and articles in English and in Greek, and is the General Editor of the Ethnomusicology and Anthropology scholarly series for Nissos Publications.
He has taught various academic courses both at undergraduate and graduate levels such as Introduction to Ethnomusicology, Anthropology of Music, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnographic Film, Music and the Divine, Seminar: Music Ethnographies, Seminar: Music Biographies, Seminar: Discourse Analysis, Questions of Methodology, Music and the Other Arts. His publications include Ghlendi and xenitia: the poetics of exile in rural Greece, Trickster and Cain: a musical allegory, Folklore and tradition: issues of re-presentation and performance of music and dance, “Ethnographies of dialogical singing, dialogical ethnography,” and “Allegories of nostalgia: music, tradition and modernity in the Mediterranean area”. His recent research projects include “Performigrations: People Are the Territory” (European Union – Canada Programme for Cooperation in Higher Education and Vocational Training, 2014-2016). “ARISTEIA II, Western Art Music at the Time of Crisis: An Interdisciplinary Study of Contemporary Greek Culture and European Integration” (WestArtMus 2014-2015), “Video Life Stories of Immigrants” (Hellenic Ministry of the Interior 2012-2013).
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Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory
The Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology Laboratory supports the discipline of the Sector of Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology of the Department of Music Studies and promotes the study, research and dissemination of the relationship between music and culture. The activities of the Laboratory include a wide gamut of the academic, research, teaching, and educational dimensions of the discipline. The Laboratory consists in the following units:
A. Archives
Its objective is the creation of a dynamic and interactive archival system supporting all Laboratory activities.
B. Research
Its objective is the support, documentation, production, and promotion of original research in the fields of Ethnomusicology and Cultural Anthropology, as well as the organization of seminars, workshops and other academic activities in accordance with international standards.
C. Publicity
Its objectives are: a) the publication of academic research b) the production of artistic and educational materials c) the organization of lectures, meetings, seminars, symposia, conferences, and other scholarly events d) the publication of a peer-reviewed academic journal and e) the organization of cross-cultural academic and artistic activities.
