Disco es cultura: discourse, hermeneutics, and the social lives of the "Yuyay Jap'ina Tapes"

This thesis examines the creation, distribution, engagement, (re)contextualization, and (re)signification of a series of recordings known as the “Yuyay Jap’ina Tapes.” Exploring the tapes’ global circulation, this thesis is a case study of the ways that recordings of music are incorporated into multimodal discourses as dynamic elements of social life and musical practice. Recorded in La Paz, Bolivia, during the early 1990s and featuring performances and songs by Luzmila Carpio, an Indigenous singer from the Bolivian Department of Potosí, these recordings were initially used as pedagogical aids in a UNICEF-backed program focused on the promotion of Quechua and Spanish language literacy among rural Bolivian Indigenous communities. Two decades later, these recordings were commercially released by three independent record labels, on three different continents, in three different media formats. Each of these releases is a unique version, contextualizing and engaging the recordings in ways that anticipate particular audiences and forms of musical and media practices. Analyzing these releases provides critical insights into the layers of discourse with which these recordings become entangled as they are circulated through cosmopolitan, colonially inflected, transnational, digitally interconnected cultural economies of musical consumption and engagement. In doing so, this thesis interrogates the nature of musical experience and its relationship to recordings of sound. Chapter one situates the recordings in the context of the Bolivian commercial recording industry that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and discusses how hegemonic discourses about Indigenous identity and language shaped the way that artists like Carpio were able to express themselves in this repressive cultural milieu. Chapter two examines how the social life of the Yuyay Jap’ina recordings unfolded in the context of the transnational digital cultural economies that emerged at the start of the twenty-first century and how new types of engagement with Carpio’s recordings in diverse locales resulted in emergent forms of discourse and significance. Chapter three uses the case of Carpio’s recording “Tarpuricusum Sarata” to explore the hermeneutics of sound recordings in these digital cultural economies. Chapter four offers a comparative analysis of three different recordings of Carpio’s song “Warmikuna Yupay-Chasqapuni Kasunchik,” bringing them into dialog with concepts and perspectives that I discussed with Leonardo Martinelli, an Argentine producer and musician who works with Carpio.