The musical construction of identity among students at the Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University

Abstract

The Potchefstroom Campus at North-West University strives towards integrated student communities within its residence system and campus practices. Maintained by means of a kaleidoscope of intra and interhostel practices, campus-wide sporting events, cultural and welfare activities, these communities involve their members in a range of shared as well as distinctive experiences. This dissertation explores some of these experiences, focusing on musical practices in three residences, as well as certain wider, institutional musical events. Invoking the paradigm of music-as-identity and music-as-life, it treats musical expression as indispensable to local identity discourses that conceptualise worldviews, direct behaviour and define networks. Discursive practices involve integrated complexes of non-musical and musical symbols. Non-musical symbols include rank, dress, nicknames, slogans and emblems, while musical meaning is expressed in a variety of anthems, dances, serenading competitions and rock concerts. These practices express a continuum of macro-micro social relations. Networking accordingly emerges as malleable and shaped by shifting conditions, and identity as a plural concept not easily reducible to some ostensible essence. Musical practices were found to construct a variety of communal imaginaries on macro level, involving NWU as institution, as well as campus-wide and hostel networks. They generalize the diverse experiences of individuals from different places and cultures within a rapidly transforming South Africa into local networks characterized by shared discourses. These discourses involve vocabularies of coherence, expressed powerfully by the trope of "home", as well as hierarchy, conflict and difference. The latter is evident in role allocation in hostel musical practices as well as in distinctive micro networks that find, inter alia, expression in intra-hostel serenading practices. This investigation

accordingly uncovers the nature, uses and functions of a range of musical imaginaries, of networks of belonging, coherence and differentiation during a time of intensive institutional and national transformation. Utilising a qualitative ethnographic research design, data was gathered by means of fourteen individual interviews with members of De Wilgers, Wanda and Villagers residences, as well as private lodgers. The interviews were integrated with field observations of hostel practices and campus events.