Protecting Cultural Heritage, Defending Cultural Rights: Afghanistan, 1996–2022 (Hartley Residency with Katherine Butler Schofield, Day One) Seminar

Because the traditional music of Afghanistan is passed on orally/aurally, the protection of cultural heritage and the defence of cultural rights are inherently linked.

In this seminar we will look at the ways in which various individuals and institutions worked to protect, preserve, and revive music in Afghanistan last time the Taliban were in power, and in the intervening decades 2001–21; and the ways in which organisations now are once again working to defend the cultural rights of Afghanistan’s musicians and listeners so that both their lives and the precious music they carry will continue to thrive.

SPEAKER:

Katherine Butler Schofield is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Music and History at Kings College London. She is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. She trained as a viola player before embarking on her PhD at SOAS, University of London. She came to KCL after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds.

Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s general research interests lie in South Asian music; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural.

Through stories about ill-fated courtesans, legendary musicians, and captivated patrons she writes on sovereignty and selfhood, affection and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange.