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I grew up in the southwest of China in the 1990s, when the internal migration of ethnic groups was already a norm. And China, while officially acknowledging its ethnic diversity, never thought its internal migration of the Han majority as a potential threat to its ethnic minorities and indigenous cultures. Japan and the Koreas are often considered as the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. Taiwan is perhaps the only exception, where the Austronesian peoples have claimed their indigenous status and political rights. In fact, indigeneity as a discourse has been largely absent in this region. Therefore, against the global market force for “a world music,” reggae was quickly adopted to preserve indigenous cultures, remixing a wide range of ethnomusical elements.īut note that Feld’s list did not include East Asia. Around the same time, however, engineers and producers in Jamaica– many of them Chinese and Chinese-Jamaican–began to experiment with remixing reggae songs, contributing to an adaptive style of pop music as well as its international popularity. The music was deeply embedded in the Jamaican culture.
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In the 1970s, “roots” reggae translated the everyday lives of Jamaicans as well as their Rastafarian spirituality into a stark resistance to racial oppression, economic inequality, and colonial capitalism that they had experienced in history. “Its perception by indigenous peoples outside the Caribbean as an oppositional roots ethnopop form has led to its local adoption by migrants and indigenes in places as diverse as Europe, Hawaii, Native North America, Aboriginal Australia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and Southeast Asia” (110). In Steven Feld’s “ From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: The Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat” in 1995, he noted the affinity of many indigenous cultures for reggae music. Recently I realized this climate connection was simplistic and reductive, and what I failed to grasp in Kawa’s music was far more important-a notion of indigeneity manifested through reggae’s generic elements. Known as “Yunnan Reggae,” Kawa’s music indeed exhibits some of the most characteristic elements of reggae music-slower tempos, remixed vocals, and repetitive chords falling on the offbeat. Outsiders often associate the musical style of reggae with a stereotypical “laidback” lifestyle projected onto these locales. When I learned about Kawa’s story in 2016, I was first intrigued by the geographical similarities between Yunnan and Jamaica: both regions are characterized by tropical climates, lush vegetations, and perhaps most prominently, proximities to marijuana plantations. Kawa is a reggae group from Yunnan’s Ximeng, an autonomous county for the Wa people in the southwest of China, bordering Myanmar.