The Riches of Embarrassment

Embarrassment is a theme that recurs like a heavy conscience in my ethnographic field notes on boeremusiek. Because it has so often stood central to my research experiences, and since it is at the same time an intensely self-reflexive and social emotion, I have come to think of embarrassment as particularly meaningful in understanding my position as a researcher of this much-stigmatized genre of white folk music. In this chapter, which draws on George Devereux’s ideas on anxiety and method, I trace the development of my own critical stance toward the music and its practitioners through a self-reflexive meditation on my own embarrassment. But this is not the only thing at stake here; I am also concerned with how my anxieties are embedded within more encompassing registers of boeremusiek reception. I am interested, in other words, in how white listeners are enregistered into embarrassment and how it functions as an ambivalent modality of aesthetic engagement. In order to tease out how pleasure has been put under erasure through an aesthetic of embarrassment, I trace the genealogy of embarrassment in boeremusiek’s reception history. This leads me to a consideration of boeremusiek’s originary moment in the 1930s, its embroilment in religious notions of (racial) hygiene, and the music’s transgressive role in defining the sacred and the profane in early modern white-Afrikaner society of the early twentieth century. I then attempt to bring my own ethnographic experiences of embarrassment into a relationship with this genealogy.