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Lullabies are commonly described as a universal musical genre among humans and a likely source of insights into the origins of music. This study explores the validity of these claims through a critical analysis of the ethnographic literature, starting with a literature review based on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Lullabies emerged as a “near universal” when defined broadly as any type of singing used to soothe children, but neither as a “near universal” nor a “statistical universal” when defined strictly as a specific category of infant-directed songs. As Indigenous Peoples from America presented more societies with few or no lullabies than other regions did, a second review focused on this area was conducted, highlighting three cases: (1) the absence of lullabies among certain Native American communities, (2) the historical diffusion of repertoires in the Circumpolar North, and (3) cross-cultural convergences and entanglements between musical genres on the Pacific Northwest Coast (complemented with corresponding examples from Polynesia). In conclusion, while the act of singing to soothe children is a near universal, it also presents significant cross-cultural variability. Perspectives for future research are discussed.
Lullabies are commonly described as a universal musical genre among humans and a likely source of insights into the origins of music. This study explores the validity of these claims through a critical analysis of the ethnographic literature, starting with a literature review based on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Lullabies emerged as a “near universal” when defined broadly as any type of singing used to soothe children, but neither as a “near universal” nor a “statistical universal” when defined strictly as a specific category of infant-directed songs. As Indigenous Peoples from America presented more societies with few or no lullabies than other regions did, a second review focused on this area was conducted, highlighting three cases: (1) the absence of lullabies among certain Native American communities, (2) the historical diffusion of repertoires in the Circumpolar North, and (3) cross-cultural convergences and entanglements between musical genres on the Pacific Northwest Coast (complemented with corresponding examples from Polynesia). In conclusion, while the act of singing to soothe children is a near universal, it also presents significant cross-cultural variability. Perspectives for future research are discussed.
This paper explores singing lullabies as a practice that opens spaces to reflect on ‘night’ as a sonic and sensory experience with implications for research in music and peacebuilding. Using arts-based and autoethnographic approaches, I ask: Can singing lullabies (Juvancic 2010) open a space to examine how sounding at night shapes a researcher’s ‘peace’ imaginary? This question aims to expand understandings of the ‘self’ as a site of an “aesthetics of resistance” (Möller 2020), or the notion that individual reflection and action sustain social engagement in music and peacebuilding scholarship. These understandings can contribute to interdisciplinary conversations on self-reflexivity and performance as ethnographic access points to peace imaginaries in Night Studies.
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