Mark DeWitt
Mark F. DeWitt is Professor of Music and holds the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he directs an undergraduate curriculum and degree program in traditional music. His primary research area is Cajun and Creole French music of Louisiana and its diaspora, and he is author of *Cajun and Zydeco Dance Music in Northern California: Modern Pleasures in a Postmodern World* (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). He received a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MM in music theory from the New England Conservatory of Music.
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Civil society—social organization that owes its existence to neither the market nor the state—is most often associated with relationships between people and their government, providing either political advocacy or social services. It is proposed here that social capital in the dance scene fuels public cultural expression, an aspect of civil society often overlooked and a public good in its own right. Viewed thus, hosting a dance with live music becomes a civic activity supporting folk art forms that the United States federal government funds in modest ways and the California state government almost not at all. From the author’s fieldwork experiences, suggestions are offered for how cultural advocates can work to make or keep music sustainable using strategies designed to foster social capital. Finally, social capital is offered as a useful analytical framework for ethnomusicologists, who (for the most part) have yet to take it up.
Civil society—social organization that owes its existence to neither the market nor the state—is most often associated with relationships between people and their government, providing either political advocacy or social services. It is proposed here that social capital in the dance scene fuels public cultural expression, an aspect of civil society often overlooked and a public good in its own right. Viewed thus, hosting a dance with live music becomes a civic activity supporting folk art forms that the United States federal government funds in modest ways and the California state government almost not at all. From the author’s fieldwork experiences, suggestions are offered for how cultural advocates can work to make or keep music sustainable using strategies designed to foster social capital. Finally, social capital is offered as a useful analytical framework for ethnomusicologists, who (for the most part) have yet to take it up.