FARC musicians' musical identities and political identities through their music: analysis of their narratives, musical practices and songs in the Colombian peace post-agreement

Abstract

The Colombia Revolutionary Army Forces (FARC) was the largest and most important guerrilla movement in the long and persistent Colombian internal armed conflict. In November 2016, after overcoming significant difficulties, the Colombian government and FARC signed and ratified a Final Peace Agreement; nowadays, FARC has become a lawful political party: Los Comunes. For over fifty years, the movement stimulated cultural and musical activities; FARC's musicians created, composed, arranged, recorded, performed and distributed thousands of songs, initially as part of a guerrilla and now as political party members. This research studies the musical identities of FARC musicians and their political identities as constructed through their music, based on social and cultural perspectives from the field of musical identities, the music and social movements theoretical framework and the transformation of conflict approach. This study observes how musical identities are negotiated as a force for transformative political and cultural changes at the personal and collective levels. The FARC musicians' narratives are a primary source for analysing the sociocultural transformation of identities and how they negotiate their musical and political identities.

Based on a phenomenological perspective and qualitative methods, this research applied an ethnographic approach and narrative analysis based on the Listening Guide Method (LGM) to undertake a qualitative study of two narratives: life histories and songs-as-narratives. The life histories and the songs-as-narratives can be understood as sociocultural performances with multiple and continuous constructions of selfhood. The analysis of (5) FARC musicians' musical biographies (life histories), obtained through three in-depth semi-structured interviews each, and four (4) songs-as-narratives, based on music video material, allows us to observe the relationship between their music and the social movement and the role of their music in the conflict transformation process.

The analysis reveals how the negotiation of musical and political identities interacts mutually and intertwined during conflict transformation experiences involving personal and collective changes. The life histories and song-as-narratives analysis provide evidence about the relationship between Identities in Music (IIM) and their Music in Identities (MII). The IIM and MII are inseparable dimensions of the self. The former is narrated through ex-combatant musicians' experiences as songwriters, singers, instrumentalists, producers, and music teachers committed to their political ideas. The latter emerges in ideological terms, but mainly through personal and collective experiences, emotionally significant, expressing their belonging to the peasantry, indigenous and popular musical cultures. At individual and collective levels, their musical knowledge, interactions and experiences construct new social roles, particularly in transitioning from guerrilla combatants to political party members.

The results reveal that music is a sociocultural resource developed by musicians and the entire movement throughout the decades. The ex-combatant musicians' narratives reveal how they employ their musical experiences to explore the possibilities of the moral imagination, changing lyrics, musical production and distribution processes. Exploring new musical genres or affirming their belonging to some of them, they build different social (political) and cultural (musical) realities in their contexts. The transformation of the conflict is a profound identity negotiation process. During the transformation of the conflict, musical and political identities support each other based on ex-combatant musicians' emotional competence or emotional capital, their different uses of "I" and "we", their personal and collective relationships and connections with broader socioeconomic, political and cultural structures.