From Bougainville, Papua New Guinea to Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia : an interview with musician and educator Ben Hakalitz

In popular music studies, many scholars recognise that processes of globalisation have impacted profoundly on the musics they research (Taylor, 1997; Meintjes, 2003; Toner and Wild, 2004) or produce (Neuenfeldt, 2001; Crowdy and Neuenfeldt, 2003). Whilst an appreciation of such broad processes is analytically useful, it is too often in essence an abstraction, a de-personalised analysis. It is therefore useful to provide accounts of how such processes are played out in the lives and careers of individual musicians operating within the global cultural economy of music. This riff uses as its springboard an edited interview that provides a personalised account of the life and career of Ben Hakalitz. He is a Papua New Guinean musician who in many ways epitomises the broad processes at work over the last several decades in the evolution, positioning and marketing of the eclectic genre of world music, in particular a sub-genre categorised here as 'indigenous' world music.