Thesis title: Voci sospese: liuti nordafricani tra sradicamento culturale e memoria musicale. Un’indagine etno-organologica all’intersezione tra studi di cultura materiale, etnomusicologia storica e museografia decoloniale
This thesis grew out of research on historical North African plucked lutes held in three leading Italian museums, but its real focus is methodological. It sets out, formalises, and critically tests an approach to historical ethno-organology that first took shape largely empirically during my master’s research, and is reconstructed here in terms of its theoretical grounding, its unspoken premises, and the circumstances in which it can genuinely be applied. Working in an explicitly reflexive mode, I place this method within a wider constellation of practices and ways of knowing: historical organology, microhistory’s clue-based paradigm, field ethnomusicology, and - by analogy - certain heuristic models drawn from cryptozoology. These are distant domains, but bringing them into conversation helps to clarify how knowledge can be built when sources are fragmentary and the object of study has been marginalised, within a broader epistemology of complexity.
The approach is put to an empirical test through the comparative study of six instruments, grouped into three case studies, designed to show not only what the method can deliver but also where it strains, falters, or stops. It is most productive when a specimen can be triangulated across a diverse body of evidence, and when comparison allows minute morphological differences to be treated as meaningful clues. In such cases, even what is missing can function as “negative evidence”, and a deliberate choice to forgo full resolution becomes a mark of rigour rather than a concession of defeat. The method, by contrast, is less effective when confronted with fragmentary objects, idiosyncratic morphologies, thin comparative corpora, and documentary trails that break off.
In this sense, the thesis’s originality lies in its epistemological commitment to objects that fall outside established typologies, sometimes opaque, often absent from the literature, and frequently stripped of their “voice” by the complex processes through which they were collected and musealised. A further strength is its disciplined use of non-canonical sources and its treatment of iconography not as illustrative garnish but as a contested field in its own right, one that also helps to expose the exoticising regimes of representation that have contributed to consigning these instruments to the silence of museum collections.