ABSTRACT
Flamenco music marks and defines the Andalusian cultural identity, and at the same time the identity itself also marks and defines the music. The simplistic imaging of flamenco-as-tree often comes paired with another metaphor that objectifies flamenco with yet more unsettling simplism. That metaphor is blood. This characterization of flamenco as tree offers the advantage of simplicity and clarity, a certain blink-value, as it were. Because the political movement turns on the flamenco musical object, it is important to clarify the concept of musical object' in general and to understand the constitution of this particular object, the flamenco style. As a result of such definitional simplicity, the flamenco style comes off as a fixed and narrowly bounded musical object, the sort of thing that would be called a 'cultural trait' in early anthropological parlance. Contemporary Webpages about flamenco are rich with such definitional claims.
