ABSTRACT
The 1986 nuclear accident at reactor number 4 of Ukraine’s Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Plant prompted the rise of an “eco-nationalism” that contributed significantly to the Ukrainian national independence movement of the late 1980s. It also resulted in the resettlement of over 200,000 Ukrainians from a zone known by ethnographers to have preserved a rich village culture of traditional folksong and ritual. This article examines the rise of the avtentyka musical movement, which paid close attention to regional and local village styles of musical performance, in relation to the growth of movements of national identity, political sovereignty, environmental awareness, and the neo-traditionalist “Native Faith” religious movement in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Taking cues from Russian historian Dmitry Likhachev’s notion of an “ecology of culture”—influential among practitioners of avtentyka themselves—and from American ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon’s (2009) proposal for an “ecology of music,” we look at how variable notions of culture and nature played into the dynamic relations among music, identity, politics, and ecology in a context of rapid cultural and environmental change.
