ABSTRACT
It is no longer possible for a social analysis to dispense with individuals, nor for an analysis of individuals to ignore the spaces through which they are in transit.
—Marc Augé (1995: 120)
This chapter is an extremely localized consideration of one musician and a representation of one piece of music. Ethnographies of the particular offer special rewards as well as a corrective to certain habits in cultural studies. My consideration of the Vietnamese composer Pham Duy1 in the context of Vietnamese American2 technoculture is self-consciously placed at the intersection of cultural studies and ethnography, i.e., I work within an expectation of cultural construction amidst the free flow of power, but I believe that the best way to get at its workings is through close, sustained interaction with the people doing it and an obligation to address their chosen self-representations.
