First, I learned that it is a lot more powerful to be experiencing things in person than reading about them on the internet. Because I have actually gone to the country and heard the music on the streets of the country where it originated, I know what impact that had on my thinking versus the impact of the information I found while reading for this blog. The performance I heard in Port of Spain was a lot more moving emotionally than all the research I have done since then. I know now how the music came to be a part of the culture, but what I experienced on the island was a more first hand view of the impact on the individual lives of the people.
Second, I learned how history can help a person better understand a piece of another culture that they may have thought they understood, but really they were only seeing it from one perspective. When I was reading about the music of Trinidad in preparation for my trip, I was interpreting it in terms of my current ideas of music. By reading the many different styles of history relating to the steel pan drum I was exposed to the different perspectives of those writing about it. I think this blog has helped me better understand the importance of using many sources, and also to notice the subtle differences in how the history is portrayed that come from differences in background of the author.
Third, with relation to anthropology, I have learned one way that people and their music shape and are shaped by culture. I learned a little about the relationship of music and culture in my anthropology course, but we didn't really looked at an example of how that happened over the course of a little over a century. I observed the subtle changes like the different types of drums, the slow formations of bands, then the formation of organizations of bands, all leading to the Carnival that the citizens of T&T enjoy today. Carnival and the steel pan music are also highly intertwined, which I did not know when I started the blog. Overall, this was probably the biggest thing I learned, because by discovering slowly what I had been taught to be true is different from being shown examples in a classroom.
I feel like I have developed a new understanding of the culture that developed in Trinidad and Tobago and also found an example of how music and culture are mutually constitutive.
