Megwen Loveless

My academic trajectory has taken me in two very different directions, starting with my graduate work in the Cultural Anthropology department at Harvard and culminating in my current role as Director of the Portuguese Language Program here at Tulane. I like to think of myself as a social anthropologist who specializes in teaching Portuguese language and as someone who has long encouraged colleagues across disciplines to acknowledge the importance of teaching culture in the language classroom as well as the importance of teaching language to students and scholars of culture.

My research in the ethnomusicology realm focuses on music and dance from the Northeast of Brazil as well as regional/national migrations and the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition in Brazilian popular music. I’ve studied the button accordion with world-renowned musician Arlindo dos Oito Baixos, an experience out of which grew the ethnographic research for my dissertation. That project explores forró music in the cities of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and New York to show mutations in popular music production and consumption across time and space. I examine Luiz Gonzaga as the creator and disseminator of forró at its most “traditional” and iconic and the discourse of forró as a “roots” genre. I then look at more recent permutations—namely forró estilizado and forró universitário—to determine how the roots discourse has remained a constant even while the music production itself has changed. My understanding of the genre comes not just from its change over the years, but also across different nodes in Brazilian migrations, from the rural to urban migrations of the mid-twentieth century to the north-south migrations of the age of industrialization and finally international migrations as a result of Brazilian financial crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately I propose that Brazilians have approached the age of globalism with gusto while still reveling in the memory, many times never actually experienced, of a traditional rural upbringing in simpler more rustic times. It is this imagined “forróscape” that I argue accounts for the great surge in popularity of forró on stages across Brazil and the world from the turn of the 21st century.

Prior to my work on Brazilian music, I lived in Salvador da Bahia, where I researched the afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé and wrote the first English-language work on the culto dos eguns, an ancestor-worship cult within the larger religious complex of candomblé. Though candomblé is well known to be a matrilinear religion (and the city of Salvador a “city of women”), the culto dos eguns is markedly male-centered and my work examined the interplay of these two gendered philosophies and how they converge within practitioner communities in the city and its satellite areas. I also focused my research on the introduction of modern pop culture phenomena into what was defined as a highly traditional and “pure” religious heritage.

I discovered, even while working in the field of anthropology, that the language classroom is in fact an arena in which we can not only describe and analyze culture but actually perform culture and teach it through example, thus beginning my transition to Second Language Acquisition and Portuguese as a foreign language. I taught at Princeton University for over ten years before I came to Tulane, all the while developing materials meant to take advantage of new media and expanding a music-based curriculum that incorporates Brazilian popular music into every class in order to analyze and discuss key vocabulary and grammar from each unit. A major contribution I’ve brought to my work is the importance of developing an on-campus community that offers extensive extra-curricular opportunities to use language in context, and I’ve founded groups built around conversation, music, board games and more as a way to draw students out of the classroom and into the community.

Today our Portuguese language curriculum is a vibrant space that emphasizes music, popular culture, new media as well as innovative technologies inside and outside the classroom. One of the special programs that we have spearheaded here at Tulane are weekly telecollaboration sessions that happen in real time between our intro and intermediate students and partners from the State University of São Paulo. Other current projects include community-based learning activities, ludic learning in the language classroom, development of strategic competence, proficiency-oriented program materials, literacy in L2/L3, and incorporation of African and Asian linguistic and cultural content into the curriculum.