Ethnomusicology Lecture: Yurika Tamura, UNC Chapel Hill

What if Indigeneity is sound? This talk introduces Tamura's book project, Vibration of Others: Indigeneity as Sound and Sensation, in which she explores Ainu Indigeneity as sound and corporeal sensation.

The Ainu are Indigenous people of Japan. This simple statement took decades of activism to materialize: Japan officially acknowledged the Ainu as Indigenous people in 2019. Much of the success of Ainu activism is owing to the sounds and sensations they generated in the form of music performance. Ainu musicians and performance activists made their claims audible internationally, and in the process, they also produced a particular Ainu sonic philosophy on Indigeneity, covibrancy, and corporeal ethics. 

About the speaker:

Yurika Tamura is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Kaufman Family Global Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Tamura received her Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, studying corpo-materialist feminist theory with Elizabeth Grosz. Tamura is interested in political possibilities and onto-ethics of sound and sensation.

Her articles on the body, sexuality, and Indigeneity and citizenship have appeared in feminist journals, such as Frontiers, Feminist Formations, and Meridians. Her article, Rehumanizing Ainu: Performance of De-subjectification and a Politics of the Sameness has received the 2025 Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award by the Editorial Advisory Board, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. 

Tamura was born and raised in Yaun Mosir, currently known as Hokkaido, Japan. She has Ainu ancestry on her maternal side and is Zainichi Korean on her paternal side.