Over the Edge : Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology [1 ed.] 9781443807814, 9781847181046

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Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Edited by

Rhonda Dass, Anthony Guest-Scott, J. Meryl Krieger and Adam Zolkover

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, edited by Rhonda Dass, Anthony Guest-Scott, J. Meryl Krieger and Adam Zolkover This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Rhonda Dass, Anthony Guest-Scott, J. Meryl Krieger, Adam Zolkover and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-104-X

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ............................................................................................................. viii Introduction.........................................................................................................xi Rhonda Dass Section I: The Pendulum Swings Across Edges and Corners Chapter One .........................................................................................................2 Introduction Anthony Guest Scott Chapter Two.........................................................................................................5 Techno … Isn’t That German?: Postmodernism and the African American Origins of Electronic Dance Music Denise Dalphond Chapter Three.....................................................................................................20 A Secret Life of Rock and Roll, Pt. 1: Ghosts and Shadows Gabe Skoog Chapter Four ......................................................................................................33 Raining Blood: Apocalyptic Visions in Extreme Metal Rachel Conover Chapter Five.......................................................................................................47 Selecting Ethnic Identities Through Music and Dance Sheaukang Hew Chapter Six.........................................................................................................57 Marketing Culture: The Big Rom Orchestra of AhÕrkapÕ, Turkey and the Musical Influence of a Minority Gonca Girgin

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Section II: Under the Sun Chapter Seven ....................................................................................................72 Introduction Adam Zolkover Chapter Eight .....................................................................................................75 Na‘au Poi: Spiritual Food for Cultural Enlightenment Aloha Keko’olani Chapter Nine ......................................................................................................92 The Intellectual Property and Chinese Folk Art Jiang Lu Chapter Ten......................................................................................................106 The Concept of Divine Monarchy as it Exists in Present Day England Chantal Clarke Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................119 A Good Offense, Exploring Cinematic Tale Types Daniel Peretti Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................130 Over My Dead Body Jenn Horn Section III: And Because Mom Said We Had to Play Nice Together… Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................144 Introduction J. Meryl Krieger Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................147 Emotional Ethnomusicology: Phenomenological Possibilities for the Study of Music and Affect Paul Schauert Chapter Fifteen.................................................................................................162 Mediating Performance: Metadialogues and Representation J. Meryl Krieger

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Chapter Sixteen ................................................................................................177 When the Tape Comes On: The Frame of Fieldwork Blaine Waide Chapter Seventeen............................................................................................188 Ethno- Muso- Edu- What? Sonya White Chapter Eighteen..............................................................................................192 Ethno- Muso- Edu- What? A One-Act Play Sonya White

PREFACE PUSHING BOUNDARIES AND SHOOTING SPARKS

A dear friend and colleague in the Folklore Department of Indiana University lit the first flame for Pushing Boundaries. Matthew Kerchner and I met our first year on campus as teaching assistants for the large, introductory folklore course. Sharing a propensity to arrive early as well as our interest in folklore, Matthew and I discussed the diverse paths that had led us to folklore and our plans to create connections to other disciplines to increase our employment opportunities in the future. Our conversations began a spark that soon brought common threads and connecting fibers into view from our diverse backgrounds as well as our paths for the future. I quickly became addicted to these flickers of light, and like a junky, I wanted more. Matthew and I knew that we were probably not alone in our view of our academic situations. Matthew proposed bringing together graduate students to explore further the threads hidden in the dim light of our isolation, and to create an event where our goals as graduate students could be discussed and explored. A conference would meet this need. With Matthew’s concurrent defection from the Folklore Department in 2004, it became pertinent that our idea for a graduate conference be implemented. I began making inquiries and arrangements in April of 2004 and where the summer months would usually bring a lessening of my workload, I found myself gearing up for more work than I had previously taken on. I enlisted the aid of Meryl Krieger and Anthony Guest-Scott, both ethnomusicology students in our department. As I felt the pull of academic boundaries pushing me and the conference more toward an ethnomusicological focus, I brought Adam Zolkover, a fellow folklorist, to our committee, evening the departmental representation. The response to our call for papers was so heartwarming and overwhelming that we soon realized that our little one-day conference would need to be expanded before it even began. Each proposal offered a glimpse of new hues of light it would contribute to our project of illumination. Each challenged us as a committee to follow new threads of connection to organize the proposals into a logical pattern for all to see and understand the newly emerging perspective.

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Through the process, we found that with each flickering flame the number of connections and possible combinations increased exponentially. While it presented our weary committee with a more challenging experience than we had at first expected, it also led us to a greater understanding of what we were undertaking. Throughout the organizational process, we came to a new view of the grand scheme of life, academia, scholarship and ourselves. As Matthew and I had surmised, other graduate students were in search of an academic identity that they could call their own. As a committee, we strove to create a space where each scholar could claim a place for themselves and yet support the gathering light as a whole. Pushing Boundaries: Extreme Folklore and Ethnomusicology Conference brought together over 40 scholars from across the United States and abroad for the inaugural gathering of graduate students from a number of disciplines interested in exploring and redefining the boundaries of folklore and ethnomusicology research. The conference began on a sad note, as our student community bid farewell to Alan Dundes who had passed away the week before our gathering. His work had shed bright beams of light into many of our lives and even with his passing; this light would live on in us. Throughout the course of the two-day conference, each presenter challenged us present to look beyond our own perspectives of academic boundaries and illuminate the connecting fibers and common threads that bind our research more closely than we may have previously assumed. Light reflected from the core disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology; their glow grew in depth as those in Music Education, Cultural Studies, and Religious Studies added their distinct but complementary tones to the show. As each paper unfolded and new threads were revealed, it became apparent that there was still more to be seen as new points of light were added. The enormity of what we were doing finally struck me during the second panel that I attended that morning. The excitement and enthusiasm of the participants was generating an emergent light that continued to build throughout that first day. Culminating with the keynote address by Dr. Gregory Barz from Vanderbilt University on his work in South Africa on the musical response to the AIDS epidemic, the day brought to light new connections even our committee had not glimpsed in the proposals. Before the closing ceremonies, the general consensus was that the fire we built would live on and be rekindled and further stoked by a second conference the following year. The first weekend of April 2006 came alive with its own distinct glow over the second annual Pushing Boundaries Conference. While the torch was passed to a new group of students to run the conference, we initial band of torchbearers began to push even further

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organizing the conference proceedings into a volume through which we could expand the circle of light. Our greatest challenge came in exposing the connections we had seen in the grand glow of the performance setting of the conference for our imagined audience in a printed format. By narrowing the scope to the fourteen articles presented within this volume we were able to concentrate the light to elucidate some of the strongest fibers that were spun throughout the two day event. Through out the work on this volume, the light of each participant is once again reflected and refracted giving us glimpses of the possibilities that wait just beyond our current exploration to be revealed as the light grows. Anthony, Adam, Meryl and myself have found ourselves again in the position as torchbearers. Through work begun with a casual conversation, we find that we are now equipped with our own flames we will take with us as we leave Bloomington. With it we will spread the glow as we pass the illumination it provided us on to future generations of graduate students. Perhaps through our efforts, they will see more clearly their place within the academic community and push the boundaries of light to new and ever expanding realms of possibility. I would like to acknowledge a few of the many who have helped us in this endeavor. x First and foremost, thank you Matthew Kerchner for the inspiration and encouragement to light the initial flame. x The support staff of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Ruth Aten, Velma Carmichael, Jan Thoms, and Susan Henning-Harris; without your efforts of guidance and support our light would have become only a memory of a dream. x To all the scholars who have come before us and to all of those who will follow, we thank you not only for your contributions that created a platform for our work, but for the opportunity to carve out our own space and the challenge to let others build upon it. It is to all of you that we dedicate this volume. Rhonda Dass

INTRODUCTION OVER THE EDGE: PUSHING BOUNDARIES OF FOLKLORE AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, CLAIMING AND SHARING ACADEMIC SPACE RHONDA DASS

The claiming of tradition as the unique concept that creates a cohesive and identifiable territory where folklore and ethnomusicology research is centered and legitimized within academic boundaries is itself a nod to academic tradition. This concept of tradition is considered by many the very foundation of folklore and ethnomusicology studies. Through the borders and boundaries of instructional and institutional focus, an academic identity is negotiated and endowed with the fiscal authority that lends an air of authenticity to a discipline of study. By way of combining this identity with institutional traditions in academia, a space is carved for the continuation of research in our closely related fields. This claimed space within academic borders allows for financial support and political power within the bureaucracy of academia. It also creates a situation where the academic structure plays well into the basic constructs of the concept of tradition. As our changing world creates opportunities for new explorations, we as academics are called on to redefine how we divide the academic pie, building upon the past to support our work in the future. The act of redefining and dividing the academic space anew reflects the dual nature of tradition. As we in academia are forced to examine new areas, the static side of tradition that carries our ideas through time and space must flex enough to include new spheres and ideas. Through the negotiation within the balance of stasis and innovation, tradition adapts to retain its useful position in the creation of identity for the institutions of academia as well as for those of us who work within them. It is often at the juncture of these negotiations where opportunities for pushing boundaries is not only presented but necessary to

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retain academic viability for a previously bounded field lest it have its own space reallocated The constructs of academia require that in order to legitimize a field of study, and therefore be able to compete for funding, boundaries and divisions must be set. As a graduate student who hopes to carve her own nitch in the academic community, I, as others, am set the contradictory goals of finding a position for myself where I fit within academic boundaries and also present myself as unique within my field. These goals, when achieved, create a framework that would allow me to make significant contributions that will promote my area of study. The benefits of interdisciplinary study are promoted within scholarly thinking but often are discouraged when budgetary considerations are discussed. This “push me – pull you” situation often impedes the budding scholar with a feeling of displacement and they can end up questioning themselves and their ability to reach either goal let alone both. We form our sense of self by not only by what we are but also by what we are not. This life long process of negotiation in a quest to reconcile how we see ourselves with what others see in us, is not only at the heart of most of the papers presented at the Pushing Boundaries Conference, but also at the base of the struggles we face as graduate students. Through their search to achieve a sense of academic identity the authors in this volume have brought us new textures and ideas from their research to help us all in our creation and location of spaces we can claim as our own. It would not only be arrogant, but also against the very concept of tradition to claim that we are creating something entirely new with this volume. As Adam Zolkover reiterates from his closing remarks at the first Pushing Boundaries Conference within his introduction to Section Two of this work, there is nothing new under the sun. Rather working within the traditions of academic scholarship, we are reformulating what we see and presenting it in what we hope is a previously unexplored perspective of connections and possibilities. Through our presentation of this view, we are asserting a new location for the academic identity negotiation that will challenge and reinforce our positioning within scholarly endeavors. The articles contained in these pages are themselves markers of identity produced within and created to define the academic culture. Working from this base of academic tradition, the essays contained in this volume share grounding in the exploration of culturally produced markers of identity pulling from various academic disciplines. Through the examination of the performance of identity markers, each scholar develops and reveals connections that we may utilize in our ever-expanding perspective of scholarly subjects and approaches.

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Common bonds unite the essays between sections as well as the more defined connections within each section. Working within the traditions of our academic areas, the following essays are grounded in the basic concepts of folk groups and ethnographic research methods that cross disciplinary boundaries. These common threads are not what were brought to light within the conference proceedings, but rather the focus of a new generation of scholarly research that places the emphasis not on the “things” of folklore and ethnomusicology, nor the performance aspect of the field as its predecessors in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. This generation is pushing boundaries of the spaces that are the loci for the examination of the performance of cultural identities. Reaching beyond the borders of nationalism and academic communities, the contributors attempt to shed light on new locations of interest where the view may offer new insight and a reformulation that will become the basis for academic tradition in the future. The settings of the following essays span the physical areas of bounded folk groups, interactions and exchange between distinct folk groups sharing space, diasporic and imagined communities. The thread of spaces can be traced through the works within musical research encompassed in the opening section. Denise Dalphond begins our siting of our academic space within the sphere of electronic dance music. Exploring the historic construction of the genre, Dalphond argues for the space to locate Detroit techno music outside of the sphere of a postmodern discourse where contextualization and particularity may be employed in the analysis of the field. Sharing the historic approach, Gabe Skoog brings a previously clouded area of Rock and Roll into vivid relief with his exploration of the globalizing threads that have previously been outside the realm of academia. Skoog pulls on the thread of global relationships to allow the areas of cultural production within the genre of Rock to redefine the commonly perceived borders. Pulling inward from the global perspective, Rachel Conover lights up the variety of cultural expressions utilizing an apocalyptic connotation in the Extreme Metal sub-culture. While bounded within a specific folk group, Conover brings to the surface for discussion a previously overshadowed cultural use of historic symbolism that sheds light on the larger culture the subgroup sets itself in opposition to in addressing current social issues. The essay by Sheaukang Hew looks at the relationship of the dominant American culture with ethnic communities on the issue of the cultural expressions of music and dance. Hew argues that the creation of ethnic identity is a choice that utilizes cultural expressions in the negotiation and legitimization of the individual identity. Unlike previous arguments based on the idea of “dime store ethnicity,” Hew locates her examination within the factors that influence how an individual comes to a particular choice.

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How the ethnic minority influences the majority is also at the heart of the next essay by Gonca Girgin. Her assessment of the Roma musical community in Istanbul, Turkey takes the opposing perspective from Hew to look at how cultural expressions are brought into the majority. Her positioning as an outsider from her research community reflects the traditional approach within academia. Speaking from within her claimed space of authority in the indigenous Hawaiian community, Aloha Keko’olani swings the spot light not only to the opposite side of the globe from Girgin, but also from the opposing perspective. With her assessment of tacit ideational expressions that illuminate her cultural worldview, Keko’olani not only shifts our view, but also bases her work in the academic tradition of a folklore genre. Jiang Lu brings an insider perspective to the global issue of intellectual property in respect to Chinese folk art. Her positioning as an insider allows her to expand our understanding of how a culture adapts to an outside concept. Utilizing three examples to illustrate her ideas, Lu brings issues of patents, copyrights and cultural appropriation in China into a new light. Pulling us across the world to better view for cultural understanding, Chantal Clarke brings a refreshingly new look at British monarchy and the importance it still holds for the English folk group. Tracing the idea of divine rulers beyond the legal standing of leadership allows rays of light to illuminate how our traditions may be stronger than our legislative precedence. Daniel Peretti expands the academic location of folklore to look to the film industry in the production and dissemination of folktales. Through his analysis of the motifs presented to us through the cinematic medium, Peretti pushes the boundaries of folklore to a new positioning brought about by the development of technologies. Reminding us of the fluid nature of tradition, Peretti allows us to consider possibilities brought about by the shifts in our culture. Jenn Horn not only gives us a new location in the presentation of folkloric information but also pushes the boundaries brought about by contemporary cultural changes. Her work forces us to consider how our cultural shifts in technology and family structures have changed our ideas of death and the treatment of the dead. Presenting her information in a narrative style makes us focus our gaze back within academia and the traditions surrounding scholarly presentations. Paul Schauert shines his light in another direction within academia. His essay allows us to view the methodology of research within ethnomusicology and suggests consider an addition to the spectrum of accepted hues. Schauert argues that we consider a new location within the emotive realm as the new frontier in study and analysis. Similar to considerations when studying ideational folklore, emotive research may be complicated in the collection process, but more rewarding for analysis of cultural processes of expression.

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While the study of the recording process and the influence recording technology has had on music is not a new area of study within the field of ethnomusicology, J. Meryl Krieger directs her lens at women and their distinct role in this area. In this paper Krieger examines how her role in the studio is affected by recording technology and the strategies employed in the mediation of her role in the studio that lends light to the metadiscourse produced through technological advances. Pointing his lens at a different musical genre, Blaine Waide shines the spotlight at what he terms the “blues interview” allowing us to examine the academic traditions deployed in the negotiations between the researcher and those he interviews. The underside of Krieger’s work is illuminated as Waide exposes the negotiations brought to light by the racial constructs and issues of power attached to it within certain genres of music. Sonya White takes us back to how we communicate within the academy through her work on ethno music educational techniques. On the opposing side of the spectrum from Horn, White presents new strategies for presentation of academic issues to those outside the circle of scholarly lights. Her introduction and play present a way of utilizing performance to obtain educational goals that has great potential within the fields of folklore and ethnomusicology and pushing boundaries to other ethnographic based disciplines. The common thread of local and how we create our identity through our positioning is the outstand fiber binding these essays. Underlying connections throughout the works also bring to light the negotiations we undertake to better understand ourselves and through that understanding shed light on others. As the academic pendulum swings, we begin an era of inward focus, which might bring with it an examination of academia and the traditions we use in its identity negotiations. From within the heavily trodden paths of tradition we begin to negotiate our academic identity and carve a nitch where our new perspective can gain authority and be legitimized. There may be nothing new under the sun, but perhaps through the unique combination of the common colors each author brings to this work, we can create a rare amalgamation that will shine on a new path for the future.

SECTION I: THE PENDULUM SWINGS ACROSS EDGES AND CORNERS

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION ANTHONY GUEST SCOTT

Of power, Michel Foucault wrote, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (1977:194). As with the term “power,” the term “boundary” can carry with it many of the same pejorative associations, but boundaries are also fundamentally productive. Not only do boundaries produce reality, organizing thoughts and experiences into meaning, but also they are special and intensely productive cultural loci—vortexes of heightened meaning manufacture where defining terms and concepts in the debate are arrayed in their most explicit housing. As such, we can say that boundaries, like power, produce people, and people thus become occupied with manipulating them ad infinitum. Even as we perceive these boundaries, however, we know they do not divide distinct and incompatible realms. We know they can be redrawn and rebuilt, and the fact that boundaries are always pushed, pulled, bent, broken, and relocated, in a state of perpetual motion, means that every part so divided is engaged in an endless dialogue with every other. This section of the book brings together five essays that all, at varying stages in the musiculture research endeavor, seek out tucked-away pockets of human meaning. These explorations are also dialogues, however, intended to compare and illuminate how such pockets resonate with and against the larger formations with which they are inextricably connected. The pendulum swings across identity terrain from the individual to the collective, from minority to majority, from generic sub-levels to the surface, from ethnographic site to theoretical framework, and from the narrative margins of history to page center, and in doing so, casts a small light upon meaning at its edges and corners. Music, as an expressive form, never comes packaged without a wrapper of identity. Some form of self-presentation is always involved, even if

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that self is constituted as more than a purely unique entity—part of a long, but clearly articulated story of selves stretching back beyond recorded time. As people move through the world, they find themselves in contexts where new articulations of self become necessary to find a foothold that other people can recognize. The movement across great geographic distances, a physical terrain, is also movement across great stretches of social and psychological territory, and these travels continue for generations after the journey to shape selves. In a country like the United States that has come to be identified as a country of immigrants, a multicultural “melting pot,” multiple selves (and, specifically, multiple ethnic selves) are made available for selection and inclusion in the repertory. Ethnic selves become time-traveling vehicles enabling many Americans to reach back to a sense of community that they perceive as a fading pocket of meaning. Where is this selection happening; in what domains does it become manifest? One such dimension is sown together with the threads of musical acts—acts of belonging. Individual self and collective self are thus articulated against one another, the part and the whole, with neither color looking the same without its adjacent hue. In this way, smaller collectivities can profoundly shape larger social formations. In these contexts, cultural influence is inverted through musical acts of belonging that are simultaneously acts of equalization. Power relationships between dominant and subordinate ethnic groups may consequently shift when refracted through the lens of music that, as a form of entertainment, is an intensively sought commodity. Through such channels, the musical performance of distinctive (but equally valuable) cultural and human identities becomes also a financial endeavor that can open up new doors of access to social and political rights for disadvantaged groups. A minority voice does not echo in an endless void; it is reflected from the walls erected around it by the majority. Nevertheless, those outside the walls can become fascinated with what lies within. Social barriers are broken down in such ways, and rebuilt in others. Musical selves, and groups of selves, are not just ethnically constituted; they can also be carved out of the rock of generic forms. Layers of sub-genres blossom when people decide to cordon off generic terrain, and the construction of musical borders becomes a process of distinction. These borders may lie at an increasing distance from cultural centers, and deliberately so. Call them micromusics, subcultures, sub-genres, underground, alternative, or any of the host of terms that have arisen in academic and journalistic writing to describe such musical enclaves at the margins—identity formation and expression forge the anchor for this pendulum. We can locate the emergence of these generic collectivities through the examination of a whole host of expressive dimensions. Symbolic representations like clothing, body adornment, the artwork on band T-

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shirts and music videos, textual analyses of song lyrics, etc., thus become the compositional elements in alternative narratives of reality at the edge of a broader cultural “center,” a normality which is ignorant of the more important values cloaked in its shadows. The power of the center is always an interlocutor with the formation of the periphery. This dialogue does not only form the superheated core at the center of the musiculture dynamic, boundary and meaning production, but also extends to analyses of such phenomena. The intellectual life of ideas arcs according to a pendulum-like motion of its own, swinging toward and away from the center of popular use. In the process, often different kinds of ideas become bundled together, growing into a conceptual morass that seems to take on a power of its own. The consequence of this accelerated conceptual inflation is that these murky analytic tools get used in places where they explain very little beyond continuing to justify the importance and power of the megatheory. In the process, certain expressive forms become banners and poster-children for megatheories even as they are practiced in social sites and in historical trajectories that defy such analyses. Finally, historical narratives of musical genres, compiled from the bones of periodization, comprise our last pendulum. Again moving from the center to the outer edge of the pendulum’s swing casts a light upon the forgotten people and music that played their parts before growing dim, grayed-out, and finally extricated from the picture. Thus, the task of revisionist history is to go back and cast some light upon these souls, broadening the scope of the narrative (and problematizing the linear course of narrative itself as a valid form of historical representation). When this narrative scope is expanded to the level of the global, it can and must account for global processes of musical importation, appropriation, and expression, processes that have been a part of human existence for millennia as people traverse boundaries of geography, identity, expression, thought, and time. People try to make sense of their world by articulating all of these boundaries against and in alignment with one another, and, consequently the lines (and spaces) change: geographies become selves, selves become genres, theories become histories, and histories become geographies. These essays swing across all of these alignments, revealing their musical motivation.

References Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

CHAPTER TWO TECHNO … ISN’T THAT GERMAN?: POSTMODERNISM AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN ORIGINS OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC DENISE DALPHOND

In academic research on American popular music, postmodern approaches to cultural and musical analysis have proven widely acceptable. Scholars highlight pastiche, recycling, borrowing, and multiplicity as characteristic of popular music, thus calling for postmodernism as a way to analytically access and account for these supposedly unique processes of making music and culture. During the 1990s, scholarship on African American and American popular music set the default on postmodernism, and rigorous research and analysis were exchanged for indiscriminate applications of a popular theory to any musical example that appeared to be referencing other discrete musical examples or texts. I argue that the multitude of conceptual characteristics said to fall under the rubric of postmodernism fails to fit cleanly under this rubric when the complex histories of these ideas are explored beyond their theoretical boundaries. In this essay, I explore more nuanced understandings and recognitions of history in relation to studies of African American music and American popular music and postmodern theory. I focus specifically on techno music, a sub-genre of electronic dance music, exploring the African American historical foundations of techno and proposing analytical points of departure that do not automatically opt for postmodernist approaches to Black popular music. Alternatively, I suggest examining techno in terms of textual and discursive interaction. This approach enables an examination of the ways in which musical texts in electronic dance music performance are bounded and repeatable, as well as what qualities provide musical texts with their capacity for involvement in processes of intertextuality, recontextualization, and interdiscursivity. The multitude of sonic and performative dimensions in electronic dance music is immense and staggering. A performance of electronic dance music consisting

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of one DJ, two turntables, a basic mixer that allows the levels of bass and treble to be adjusted and allows the DJ to “cross fade” between the two turntables, and a few crates of records can be aesthetically pleasing and commercially successful in terms of paid admission into a live performance as well as purchase of a recording. However, there are other types of equipment used to manipulate the pre-recorded sound on the records played on turntables, as well as equipment that enables a musician to electronically produce a composition performed live using electronic equipment. Performance of electronic dance music is a complex process with many layers of textual involvement and circulation. Before I begin a detailed discussion of postmodern literature and analysis of Detroit techno, I will foreground some reasons why postmodern approaches may not suit techno, nor much of African American and American popular music in general. First, postmodernism has been defined and used by many scholars as a meta-theory (encompassing an expansive collection of theoretical concepts and analytical approaches) as well as a theory in its own right. Scholars also interpret postmodernism as a historical framework, identifying it as a particular stretch of time during the mid-to-late-twentieth century. In much of the writing in which scholars apply postmodern analysis to popular music, and to popular culture in general, the writer devotes a great deal of space to describing the cultural expression under examination and why it fits under some vague notion of a postmodern rubric. However, very few words are actually dedicated to the arduous task of defining the author’s particular interpretations of postmodernism. What we are left with is a frustrating conflation of historical periodization, theoretical framework for understanding cultural expression and social action, and collection of various theoretical ideas. This entanglement of referential frames becomes crystallized into a grand narrative of pastiche, rupture, and deconstruction, a grand narrative that would, at least at the level of metatheory, seem to defy the fundamental relativistic tenets of postmodern theory. There is a sort of internally inconsistent logic operating here that is particularly evident when scholars raise up American popular music in general, but particularly hip hop and electronic dance music as postmodern mascots—paradigms through which postmodern ideas and analyses come shining through. This is commonly the case because many approach the music with postmodernism ready-made to fit around the subject matter, an approach that begins at the top and works its way down to the subject of analysis. Much postmodern scholarship applies the theory to American popular music in just such a general, universal way, making rigorous definitions and qualifications seem unnecessary. Scholars write about postmodernism assuming that it exists somehow in an amorphous discursive entity beyond the confines of

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a printed publication, and that this discursive knowledge is universally recognized, understood, and accepted. In addition, postmodern analyses of music often disregard history in exchange for exciting ideas about recycling and pastiche. I argue that particularity and contextualization are fundamental to any cultural analysis. With this in mind, it becomes nearly impossible to engage with a topic of research using a top-down approach. A responsibility to the particular social and historical contexts of Detroit techno, for example, stresses the importance of developing an appropriate theoretical approach that suits research findings. Techno music does not fit into the postmodern formula in which a performance, cultural expression, or social action is measured for its use of pastiche and disjuncture, and catalogued as postmodern. This conception of culture assumes that DJs do not engage in any form of sophisticated cultural referencing, rather, they haphazardly mix in any sound nearby into their “recycled” performances. There is a great deal more complexity to conceptions of continuity in relation to history and culture in the context of techno. Applying an intertextual analysis to Detroit techno recognizes this continuity because it emphasizes the constellation of texts and the connectivity between these texts and the people who create, recreate, and manipulate them.

Narratives of Origin Techno, along with house, jungle, drum n’ bass, hard house, down-tempo, trance, big beats, and garage are all forms of music created electronically by DJs at turntables and/or other electronic equipment (such as drum machines, multitrack mixers, computers, and samplers) and are parts of a larger genre that music theorist Mark Butler calls electronic dance music (Butler 2003:6). According to Butler, this term was established by fans and musicians and is popularly accepted. Describing the production of electronic dance music, Butler explains that “the most distinctive characteristic…is its utilization of electronic technologies such as synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, and samplers” (2003:6). Electronic dance music is most commonly performed by a live DJ in a dance environment. The musicians performing this music often perform impressively varied collections of musical references to African American forms of music such as rhythm and blues, disco, and hip hop, as well as many other types of musical samples. Techno is perceived by many musicians as well as the popular print and visual media as having its origins in European rave culture. To the contrary, the history of techno has its beginnings in African American parties and dance clubs in Detroit in the late 1970s. Moving outward from Detroit, this music and its creators became popular in Europe at rave parties in the late-1980s while slowly

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losing community support in Detroit. During the 1990s, techno returned to the United States and became associated with rave parties attended by white teenagers and young adults and the productions of European and American white DJs. Despite techno’s locally specific beginnings (Detroit), this music became broadly known as electronic dance music and associated with European popular traditions. Techno is popularly and academically considered to be a subgenre of electronic dance music and grew out of a complex of musical and cultural influences during the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to many DJs and popular and scholarly writing on electronic dance music, the narrative of origins for electronic dance music is constructed around African American, urban, gay, male club cultures in Chicago and Detroit during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As ethnomusicologist Kai Fikentscher describes, techno also had strong initial connections to New York City’s disco culture and its later Underground Dance Music culture. Fikentscher explains that Bronx-bred DJ Frankie Knuckles took residence at a Chicago dance club called the Warehouse in 1977, forging a link between Chicago and New York. Knuckles had spent many years DJing in New York dance clubs in the late 1970s with “his friend and mentor Larry Levan [renowned New York DJ], who had declined an offer to relocate there from Paradise Garage in New York” (Fikentscher 2005:467). The links between Chicago and Detroit were also powerful and mutually influential. Many DJs creating techno in Detroit in the early 1980s tell stories of traveling to Chicago for the weekend to hear important house DJs. They would then return to Detroit and try to emulate what they heard as well as adopt those Chicago sounds to a Detroit techno sound. According to independent techno historian Beverly May, “Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May describes how powerfully these Chicago road trips impacted the young Detroit artists during their formative years: ‘If you wanted to hear Ron Hardy or if you wanted to hear Frankie Knuckles play, it was like Juice, so much juice. Frankie was on the Fridays and Ronnie was on the Saturdays, so we just made a weekend out of it’” (May 2006:335). In her detailed history of Detroit techno, May describes the complex of musical influences from which techno emerged. She states: “The musical roots of techno lie in several divergent traditions: experimental electronic music, 1980s electro-pop, German ‘kraut-rock,’ and, most importantly, the African American heritage of electro-funk, disco, and house” (May 2006:331). Other influences include music inspired by Detroit radio, European electronic music like that of Kraftwerk, American electronic music of the 1960s and 1970s such as Phillip Glass, and Chicago house, (techno’s precursor by about seven years). Many techno DJs from Detroit claim other references like “James Brown and

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Sly Stone, Afrika Bambaataa, George Clinton, Robert Moog, the Paradise Garage, Frankie Knuckles, and the Warehouse” (Glazer 2003:66). Detroit’s early techno music makers were mostly African American men and came from suburban, middle-class, college educated backgrounds. Three men—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—are often referred to as the “Belleville Three” or the “Holy Trinity” of techno and are credited with the creation of techno music in Detroit. Kevin Saunderson recounts to pop culture journalist Simon Reynolds, “In Belleville, … it was pretty racial still at that time, there wasn’t a lot of black people there. So we three [Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Saunderson] kind of gelled right away” (Reynolds 1998:14). In an interview between Reynolds and Derrick May, another of the Belleville Three, May explains, For us, it was always a dedication…. We used to sit back and philosophize on what these people thought about when they made their music, and how they felt the next phase of the music would go. And you know, half the shit we thought about the artist never even fucking thought about!... Because Belleville was a rural town, we perceived the music differently than you would if you encountered it in dance clubs. We’d sit back with the lights off and listen to records by Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra. We never just took it as entertainment, we took it as a serious philosophy. (1998:15) Reynolds goes on in his book Generation Ecstasy to discuss the African American middle class teenagers infatuated with European popular culture in Detroit during the late 1970s. He claims, “The Belleville Three belonged to a new generation of Detroit-area black youth who grew up accustomed to affluence, thanks in part to the racially integrated United Auto Workers union” (1998:15). African American teenagers of this cultural and economic background in Detroit established high school social clubs who would rent out spaces to hold dance parties. In these clubs, the teenagers preferred Italian disco, electro-funk from New York, Euro-synthpop, and American New Wave. These “Europhile tastes” of Detroit’s African American, middle class youth were influenced by radio DJ Charles Johnson, “the Electrifyin’ Mojo,” “whose show, ‘The Midnight Funk Association’ aired every night on WGPR through the late seventies and early eighties. Alongside synth-driven funk by Prince, Mojo would play Kraftwerk’s ‘Tour De France’ and other Euro electro-pop. Every night, Mojo would do his Mothership spiel, encouraging listeners to flash their headlights or bedroom lamp so that the intergalactic craft would know where to touch down” (Reynolds 1998:16).

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Postmodernism and Popular Music Studies The historical time period in which techno emerged as well as the ways in which techno music was created made the music ripe for scholars to group it with other contemporary popular music forms being labeled postmodern. Like techno, many popular musical forms surfacing during this period with generally related musical characteristics are often joined together under the label postmodern. Postmodernism is often applied as a limiting label to cultural expressions as a way of emphasizing a dramatic rupture with the past and with modernity. Hip Hop, electronic dance music, and much American popular music in general are all said to be postmodern forms of musical expression. The application of the label ‘postmodern’ to these popular music forms highlights particular musical and communicative characteristics, specifically the manipulation of equipment, as well as the eclectic use of cultural referencing in the music. When analyzing electronic dance music and hip hop, scholars locate the postmodern in the music through the element of sampling in its use of rupture and pastiche, recreation and reinterpretation, claiming it as the practical, sonic manifestation of postmodern theory. It is interesting to note that most of these scholars who claim postmodernism for electronic dance music have not conducted ethnographic research in order to confirm such suspicions. Many scholars apply postmodern theory as a definitive answer constructed primarily from academic discourse. Historical periodization presents another level for analysis of popular musical expression to which postmodernism is often applied. John Storey emphasizes the central problem with this relationship when he explains that, “Perhaps the best way to think of the relationship between pop music and postmodernism is historically. In most accounts, the moment of postmodernism begins in the late 1950s – the same period as the emergence of pop music. Therefore, in terms of periodization, pop music and postmodernism are more or less simultaneous” (Storey 2001:153). Storey, like many scholars of postmodernism and music, assumes that postmodernism is a social and philosophical foundation of late twentieth century, “advanced capitalist democracies of the West” (2001:147). He further states, “whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility or a new cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes can be most readily found” (2001:147).1 Constructing a postmodern analysis of popular music around a conception of history as a universal, unilateral, linear progression of time for “advanced capitalist democracies of the West” is a dubious project. Means of cultural communication labeled postmodern by many scholars might be more accurately recognized as consistently recurring elements

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and styles of cultural communication for many people, in many places, at many times in local and global histories of human social existence. Using pastiche as a common point of analysis of popular music, many scholars branch their analysis out to include globalization in this discussion. Cultural studies scholar Tony Mitchell focuses a great deal of his writings on the effects of globalization on popular music, as well as the effects of popular music on globalization. In Popular Music and Local Identity, he recognizes the autonomy and power of the cultures into which American popular music has been imported and claims that culturally specific interpretations of this music outside the United States are localized versions, which incorporate native, or local cultural references into the music. He locates this discussion within the theoretical concept of postmodernism. Mitchell relies upon a predictable intellectual narrative commonly used by scholars of Hip Hop music and popular culture in general: the “fragmentation and breakdown of ‘master narratives’ in popular music led both to a widespread tendency towards pastiches and recyclings of earlier forms and idioms of popular music, and to an exploration of Third World musics” (Mitchell 1996: 3). Ultimately, Mitchell provides evidence for challenges to this postmodern narrative, but remains loyal to the unifying concept of postmodernism in his analysis of popular culture as a global phenomenon.

Postmodernism, Historicity, and Techno Mitchell’s version of the postmodern critique is inadequate in application to contemporary African American and American popular music. This approach operates without any historical discussion of Black musical forms that preceded Hip Hop and techno, and that preceded the postmodern era. Any prior developments or expressions in Black music and culture are almost irrelevant to the postmodern theorizing of contemporary Black popular music. History does play a role, however, as scholars categorize time in terms of two distinct eras known as modernity and postmodernity, as in the work of John Storey. Not all scholars adhere to this approach, but for Mitchell, the music-making practices he references are interpreted as having begun at the time modernity came to an end. This is generally assumed to be around 1960. This is hardly the case for African American musical expressions of any genre. As musicologist Guthrie Ramsey explains, “African Americans have continually (re)articulated, questioned, abandoned, played with, and reinforced their ethnic identities through vernacular musical practices and many other activities. …The process of repetition and revision that characterize these musical styles shows how black musicians and audiences have continually established a unified and dynamic ‘present’ through music” (Ramsey 2003:36).

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In this statement, as well as throughout his book, Ramsey recognizes historical and social contextualization as paramount in his analysis of what he calls “race music.” Ramsey presents important ideas challenging postmodern constructions of history and cultural communication. He expands the discussion of African American cultural processes beyond the confines of postmodernism, prioritizing contextual contingency over postmodern constructions of time and place. He is concerned with identifying and exploring “some of the ways in which meaning is achieved in various styles of African American music,” and a principal point of inquiry for Ramsey is “How does the music under consideration work as discourses and signifying practices at specific historical moments?” (2003:3). A general recognition of difference and multiplicity of voices, identities, experiences, and, at a basic level of communication, texts, is an important concept in the analysis of Detroit techno. However, it is in the application of postmodernism to specific cultural action that problems arise. Mitchell’s construction of popular music as postmodern assumes that the acts of appropriating, recycling, mutating, and recombining “earlier and contemporaneous genres and sub-genres” are unique to the contemporary popular culture beginning in the late 1980s and limited mostly to North America and Western Europe. Paul Gilroy, however, a central figure in the study of the history and culture of the African diaspora, has claimed that these postmodern practices are not new, but rather are fundamental characteristics of Black culture in general. Mitchell references Gilroy’s concept of a “changing same,” as developed by Amiri Baraka, to describe his interpretation of “[t]he disintegration of ‘master narratives’ in popular music” as containing “the seeds of regeneration” (Mitchell 1996:16). Explaining his position more clearly than Mitchell’s interpretation, Gilroy states, “Today, this involves the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions that suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilizing flux of the postcontemporary world” (Gilroy 1991:126). Gilroy explains that Black popular music should be recognized as part of an “Atlantic diaspora,” or diasporic continuum, “in which the use of historical musical forms through sampling and re-appropriation is not parody or pastiche but a reconstruction of black histories, folding back on themselves time and again to celebrate and validate the simple, unassailable fact of their survival” (Gilroy 1993:5). Gilroy is expressing the notion that Black popular music is not postmodern in its approach to music making through cultural referencing. He explains that Black music of the postmodern period, historically speaking, reaches far back

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into the age of modernity, and relies on performance practices and musicmaking practices that can be traced in modified ways back through the history of the music of African Americans and continuing back to cultural expressions of women and men in West Africa before slavery had become the foundations for the world’s economy and social systems. Thus, the inception of techno during the particular historical moment labeled “postmodern” does not automatically establish it as such. Categorizing Black music in this way is reductive and does not allow for any recognition of history, or of African and African American conceptual approaches to music-making that are fundamental to contemporary popular genres. As Paul Gilroy and Guthrie Ramsey have clearly established, concepts like cultural recycling, pastiche, re-creation, and reinterpretation of past utterances are historically imbedded in African American culture in general as well as in many other cultural and geographic contexts. These cultural recycling practices have long been recognized by many scholars as essential to African American expression and life. Sharing and borrowing were vital when enslaved women, men, and children were forced to migrate to the Americas; families and ethnic groups were separated, and people who shared language and other cultural practices and expressions were forced to live in isolation. In order to survive and thrive in such a hostile “New World,” Africans, and soon after, African Americans, needed to communicate with others in similar situations of enslavement. The Negro folk spiritual, and it’s concert hall adaptation—the arranged spiritual, minstrel songs, ragtime, jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, rock n’ roll, soul, funk, disco, hip hop, house, techno, neo-soul, and the list goes on: sharing of musical, cultural, social, ideological, historical, and communicative characteristics is commonplace in these musical genres and is a prominent quality of much of African American and American popular musics. Historian and American studies scholar Tricia Rose explains the problems with labeling rap and hip hop as postmodern. She claims that this approach tends to ignore the “contradictory stance toward capitalism, raging sexism, and other ‘non progressive elements’ that have always been part and parcel of jazz, the blues, and R&B, as well as any number of other nonblack cultural forms” (Rose 1994:24). She further explains that linking Hip Hop and rap with postmodernism disregards the historical social and cultural developments that led to the creation of Hip Hop and generated dramatic change over the past three decades of the genre’s life. Privileging a different reading of history, Rose is clearly conceiving of profoundly greater degrees of change as well as continuity over time and space. Richard Shusterman rationalizes the application of postmodernism to popular musics like rap and Hip Hop. He explains, “By considering rap in the context of postmodern aesthetics, I hope not only to provide academic

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aestheticians with a better understanding of this much maligned but little studied genre of popular art. I also hope to enhance our understanding of postmodernism through the concrete analysis of one of its unique cultural forms” (Shusterman 1991:614). His analysis is thus an attempt to elevate the intellectual status of rap music towards something that can be legitimately researched and analyzed in academic settings. He lists a number of “themes and stylistic features” that are characteristics of postmodernism, such as recycling, eclecticism, embracing new technology and mass culture, challenging notions of artistic autonomy and purity, “and an emphasis on the local and temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal” (1991:614). He then explores aesthetic and practical features of rap music, framing each discussion within one of these postmodern themes, such as “Cutting [or Sampling] and Temporality” (1991:618). Shusterman explains postmodern interpretations of history through the writings of Fredric Jameson. Advocating historicity, Jameson (and Shusterman) problematizes conceptions of “real history [as] the one true account of a fully determinate past whose structure, context, and meaning are fixed and unrevisable” (Shusterman 1991:624). Shusterman asks, “Does not the postmodern and post-structuralist decentering critique of definitive, ontologically grounded boundaries put the whole notion of being ‘fully outside’ seriously into question?” (1991:628). However, these sentiments could possibly be accredited to many different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including post-structuralism as a broad category that does not necessarily include postmodernism, and current anthropologically-based deconstructivist interrogations of truths and universals that became pervasive throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. Some popular music scholars engage postmodern ideas in their analyses of various sub-genres of electronic dance music. Techno, house, and drum n’ bass are a few of the particular sub-genres that have been treated in this way. British ethnomusicologist Tony Langlois characterized house music in the UK as having “culturally postmodern elements” in a 1992 article titled “DJs and House Music Culture in the UK.” In this important (but all too brief) article about the British history of house music, Langlois discusses the aesthetics of the genre through an exploration of the artistry of the DJ in performance. He explains, “DJs create original music as ‘bricoleurs,’ using a wide range of sound material, some not obviously ‘musical,’ in an organized, expressive way. Their use of records as sources for ‘recomposition in performance’ may be novel, but the process of improvising with available sounds and musical structures is not” (Langlois 1992:235). In a more explicit segment aligning his approach with postmodernism, Langlois states, “The culturally postmodern elements which are found in

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architecture, literature, and House music are probably the result of very much the same historical factors” (1992: 237). This sentence is tremendously disappointing because it fails to explicitly determine postmodernism’s application to house music. It also fails to define his use of postmodern theory.

Analyzing the Circulation of Text and Discourse as an Alternative to Postmodernism My critique of postmodern theories of popular music leads to an alternative possibility. I propose that the analytical combination of intertextuality and interdiscursivity is a more productive and effective approach because it allows for greater awareness of history and ideology and communicative processes that cannot be understood as bounded communicative events. Performances of electronic dance music, as well as those of its sub-genres, are texts, and the overall performance by an artist in some type of associated venue is an act of entextualization. Working from a definition of text as an interpretive construct that is isolatable and repeatable, characterizing these pre-recorded samples and other electronic sounds as texts is not a dramatic leap from the literary, bounded notion of a text. In the ways that they are manipulated and “re-performed,” or perhaps “remediated,” these sonic elements are extractable from their “original” recording or performance. They are recontextualizable; they can be shared relatively easily, and they have a “capacity to ‘spite the power of time,’” in the words of Johan Gottfried Herder (Bauman 2004:1). Making the leap from verbal to non-verbal texts has the potential to complicate; however, it is not difficult to imagine a text as a bounded communicative event instead of a bounded speech event. Analysis of communication framed by dialogue and interdiscursivity also allows for consideration of ideology in the formation of utterances (Bauman 2005:146). When DJs perform, they are referencing texts as well as discourses of ongoing, circulating musical, cultural, and ideological communication. Powerful insights into intertextuality and interdiscursivity in electronic dance music can be found in live performances by a group of four techno DJs known as the 3 Chairs. The four DJs are Theo Parrish, Rick Wilhite, Malik Pittman, and Kenny Dixon, Jr. a.k.a. Moodymann. They are frequently regarded by popular media as representative of contemporary Detroit house and techno. Race and ethnicity are important to their artistic presentation. All four men are African American. Each of them, to differing degrees, make musical and African American historical references to Detroit in their performances, both live and commercially recorded. The African American heritage of these

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musical styles specific to Detroit is stressed as primary to histories of the music and of the city. When the 3 Chairs perform live in a dance club, they take up their space at the decks in tag-team fashion. Since Moodymann/Dixon has released, by far, the most number of full- length albums, and seems to be the most well known name of the group, he tends to play a full, lengthy set at some point in the middle of the approximately five-hour night. Dixon encompasses in his performances much of the rhythm and blues, hip hop, and techno that have been created over the past half century in Detroit. Dixon plays Motown records frequently as well as other rhythm and blues artists popular during the 1960s and 1970s like James Browne and Curtis Mayfield. Disco and funk, as well as historically significant techno tracks, are regular elements in his performances. The other three men, Theo Parrish, Malik Pittman, and Rick Wilhite, take multiple, relatively brief turns in the position of DJ. Parrish often begins with a very bouncy, upbeat disco set, and later in the night, for one of his other turns at the decks, plays extraordinarily deep, dark, knock-you-down-on-your-ass techno. Malik Pittman spends a lot of his time in this deep area as well. He almost makes you want to run away it’s so intense. Rick Wilhite artfully blends all these styles together, playing funk, disco, rhythm & blues, house, and techno. Live performances by this group do not easily lend themselves to a postmodern approach because the intentional historical, cultural, and social references cannot be accounted for using postmodern conceptions of history and cultural interaction. Like each of the four DJs who make up the 3 Chairs, Moodymann also maintains his own solo DJ career with an extensive catalogue of releases and his own record label. He is a musician who performs and records Detroit techno with minimal outreach to popular media. He remains hidden, by choice, in the “underground” Detroit music scene as part of his profound desire to reach out to the “small majority that listens” (Moodymann 1998). One of his albums, Mahogany Brown, is a passionate embrace of Detroit culture through its music. On a track consisting of 7:07 minutes of switching around local radio stations, he presents the sonic cultural complex of the city through local hip hop and Motown songs, local sports announcers, interviews about the spirit and authenticity of contemporary Black popular music as opposed to the music and culture of the 1970s, and an interview with Moodymann himself. This song is a bounded communicative event in itself, but is also full of smaller, relational texts compiled to create an intertextual text in the context of a larger text that is the album. On other parts of the album, he includes samples of, and/or performances with, musicians who remain central to the Detroit techno and hip hop scene. Two of these include Norma Jean Bell on the track

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“M.E.A.N.D.N.J.B.”, and Lord Imran Ahmed on the track “Me and My Peoples Eyes”. Broader African American cultural references are fundamental to his music as well. In addition to the mostly Black American musical and cultural references in the first track, “Radio” (described above), Moodymann includes as the introduction to track three, “On the Run,” an emotional answering machine message from his uncle explaining the struggles of being an African American man, floating in and out of jail, and trying to support a family. The final track on the album, “Black Sunday”, includes a sample of a demonstrative sermon in a Black church as a central element of the song. Thus, Detroit and Black American cultural expressions function as Moodymann’s central points of reference in the creation of this album.

Conclusion Text is a suitable term to describe sonic dimensions of performance of electronic dance music; however, discourse is applicable to other dimensions of the social and cultural experiences of electronic dance music. In an interview I conducted with a performance artist and DJ named Carrie Gates from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, she explained sampling as a means by which DJs reference the past—not just specific pieces of music that were produced, but historical discourse, memory, stories of origins of the music, and competent DJ performance in general. By sampling previously recorded pieces of music, texts, DJs are not only entering into a dialogic process of circulating texts, but they are also entering into a broader realm of interdiscursivity that rearticulates historical threads and forges connections with the people and music that preceded them.

Notes 1

Storey’s designation of the 1950s as the decade during which “pop music,” and, I suppose, by extension, “popular culture” is also highly debatable, and points out basic problems with marking off great divides in historical periodization. This kind of analysis can be both highly useful and misleading, as historical continuities are de-emphasized or obliterated entirely.

References Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London & New York: Routledge. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Bauman, Richard. 2004. A World of Other’s Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. —. 2005. “Commentary: Indirect Indexicality, Identity, Performance: Dialogic Observations.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):145-150. Butler, Mark. 2003. “Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music.” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University. Feld, Steven. 1996. “Pygmy Pop: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28:1-35. Fikentscher, Kai. 2006. Disco and House. In African American Music: An Introduction, Ed, Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby, pp. 456-470. New York: Routledge,. Gates, Carrie. 2005. Telephone interview with the author, 12 November. Gilroy, Paul. 1991. “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same.” Black Music Research Journal 11(2): 111-136. —. 1993. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail. Glazer, Joshua. 2003. “Three Kings.” Urb 13(105):66. Hoesterey, Ingeborg. 2001. Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham : Duke University Press. Langolis, Tony. 1992. “Can You Feel It? DJs and House Music Culture in the UK.” Popular Music 11(2);229-238. Manuel, Peter. 1995. “Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Postmodern, Pre-modern, and Modern Aesthetics in Subcultural Popular Musics.” Popular Music 14(2):227-239. May, Beverly. 2006. Techno. In African American Music: An Introduction, ed. Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby, pp. 313-352. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Tony. 1996. Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Moodymann. 1998. Mahogany Brown. Peace Frog Records. PF074CD. Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr. 2003. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to HipHop. Berkeley: University of California Press, and Columbia College, Chicago: Center for Black Music Research. Reynolds, Simon. 1998. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press. Shusterman, Richard. 1991. “The Fine Art of Rap.” New Literary History 22(3):613-632. Sim, Stuart. 2001. Postmodernism and Philosophy. In The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, pp. 3-14. London: Routledge. Smith, Michael Peter. 1992. “Postmodernism, Urban Ethnography, and the New Social Space of Ethnic Identity.” Theory and Society 21(4): 493-531. Spitulnik, Debra. 1997. “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2): 161187. Storey, John. 2001. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. In The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, pp. 147-157. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER THREE A SECRET LIFE OF ROCK AND ROLL, PT. 1: GHOSTS AND SHADOWS GABE SKOOG

Rock and roll, born in the American south, spread like wildfire across the country, each region and city placing its own special stamp on the music. Scenes with their own distinct regional flavors burst forth in cities such Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Austin. At rock’s heart lies conflict: conflicts of race relations, conflicts of generations, conflicts of class, conflicts of cash, conflicts of politics, conflicts of the heart and loins. But, at the same time, rock and roll is a sponge that absorbs meaning and import depending on where it is played, who plays it, and why; sometimes it’s an icon of rebellion, at others an icon of conformity. I want to look at how rock spread around the globe, from its inception in the fifties to the mid-seventies, and how its character evolved as it took root in new soil. Identifying rock can be a little tricky; there are few necessary components and a whole lot of simply sufficient ones. There are some unifying features, instrumentation for example. There is a heavy reliance, bordering on standardization, upon core, usually electrified, instruments such as guitars, bass, and trap set. Keyboards are not uncommon, and run the gamut from acoustic, to organs, to early Moogs, to cutting-edge digital synthesizers. At different times rock has included a wide array of secondary instruments, ranging from harmonica, to horns, to jugs, to turntables. As we shall see, one of the key features of rock as a genre is its fluidity, and this fluidity allows for the incorporation of a wide array of instruments into the mix. The structure of rock tunes is also malleable. Songs can be purely instrumental or include vocals. In rock’s youth, from the mid-fifties to the early seventies, songs tended to be short and fast, powered by youthful, hyperactive metabolisms. Often its form was loosely derived from the blues, utilizing a strophic form with some variation of verse and chorus, and usually with a bridge thrown in as an afterthought. Songs have ranged from minute-long microterrors to extended cosmic exploits. For great rock and roll, sonic exploration

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and experimentation is the norm, and consequently all of the vague features mentioned above have at one time or another been renegotiated or just plain tossed out. In short, when it comes to defining rock and roll, at best it’s kind of like aural porn—you know it when you hear it. While change is etched deeply into the history of rock, there are some consistent veins that flow through it. Rock has been and still is a bastion of youth. It has been used time and again, in place after place, as an icon of the young and the young at heart. Simultaneously created by and marketed to the youth, rock has been both a tool of the youth and a tool for the manipulation of the youth. Another reoccurring feature in the narrative of rock and roll is the do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality. While loudly lauded by punk rock pundits from the mid-seventies on, there has always been a self-taught component to rock and roll. Autodidacts abound in its history. Whether learning from concerts, friends, or records, rock musicians have often lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps, combining bits and piece of techniques into idiosyncratic wholes. This process is neither purely mediated nor purely face-to-face, instead it often fluctuates from back and forth, with both the mass media and individual interactions adding to the whole. The DIY approach, when harnessed to the enthusiasm of youth, drives of rock into new regions, both sonic and geographic. The history of rock and roll is normally understood as an exchange between cultures, an inter- and trans-continental ping-pong game of create, influence, digest, and recreate. America invades England, England invades America, black culture draws on white, white culture steals from black. This overarching history of rock tends to focus on the interplay between peoples, in particular the interchange between Afro- and Anglo-Americans and the interplay between the U.S. and the U.K. and the rest of Europe. But other peoples, in many times and places, have participated in this exchange. The history of rock and roll is in constant revision. “Lost” groups are rediscovered and added to the pantheon, while others recede in importance and popularity, becoming footnotes waiting to become the new, retro flavor-of-themonth. Most retellings of rock’s history take the big-name, big-event approach, drawing a line across time through all of the major players: Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, Nirvana. The history I want to sketch for you today is one of little names and little events. Often this littleness is due to obscurity in whatever region the musicians are from. Yet sometimes, as with the case of groups such as the Spiders in Japan or Erkin Koray in Turkey, this littleness is not literal, but an illusion caused by the artists’ distance, be it geographic, temporal or cultural, from the normative history of rock. Like a mountain on the horizon, distance plays tricks on the eyes, and it is only as one approaches the foothills that you begin to understand their size. By looking at

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mountains and molehills around the world I hope to flesh out the standard history of rock to include major and not-so-major innovators and developments on the global stage. Studies of “world music,” such as Timothy Taylor’s Global Pop or the Goffredo Plastino edited Mediterranean Mosaic, have tended to emphasize music of other cultures transplanted to the U.S. and Europe—the effect of the third world on the first’s popular music (Plastino 2003, Taylor 1997). Works such as Jonathan Bellman’s article on Indian music and the British Invasion or Pedro van der Lee’s analysis of the effect of Latin and Asian music on mass global pop have illustrated the many and myriad ways that rock and roll has absorbed and re-synthesized a variety of musical sounds (Bellman 1997, van der Lee 1998). I intend to invert this point of view, flip it around and look at the manifestations of rock in the rest of the world, and look at the ways that it has been absorbed and reconstructed in local scenes. Looking at the effect of rock and roll on local musics is by no means new. Tony Mitchell and Anna Szemere have conducted insightful forays into the manifestations of rock in Czechoslovakia and Hungary respectively (Mitchell 1992, Szemere 1983). Laurence Zion’s two articles on the evolution of Australian pop and rock, when combined, outline over a decade of change on the continent (Zion 1987, 1989). Additionally, all the pieces in the Alison J. Ewbank and Fouli T. Papageorgio edited volume Whose Masters Voice? delve into local popular music traditions (Ewbank and Papageorgio 1997). But most previous studies have placed significant emphasis on popular music in particular cultures, using geopolitical borders to define the topic. Lutgard Mutsaers piece on Indorock, with its connections between Holland, Germany, and Indonesia, is the rare exception (Mutsaers, 1990). I want to take up the definitely daunting and possibly foolish task of conceptualizing rock and roll as a music that transcends specific scenes, a genre with long roots and no home. Before looking at particular music and musicians, it is best that we build some sort of framework for our discussion. How are we to synthesize all these bits and pieces of history into a composite whole? In recent years there has been a pique of interest in music scenes and subgroups. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, in the introduction to their book Music Scenes, loosely define scenes “ . . . as situations where performers, support facilities, and fans come together to collectively create music for their own enjoyment”(Bennet and Peterson 2004:3). Peterson and Bennett suggest three different types of music scenes: the local, the translocal, and the virtual. They define the local music scene as “ . . . a focused social activity that takes place in a delimited space over a specific span of time in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans realize their common musical taste.” The translocal scene is an extension of

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this, a web of the local, in which individuals in particular places “. . . interact with each other through the exchange of recordings, bands, fans, and fanzines” (Bennet and Peterson 2004:8). The translocal scene can take many forms, ranging from short-term festival setting (a la Woodstock), to longer tour-based scenes (a la Deadheads), to loose networks of clubs and fanzines. Closeness is not a prerequisite for the translocal scene; meaningful connections can stretch across vast distances. Yet, at the same time, translocal scenes do not transcend place but are instead made of many places all at once. Finally, the virtual scene, according to Bennett and Peterson, is one almost totally detached from the lived day-to-day world. It is one made up of, in the past, fanzines and mail order networks, and, in the present, web pages and chat rooms. While translocal scenes are at least distantly rooted in the local, virtual scenes are untouchable, their bones and meat are made from electrons and ink (Bennet and Peterson 2004:10). How does rock and roll around the globe fit into this tripartite conceptualization of “scene”? Is it local, translocal, or virtual? How can we conceptualize the connections and interplay between the local and the global? Are there any larger patterns that can be discerned from looking at regional manifestations of rock? This remains to be seen. The history of rock on the global stage is huge and overwhelming. As I’m pressed for space and have a whole world to cover, I will start by looking at two local scenes in particular—rock in Japan and rock in Turkey. After this skip round the world, I will touch upon rock in several other places. I will also limit myself to the first two decades of rock’s history, from the mid fifties until the mid-seventies. I will conclude with a brief discussion of rock as a scene and genre dislocated from any particular place and time. In Japan, popular music in general, and rock and roll in particular, has a long and complex history. From the late 1920s kayôkyoko has been the term used to refer to Japanese popular music. Many of the features of kayôkyoko, from pentatonic melodies to lyrical form and content, were derived from older Japanese musical traditions. During the postwar reconstruction there arose an infatuation with American cultural products, an infatuation reinforced by U.S. policy. In a study of the changing features and perceptions of kayôkyoko, Kitagawa Junko cites the Canlon report on U.S. policy in Asia, which, when speaking on U.S. exports, states, “Baseball and popular music are two American exports that need to be further developed” (Junko 1991). The developments of rock and roll in Japan are a byproduct of this policy. Yet to define rock and roll in Japan solely as a product of heavy-handed imperialism driven by a crass capitalist impulse might be an oversimplification. In their push to control foreign markets American businesses gave Japanese youth the tools and blueprints to construct their own indigenous rock culture. Rock and roll around the world has been forged between the hammer of international and the anvil of

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local interests. In the sixties the youth of Japan, influenced by an influx of American musics, expanded out from kayôkyoko to create their own musical idioms. In the early sixties young people in Japan began to form electric or “Eleki” instrumental combos, influenced by groups such as the Shadows and the Ventures. These groups were made up of young men thrashing out tunes on electric guitars, drums, and basses imported from abroad. Language was often an inhibiting factor in the development of local rock scenes. The Ventures were an early rock instrumental group, probably best known for their tune “Walk Don’t Run.” They had an omnivorous repertoire, ranging from popular favorites such as the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” to surf rock tunes like “Wipe Out” to jazz standards such as “Caravan” to pieces by Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov. They toured extensively and in many places their high-energy, bombastic sound acted as a point of entry through which people grew to appreciate later pieces by groups with vocals such as the Beatles, the Yardbirds, or the Rolling Stones. The Ventures continued to have a strong following in Japan, even after their fall from popularity in the United States. They released three times as many albums in Japan than in the U.S. and continued to tour there until the mid-nineties. It is not uncommon for world music acts to be simultaneously relative unknowns in their home countries and quite popular abroad (Susana Baca and the Master Musicians of Jajouka being just two examples). The Ventures are an example of this equation, fading to relative obscurity in the U.S. while maintaining a strong international following. Valuable future research should be done on this odd pairing of international fame and local obscurity. One early Eleki group, one that made the transition to the later vocaloriented Group Sounds format, was the Spiders. Formed in 1961, their sound and image evolved over the next decade. One of their last Eleki tunes was a straight-ahead version of “Wipe Out,” a song popularized by the Surfaris in 1963 in the U.S. and covered by the Spiders in 1965 in Japan. The Spiders rip through the piece at a breakneck speed, zipping through hairpin changes so fast that your eyes rattle in your head like dice in a back alley. Takayuki Inoue, the Spiders’ lead guitarist, abuses the whammy bar on his guitar, tearing out a swirling proto-psych solo. Releasing twenty singles in the sixties, this would be one of the Spiders’ last instrumental tunes, because, like in many other places, things changed with the arrival of four lads from Liverpool. Rock in Japan changed with the appearance of the Fab Four. In 1966 the Beatles played their infamous Tokyo Budokan concert, a spark that lit a blazing inferno that roared for the next four years. Instrumental Eleki ensembles such as the Spiders began to include vocals, and the press dubbed this music Group Sound or GS in 1967. Hundreds of bands were formed in local scenes in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kyoto. Made up overwhelmingly of young men, bands

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took English names with the ubiquitous definite article of the time, such as The Youngers, The Outcast, The Tempters, The Carnabeats, The Jaguars, or The Mops. These GS Bands often did covers of popular American and British tunes, reproducing as closely as possible the original English lyrics. In 1966 the Spiders put out their first two albums, respectively titled Album #1 and Album #2. Album #1 was a rarity of the period, made up almost exclusively of selfpenned pieces. Many of the lyrics were still in English, the lingua franca of rock. Album #2 was more in step with the times. It is a grandiloquent collection of classic rock chestnuts. Sure, they get some of the lyrics wrong in their version of “Johnny B Goode,” but from the early moments when Masaaki Sakai screeches, “right now it’s Johnny B Goode!” to the last crunchy electric guitar whines, they make the piece their own, language be damned. Before their split in 1971 the Spiders would release 12 albums, half of which kept to the simple numbering format of the first two. While many of the early Group Sounds hits were covers, or originals in English, there was a transition to Japanese lyrics. Yet, even with the language change, the basic pattern of rock held strong. The Youngers’ “Hanashitakunai” from 1968 is a good example of a rock tune with Japanese lyrics. The Youngers were nowhere nearly as popular as the Spiders. Like many bands of the period, they were originally a house band for a jazz kissa, or coffee house. Formed in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo in 1967, they released four 45’s before disbanding in 1969. The driving power of “Hanashitakunai” lies in an assshakingly repetitive bass line by Hisao Horiuchi, overlaid with frantic guitar work by Yoichi Suzuki and Hitoshi Nishi. The recording is a shimmering patina of pop over rugged garage rock growls, a mixture of rough and smooth common in Group Sounds tunes. It’s overflowing with raucous yelps, hollers, and youthful ejaculations, and, if it weren’t for the Japanese lyrics, one would think it was concocted in a garage on the West Coast. But it’s not, and that is what helps make it amazing. By 1970 the GS groups were losing steam, starting to be replaced by rock more akin to Hendrix or Led Zeppelin or other groups in the white blues revival. The Spiders bookend the decade, starting in '61 and finally breaking up in '71. Yet, even after all these years, the ghost of Group Sounds still lives, with bands like the Playmates or the 5, 6, 7, 8s carrying the torch. The 5,6,7, 8s, an allfemale GS revival band, reintroduced America to garage rock by way of Japan in their cameo in Quinton Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1. While Japanese rock and pop moved on to greener pastures, the bellow of the great Group Sounds bands of the past still echoes into the present. Rock and roll around the globe took several forms: sometimes simply copying sounds and language, sometimes keeping traditional rock forms and

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instrumentation but changing the lyrics, and sometimes fusing local music styles with rock and roll. Rock in Turkey is a great example of musical fusion, one that surpassed the simple mix of Japanese and the rock and roll of the Group Sounds bands. Turkish rock has a history similar to that of Japanese rock. Many of the tunes performed by early rock groups were instrumentals a la Ventures or the Shadows. Originally Cliff Richards’ backing band, The Shadows, went on to churn out crisp, clean rock instrumentals, the most famous of which is “Apache.” The Shadows’ effect on Turkish rock is analogous to that of the Ventures in Japan; their instrumental rock set the stage for later vocal pieces. One instrumental group, Apaúlar, went so far as to name themselves after the Shadows’ classic hit. As in Japan, the Beatles had a catalytic effect on the Anatolian rock scene. Many local groups did not include lyrics from the late fifties to the mid-sixties. After 1964 there were a number of groups doing rock songs with lyrics. While the domestication of rock in Japan in the 60s peaked with the inclusion of Japanese lyrics, the story was much different in Turkey. Straight covers of songs are rare in Turkish rock; instead most versions tend to incorporate at the very least Turkish lyrics. Erkin Koray’s version of “Night of 1000 Dances,” rewritten as “Sana Bir ùeyler Olmuú,” is a classic example. The song was composed by Fats Domino and Chris Kenner. It achieved national fame in the U.S. when it was recorded by Cannibal & The Headhunters, the first Mexican-American band to have a national hit in the States. Wilson Pickett’s rendition of the tune was his biggest pop hit, reaching number six on the charts. It’s his version that most people sing along to in the car. The song was a workhorse of many dance bands and was recorded by countless groups in the U.S. Its popularity extended at least as far as Istanbul, where Erkin Koray and his Underground Quartet recorded a version. Koray is one of the grand old men of Turkish rock and pop. His albums, such as Elektronik Türküler and 2, are classic examples of the fusion of western garage psych with eastern folk sensibilities. “Sana Bir ùeyler Olmuú” starts with a psychedelic swirl of organ before kicking into overdrive, rocketing Koray’s Pickett-esque vocal stylings into outer space. Koray’s rendition of the tune, with its Turkish lyrics and R&B aesthetic, is a transition for later, more “Turkified” rock. Rock and roll in many places was manipulated by local institutions, both public and private. Hürriyet, the largest newspaper in Turkey in the 60s, started the AltÕn Mikrofon contest, which guided the fusion and the domestication of rock in Turkey. A nation-wide song contest, the winners had a 45 pressed and toured to promote it. But, there was a catch. In order to enter the competition the song had to be a fusion of Turkish music with rock. This contest influenced

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the development of Turkish rock in the sixties, setting fusion and cross-cultural pollination as the norm. Like Erkin Koray, Bariú Manço was one of the pioneers of Turkish rock. He started performing in the late 1950s and continued on for decades. Manço’s story reads like a condensation of the transnational epic of garage rock. In 1963 he went to the Belgian Royal Academy to study graphics and art, and while he was there he put out records simultaneously in Belgium and Turkey. He performed with several groups, from les Mistigris in Europe to KaygÕsÕzlar in Turkey. Manço worked with les Mistigris for several years, releasing three records with them in Turkey between 1966-67. He then moved on to work with KaygÕsÕzlar for several years before forming a group made of international musicians under his own name. Like many Turkish musicians, Manço fused Turkish folk music with rock. In 1970 he cut a song titled “Derule”, a Black Sea folk tune folded into a rock setting. The instrumentation is standard American rock: guitars, drums and bass, but the song is all Turkey. The beat is a lilting “nine,” unheard of in western rock, and the guitar, played by non-Turk Jonathan Glemser, repeats a short melodic line explicitly imitating a Kemanche, or folk fiddle from the Black Sea region. “Derule” is a typical example of western rock reconstructed in a Turkish context. The myriad ways that Turkish musicians redefined rock in the sixties was limited only by their imagination. Apaúlar, working with the singer Cem Karaca, often set the lyrics of the famous Anatolian troubadour Karacao÷lan to contemporary rock songs. Groups such as Mavi IúÕklar and østanbul Erkek Lisesi reworked standards such as Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “The Great Airplane Strike of 1967” and the Artwoods’ “In the Deep End.” Mo÷ollar, a venerable mainstay in Turkish rock, transitioned from rock and roll wild men singing self-penned tunes in English in the late 1960s, to composers questing for an purely Anatolian rock sound producing psychedelic instrumental pieces in the 1970s. While GS musicians in the sixties kept to a standard format for rock and roll, their Turkish counterparts worked at building a new sound, evocative of a new time. Rock round the globe in the sixties and seventies was surprisingly international. Bariú Manço is just one example of artists who built their sound and careers in multiple places. The music moved from place to place, but so did the people who made it. For example, Lutgard Mutsaers tells us that secondgeneration Indonesians living in the Netherlands in the late fifties and early sixties would often go abroad to perform rock and roll, particularly in German cities, such as Hamburg, where they established a standard of high-energy, fastpaced performances, a standard that would act as a crucible for British bands like the Beatles (Mutsaers 1990).

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While attention was lavished on groups from the U.S. and U.K., it wasn’t uncommon for scenes in different countries to influence one another. In the later 60s a Lebanese group called The Cedars rose to some prominence in Turkey. Several different groups covered their songs. The short-lived group Mavi IúÕklar, who disbanded in 1971, did a reworking of a Cedars' song titled “Iyi Dusuan TasÕn,” a translation of the original title “For Your Information.” Mavi IúÕklar were not alone, as there are multiple Turkish versions of the song. Selçuk Alagöz, an artist known for his saccharin pop songs, reworked the B-side of “For Your Information” originally titled “Hide If You Want to Hide” as “Saklan Saklanabilirsen” in 1967. While the GS bands in Japan stayed close to the normative blueprint of rock and roll, Turkish rock drew upon whatever was available, which only further crossed the wires in a global game of rock telephone. Filipinos often acted as rock translators in different settings. A Filipino man by the name of Bing Conception was a rock promoter and MC in Japan and worked as a translator on the Ventures’ 1965 tour of the country. Also, Louis Dupree tells us that it was the Hilario family from the Philippines who taught Afghani musicians the ins and outs of rock and roll in Kabul in the late sixties and early seventies, which led to the first ever international Afghan rock festival in 1975 (Dupree 1976). Finally, the Filipino group D’Swoners was a transplant to Japan by way of Hong Kong. Formed in Manila in 1963, they moved to Hong Kong where they released songs and opened for bands such as the Kinks and Manfred Mann. In 1967 they moved to Japan where they would release two singles and two full-length albums. Their 1968 cover of Jimi Hendrix’s B-side from 1966’s “Stone Free,” is a classic, and, while they might not be able to pull off Hendrix’s complex guitar solos, they still maintained much of Hendrix’s original fire and drive. From its inception, rock and roll was a smorgasbord of ideas and innovations, everything and the kitchen sink were included. Scholars of rock, academic and otherwise, have over the years split it into increasingly specific genres: garage, big beat, bubblegum, heavy metal, black metal, death metal, country rock, alt-country, southern rock, psychedelic, progressive rock, folk rock, punk rock, post punk, hardcore, grindcore, new wave, no wave, lo-fi, the list goes on and on. But many rock musicians are unconcerned with these categories, taking a bit from here, a bit from there, and piecing together something they can enjoy. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between rock and r&b, or rock and country. A classic example of this comes from southeast Asia. Thai singer Payom Moogda reworked “What I Say,” a Ray Charles classic covered by countless American garage bands in the sixties. The lyrics are reconstructed, changing “What I Say” to “Tami Dern Sai” or “Why Do You Walk Like a Drunkard.” Substituting guitar for Charles’ iconic piano line, the

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tune keeps all the jump-up-and-spin-around energy of the original, complete with driving backbeat and tightly knit call-and-response vocals. Again and again, in place after place, American music gets broken down and reconstructed, transformed by its new context and home. By now I hope that it is evident that the history of rock and roll, particularly on a global level, far exceeds its commonly prescribed boundaries. I’ve chosen to give emphasis to covers of well-known rock and roll tunes, but originals are just as common. I’ve done this in order to tap into our collective knowledge of rock and establish a transnational beachhead in our imagined history of the genre. In rock and roll, covers of other artists’ work, particularly in these decades, were the norm. They allowed lesser-known musicians to tap into the popularity of better-known artists, while simultaneously giving a blueprint for future composition. Future projects could address original compositions. After looking at just some of the manifestations of rock and roll on the global stage, questions still remain as to how to conceptualize them, how to place similar and disparate phenomena into a coherent whole. Drawing upon Bennett and Peterson’s work on scenes, it’s easy to acknowledge that local scenes made up of shared practices and conceptualizations of rock have arisen around the world. But this does not take into account the transnational aspects of rock and roll, those features that transcend boundaries and borders. Regionally there were interconnections, ranging from the influence of the Cedars on Turkish rock to the northern migration of the D’swoneers. Extending out, lines of influence run around the globe, made up both of migration of individuals through concert tours and expatriates, to the spread of rock through global mass media, films, radio, television, and recordings. Slobin, drawing upon Arjun Appadurai, speaks to the process of dissemination with his idea of transregional musics, saying, “Transregional musics have a very high energy that spills across regional boundaries, perhaps even becoming global. This category of musics is increasing rapidly due to the mediascape, which at any moment can push a music forward so that a large number of audiences can make the choice of domesticating it” (Slobin 1993:19). The reliance upon media for self-education and the construction of a new local identity is found throughout this period of rock, from the Beatles’ exploration and adoration for early blues, to U.S. garage rock bands’ imitation of the Beatles themselves. Accessing and learning of “the other,” whether “the other” is separated by language, distance, ethnicity, or class, is a key feature of the spread, dissemination, and appropriation of rock in the twentieth century. Scenes around the globe, when taken together, make a composite sleeping giant, unaware of itself; its dreams manifest in the howls and feedback of young musicians around the world. Over the last decade scholars have become increasingly concerned with issues of globalization and transnationalism. But these are really extensions of

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processes of cultural interchange and influence that have been going on for millennia. This new history of rock and roll that I have quickly sketched for you evokes issues of appropriation, authenticity, cultural imperialism and hegemony, issues that at this point I honestly don’t have any answers to. One’s knee jerk reaction might be to decry all of this as an example of cultural grayout, the product of an increasing move towards a homogeneous global culture. But I choose to see it a little differently, as transnational empathy, the ability to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. Is the impulse of teens in Athens or Seoul or Istanbul to play rock and roll all that different than the impulse that drives ethnomusicologists and lay people to learn how to play Ewe music, or Balinese gamelan, or Afro-Peruvian music, or didgeridoo? Honestly, I don’t know. I suspect that beneath all of the conflicting local, international, and global pressure to imitate, appropriate, or be subsumed beneath another culture lies a drive towards individual fulfillment, one that can manifest in an infinite number of ways. A drive that is, regrettably, often manipulated by different groups and ideologies for ends that are beyond the individual’s desires. Unlike most “world music” available at your local record store, this music was recorded and distributed and consumed in country. Much of it, with a few exceptions, was never meant to be marketed abroad. These bands were fulfilling a local demand for rock, a demand that some might say has little to do with the music itself and everything to do with postwar American imperialism. Or is there something about rock and roll that speaks across cultural boundaries? Look at its roots, the Beatles imitating Elvis imitating African-Americans? The fact is that rock was ripped from the womb, stolen from the get-go; it makes total sense that this changeling then be passed from hand to hand, people to people. In today’s “World Music” context, issues of authenticity, ownership, tradition, innovation and appropriation have come aggressively to the fore. An idle glance at any of this month's World Music magazines will find innumerable examples of musical fusions. What is charming and noteworthy about the music I’ve mentioned is that the recordings were made in an age during which globalization was not yet a buzzword, in which Europeans and Americans were yet to be infatuated by the popular music of the “other,” and in which musicians did not cultivate world fusion groups in hopes of making it to the European and American festival circuits. The music was made instead because, like other teenagers around the world, the kids don’t just want to consume rock and roll— they want to be rock and roll.

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Discography GS I Love You. Various artists. 1996. Big Beat, cdwikd 159. GS I Love You Two. Various artists. Big Beat, cdwikd 196. Hava Narghile: Turkish rock music, 1966-1975. Various artists. 2001. Dionysus Records, ba1162. Koray, Erkin. 2004. 2. World Psychedelia Ltd., wpc6-8477. —. 1999. Elektronik Türküler. World Psychedelia Ltd., wpc6-8461. Spiders, The. 2000. Let’s Go Spiders! GS I Love You Vol. 3. Big Beat, cdwikd 202. Ventures, The. 1995. Live in Japan ’65. EMI, E2 32820. Various artists. 2004. Thai Beat A Go-Go Vol. 1. Subliminal Sounds, subcd 11. Various artists. 2001. Turkish Delights: Rarities from beyond the sea of Marmara. Grey Past Records.

References Bellman, Jonathan. 1997. “Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 19651968.” The Journal of Musicology 15(1):116-136. Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Dupree, Louis. 1976. “It Wasn’t Woodstock, But-.” South Asia Series, American University Fieldstaff Reports 20(2). Ewbank, Alison J., and Papageorgious, Fouli T., eds. 1997. Who’s Masters Voice? The Development of Popular Music in Thirteen Cultures. Westport: Greenwood Press. Hernandez, Debrah Pacini, Héctor Fernández l’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov eds. 2004. Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Junko, Kitagawa. 1991. “Some Aspects of Japanese Popular Music.” Popular Music 10(3):305-315. Lee, Pedro van der. 1998. “Sitars and Bossas: World Music Influences.” Popular Music 17(1):45-70. Levy, Claire. 1992. “The Influence of British Rock in Bulgaria.” Popular Music 11(2):209-212. Mitchell, Tony. 1992. “Mixing Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia Before and After the Velvet Revolution.” Popular Music 11(2):187-203.

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Mutsaers, Lutgard. 1990. “Indo Rock: an Early Eurorock Style.” Popular Music 9(3):307-320. Plastino, Goffredo. 2003. Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds. New York: Routledge. Szemere, Anna. 1983. “Some Institutional Aspects of Pop and Rock in Hungary.” Popular Music 3: 121-142. Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Makers. New York: Routledge. Zion, Lawrence. 1987. “The Impact of the Beatles on Pop Music in Australia: 1963-66. Popular Music 6(3):291-311. —. 1989. “Disposable Icons: Pop Music in Australia, 1955-63.” Popular Music 8(2):165-175.

CHAPTER FOUR RAINING BLOOD: APOCALYPTIC VISIONS IN EXTREME METAL RACHEL CONOVER

Introduction The extreme metal subculture is comprised of a number of affiliated musical styles, including death metal, black metal, grindcore and thrash, all of which share similar origins, ideologies, and an overlapping fan base. It first emerged in the1980s from a fusion of heavy metal mysticism with the nihilism and DIY (Do-It-Yourself) ethics of punk. While remaining largely underground, extreme metal has since become a global phenomenon, and is both a translocal scene and a subculture. Scene participants include musicians, fans, and industry representatives, but generally these categories overlap since it is a small group – industry employees are generally fans (underground music is not a lucrative business), and many fans are also musicians. The demographic is overwhelmingly male and young, although female participation is growing and fans are aging along with the music. The subject matter of extreme metal increasingly addresses current social conditions, but usually in a more fantastic and metaphorical way than punk. The central themes revolve around death and destruction, while addressing issues of mortality, religion, and social disintegration. This essay will examine these themes, as they are expressed in various facets of the metal subculture and interpreted by metal fans. My research was conducted in the Fall of 2003, and included interviews with fans and musicians in New Mexico, Washington, and Ohio, some of whom I was previously acquainted with through my own participation in the scene, and others that I met in the course of this study. The origins of the extreme metal scene in both heavy metal and punk are reflected in the backgrounds of its adherents. Black Sabbath is often cited as inspirational, and it is a common starting point for many metal fans. M. Krutsinger, guitarist for the black metal band In Memorium, said, "you can think of classic rock as a gateway drug to underground metal" (2003). Others,

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like Jimmie, who directs the metal department at Bowling Green State University’s radio station, previously listened to punk, and were never fans of metal until the advent of thrash: I stumbled on metal. I read about Slayer in a zine in '85 and ordered Hell Awaits...I didn't take that record off my turntable for months, and it changed my life...I played it over and over, and looked for other stuff like it...When [Slayer’s album] Reign In Blood came out it was all over, I went from thrash to death metal to black metal to crust. (2003) A search for something more intense seemed to lead people towards thrash and death metal in a progression towards harder and faster, heavier and heavier music. As ethnomusicologist Harris Berger described, "a rich and complex concept differentially interpreted across scenes, 'heavy' refers to a variety of textual, structural, and affective aspects of musical sound and is crucial for any understanding of metal." Heavy instrumentation, including distorted guitar, bass guitar, and bass drum timbres, boost both upper and lower harmonics, which adds power and definition. In contrast, a heavy vocal timbre will have little to no identifiable harmonics, producing a rough guttural sound. Heaviness also includes extreme tempos, stiff rhythms, and the quality of performance itself if it evokes grim emotion or power (Berger 1999:58-9). Jimmie described it as "brutal...a certain tone that goes all through your body" (2003). This power is seen as something new and radically different, and one cannot return from it once it is experienced. Drew, guitarist and vocalist in the death metal band Manias, described his introduction to extreme metal as a gradual progression of intensity: I listened to 70's rock, AC/DC, Sabbath... then Metallica obliterated them, then Slayer did the same to Metallica, on to Venom, Kreator... It got heavier and heavier, speed and intensity. I was hooked on it. Sepultura changed my mindset from rock, opened the door... I'm still into intensity. Bands can be good musicians and I'll respect that, but it's no good without intensity, I won't listen to it, I lose interest. (2003) The metaphor of addiction was repeated often, with metal as a musical "high" that never went away, but only intensified the search for more. Dustin, a metal fan and guitar player, said, "I always craved the sound, crunchy guitar and aggressive vocals," and described his introduction to the metal scene as finally finding something he'd been subconsciously looking for, not knowing what it was, but sensing that there had to be something more (2003). Vincent, vocalist for the black metal band Acheron, explained his continued involvement in the scene as necessary, like a physical need. He said, "Creating dark extreme music is like a drug. I may be sick and tired of the music business, but I have the need to invoke my inner demons to produce this kind of music" (2003).

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This addiction to and identification with the music shows that metal expresses something not found in the larger culture and answers a "call to an unsatisfied void within modern consciousness" (Christe 2003:5). There is something about it that black metal drummer Deathcrush, from the band A Gruesome Find, called "the raw intensity," and which he said has “connected with me in a way that's kind of hard to describe, in a way that no other music has" (2003). The music expressed something that some listeners identified with, and that they did not previously find in anything else: The addictive guitar sound, the speed and precision of the drums with intricate rhythms, the sound of the harsh vocals...yet all this noise can be put together with melody and harmony to make it the most beautiful music...able to pull emotions out of me that I cannot experience in everyday life. (M. Krutsinger 2003)

This lack of expression in the everyday features of mainstream culture leads to the formation of subcultures, as spaces for the enactment of a forbidden identity. Subcultures develop in reaction to the dominant culture, as a means of expressing difference and defiance, a "symbolic violation of the social order" (Hebdige 1979:19). In youth subcultures, a sense of group cohesion is often formed, expressed, and maintained through the central feature of music (Epstein 1998:13, 21). Most members of the metal community seem to view it as a form of subculture, made up of the limited number of people who "get it" (M. Krutsinger 2003), and who don’t "fit in with the so-called normal humans" (Vincent 2003). Subcultures dispute the views of mainstream society, allowing the expression of different opinions and forbidden subjects in ways that often provoke and disturb. However, these expressions must deal with contemporary problems in order both to attract members and to outrage opponents.

Symbolic Representations of Death and the Apocalypse Clothing and the Body The themes of death and apocalypse appear in the choices metal fans and musicians make about their clothing and physical appearance. The style of dress varies between subgenres, but some aspects are continuous across all forms. The most pervasive element is the color black, worn almost exclusively at any extreme metal gathering. The prevalence of the color black is also common in metal, punk, and industrial music scenes, and is a key means of expressing subcultural identity. M. Krutsinger said that black stands against the status quo, since we bleach things to make them appear clean, innocent, and

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pure; wearing black is thus a reaction against this (2003). Nihilist, In Memorium’s vocalist, equated the color black to both strength and emptiness: Black is the essence of our soul and it is what we will see after the blue shining will fade out like stage lights when we die. Black is nothing, black is pure, undiluted strength. Just like one of the most powerful forces in the universe - the black hole. Pure nothingness. (2003) When thrash began, the style was a break from glam rock, and thus moved away from the theatrical emphasis on image and towards more everyday dress. Death metal, grindcore, and thrash maintain a dark image, but avoid make-up and elaborate costumes in favor of simpler and more functional outfits. Scene members’ appearance generally includes jeans or fatigues and band t-shirts, almost always black, with long hair, and maybe spikes or leather. Black metal tends to be more theatrical and can include wearing "corpsepaint," black and white stage make-up that has been compared to that of KISS, Alice Cooper, and King Diamond, but also to Japanese kabuki make-up and Norse war paint. It became very popular in northern European black metal, and may have been a reaction against death metal's toning down of the image. The corpsepaint style spread throughout the world along with black metal music, but discrepancy and disagreement over image continued. The extreme metal scene is small, and there is a lot of overlap between black and death metal in both fan base and musical style. Although the same people often listen to both death metal and black metal, they may change their appearance depending on the particular show they are attending, and the bands often use their appearance to display scene allegiance. Some people think it is important to maintain these different elements, that they are important parts of the specific subgenre. Deathcrush said, "We play black metal, we should wear the corpsepaint, it's a tradition" (2003). Others, like Drew, think that stylistic divisions within the scene are artificial, and encourage factions that would not otherwise exist: Hardcore plays metal but says it's not. People try to be different, but really we're more alike. [The band] Fall of the Bastards look like crust but they play black metal. Death metal has a lot of different musical influences but it's mainly about death, you have to look deeper than that.... I used to wear corpsepaint in Mexico and people said we were black metal, even though we play death metal. They called us black death metal because it's associated with the black metal image. I don't wear it anymore. (2003) To some, wearing corpsepaint is simply an image, used as a theatrical prop, while for others there is more personal meaning behind it. For Deathcrush, "It's more like stepping away from yourself when you're on stage... I like the anonymity of it, you don't know really who I am when I'm up on stage, like a barrier between who I am on a regular basis" (2003). Dustin also wears

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corpsepaint for personal reasons, but these are part of private ritual rather than public display. I wear it a lot. I run around the cemetery being creepy, I feel like it's necessary for myself. Sometimes I try to communicate with dead spirits, it symbolizes being closer to death, or being dead, wanting to be dead or pretending to be dead. It looks cool, but it's usually serious, not just for looks. Sometimes I wear it out to support the black metal art, it's not for death metal. (2003) Subcultural style acts as an identifying marker, which both creates a bond among group members and acts to separate them from the rest of society, to "warn the 'straight' world of a sinister presence" (Hebdige 1979:2). In addition, the style of a particular subculture will follow the patterns of homology, where there is a conceptual fit between the specific objects chosen and the focal concerns and desired image of that subculture (Hebdige 1979:113). Thus the “metal image” tends to reflect concerns with death through the use of dark colors, violent imagery, and corpsepainted skull-like appearance. These same concerns are expressed lyrically.

Song Lyrics These themes of death, destruction, afterlife, and apocalypse are graphically described in band lyrics, and can be seen in album and video art. They tend to vary by subgenre, with thrash and grindcore generally the most directly political and concentrating on physical death, black metal tending to be more mystical, and death metal covering both physical and spiritual dimensions. The thrash band Slayer wrote many songs as anti-war messages, such as Murder at your every foot step / A child's toy sudden death Sniper blazes you thru your knees / Falling down you feel the heat Burn! Ambushed by the spray of lead / Count the bullet holes in your head Offspring sent out to cry / Living mandatory suicide Suicide ("Mandatory Suicide," South of Heaven, 1988)

Black metal bands often use more supernatural imagery in their descriptions of death. They discuss death from a more spiritual perspective, concentrating on the idea of an afterlife and the human soul. This can be seen in lyrics from the band Mayhem, A dream of another existence / you wish to die A dream of another world / you pray for death to release the soul.

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Chapter Four One must die to find peace inside / you must get eternal I am a mortal but am I human? How beautiful life is now when my time has come A human destiny but nothing human inside What will be left of me when I'm dead / there was nothing when I lived What you found was eternal death / no one will ever miss you (“Life Eternal,” De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, 1994)

In contrast to this mysticism, British grindcore band Carcass wrote mainly physical descriptions of death, and explored the physical presence of the human body rather than the spiritual nature of the soul. Battered and diffused with placating blows A human jigsaw to make whole A sequacious pattern which once fitted so snug Joining together each dubious lump Ravaged disassembly, neatly cubed and diced A cold mannequin once reassembled Astute brain teaser, incorporate flesh and bone So mortifying... ("Corporeal Jigsore Quandary," Necrotism - Descanting the Insalubrious, 1992)

Death metal band Morbid Angel addresses both physical and spiritual aspects of death, such as chemical warfare and demonic spirits. Men rot forever in pain / Mind machines control Toxic rains scouring brains / Victimizing souls Winds of war suffocate / Voodoo in the sky Breathe the gases, breathe no more My vision - all will die Cut myself and release the blood / Pain of a thousand years Pathetic sights - journey's end / Descent into another world My time has come to meet the / Masters...all the corporate lourds ("Visions From the Darkside," Altars of Madness, 1989)

All of these songs approach the subject from different points of view, but they share an apocalyptic focus on death. Lyrics such as these make up the subject matter of extreme metal almost exclusively. In his article "The Poetics of Destruction," Jack Harrell lists typical rock music themes as "women, sex, love, peace, romance, beauty, hope, pleasure, deliverance, freedom, cars, school, and work." He then notes that these are hardly ever mentioned in death metal, which concentrates instead on "war, destruction, decay, disease, disillusion, death, pain, torture, vengeance, murder, blood, anarchy, corruption through

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power, confusion, chaos, darkness, isolation, insanity, monsters, weapons, and technology gone awry" (1994:93). Some bands take inspiration from real people or events, such as Slayer's song "Angel of Death" about Nazi researcher and torturer Josef Mengele, or the band Macabre, who call themselves "murder metal" and write all their songs about serial killers, but say they are intended to inform and warn, "like news" (Purcell 2003:128). Others use fictional representations of similar ideas. Horror films are the direct inspiration for many lyrics, and literature, such as the work of H.P. Lovecraft, is also influential. Although widely viewed as a Satanic band, Morbid Angel often uses characters from Lovecraft's stories as "demonic" references. These may be described in an anti-religious context, such as the song "Unholy Blasphemies" that names Yog Sothoth from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos as the evil one. This postmodern interchangeability of symbols has been referred to as "semiotic soup," where different fantasy symbols can be given new meanings in someone else's reality (Christe 2003:281-84).

Imagery The artwork associated with the extreme metal scene reflects similar themes, and uses similar sources and techniques. The artwork on band shirts, which are worn by almost everyone at shows and often in everyday life as well, also uses images of death and evil. Bloody scenes and offensive language often accompany stylized band names. By wearing this clothing, scene members express their identity as a part of the community and also consciously distance themselves from "proper" society. It is specifically intended to be immune to mainstream acceptance, with the "obscenity as insurance against corruption" (Christe 2003:248). Extreme metal scene members are very conscious of their distance from normal society, and take pride in this difference. Displaying a gruesome or frightening image is one way both to mark and to maintain this division. Drew said, "It keeps us on the underground, everyone aspires to be famous, but they don't want to be mainstream...the mainstream ruins it" (2003). In contrast to many pop artists, metal albums rarely features photos of the artists on their covers. Instead they use mostly images of death or mythological evil, as in the Slayer cover image for South of Heaven, which features a giant skull in a pool of blood, with demons on, around, and inside the skull, and church windows divided by pentagrams with upside down crosses as steeples. Album cover images such as these often make use of postmodern bricolage techniques, where objects from different times and places are put together for an overall effect of darkness, mystery, horror, and violence. The Morbid Angel cover for Covenant uses this technique, displaying an unreadable parchment covered with script, a closed book with the album name, a pentagram, and an

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upside-down cross on it, and an open book titled "The Book of Ceremonial Magic." There are also a burning candle, a knife, a feather pen, and an inkwell, which have no specifically arcane meaning but are traditional symbols of alchemy, and lend atmosphere to the image through that profession’s association with the occult. Although many bands do profess serious occult beliefs, these are often not along official lines, and they may use their own symbols, such as the death metal band Deicide's “trifixion,” an arrangement of three interlocking upside down crosses, which has no historically Satanic meaning, although its anti-Christian stance is clear (Baddeley 1999:171). Bricolage techniques are also used in music videos, which often feature spliced scenes from horror films along with footage of the band. These may act to reinforce the idea of death themes as reality that Macabre expressed about their "murder metal." Megadeth's video "Peace sells...but who's buying?" shows a father telling his son to switch the TV from metal videos to news, and the son flipping back to Megadeth's images of tanks and saying, "this is the news" (Christe 2003:156). The feeling of horror created, whether using real or fictional sources, is what is viewed as being real, even if the narrative is fantastic.

Narratives of Reality The themes commonly found in extreme metal are viewed as important because they are "real." Death is the ultimate reality, since it is something that will be faced by everyone. Even so, it is a topic avoided by mainstream society as something too touchy to be examined closely. Alex, vocalist in the grindcore band Noisear, put it simply: "Death is reality...some people don't want to look at it, but it's there" (2003). Death has been a common concern throughout Western culture, and is addressed frequently, yet it still has an air of the forbidden because it is rarely confronted directly. We talk about dealing with death or the grieving process, but not the physical reality of death itself, which we keep at a distance. It is compelling because it is mysterious, but we are still repelled and ashamed of being interested in something awful. "We find death so horrible that we avert our eyes in its presence; we rush to find a suitable blanket or coat to cover the body so that passersby will not see" (Feldman 1992:127). This has not always been the case. In many cultures, images of death were common, but as these societies became more modern, death was removed from daily life. Dying occurred in hospitals and graveyards were moved out of city centers, so that people lived without the perception of death until it directly touched their lives (Dollimore 2001:119). Dustin thinks that metal bands are trying to counteract this removal in their confrontational treatment of death, in an attempt to reintegrate death as a normal part of life:

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Bands are trying to wake the world up. Other music doesn't like to talk about the reality of death. Death metal bands are pissed off and shoving it in people's faces, “this happens, you'll have to be dead.” Nobody else will confront this; it's a good thing. Gore is kind of sick, but there are a lot of sick people and that shouldn't go unrecognized. The ugly, sinister, and malevolent should be brought out, not put away. People who live in a fairy tale world are devastated when reality hits, but people who are used to hearing about it can deal better, it makes you a stronger person... It brings out the truth of what's really going on in the world. (2003) The violent lyrics and images of extreme metal are viewed paradoxically by most listeners, since they are seen to represent a "reality" that is not found in pop music, but at the same time are recognized as metaphorical or humorous and not to be taken literally. Nevertheless, the meaning behind them is real, and it is this meaning that is not found in mainstream music. The themes of death and destruction found in metal are interpreted by fans as being much more important, relevant, and fundamentally real than those common in pop music. Themes that are more a part of daily life, such as love relationships, are not a burden on the unconscious, with a need to be explored. They have been repeated too many times, and seem superficial, whereas metal is seen as dealing with issues that are more worthy of consideration. Jimmie called pop music formulaic, written only for commercial appeal, and said, "Metal lyrics are about reality, they're not phony. Pop is too cheesy. Someone singing about the end of the world is much more important" (2003). Metal lyrics and imagery may be disturbing and confrontational, but even when joking they represent serious concerns. They investigate the subconscious and questions of life and death, and in this sense they fit into the category of mythology, as a type of narrative that explains the world or human nature. Specifically, metal is often a form of eschatology, or the study of "the last things," a myth that is concerned with the fate of the world or the soul after death, the reasons for suffering, yearning for immortality, and the nature of good and evil (Wojcik 1997:13, 214). The band Sepultura, for example, describes a war-torn end and the failure of progress in many of their songs, such as: Obscured by the sun / Apocalyptic clash Cities fall in ruin / Why must we die? Obliteration of mankind / Under a pale grey sky We shall arise... I did nothing, saw nothing / Terrorist confrontation Waiting for the end / Wartime conspiracy I see the world - old / I see the world – dead ("Arise," Arise, 1991)

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These end narratives have been common throughout history, but until fairly recently they had a divine and ultimately positive meaning, with death leading to redemption and rebirth. Beginning in the early 1800s the idea of a secular apocalypse arose, using ideas of disease and famine, and paralleling social upheaval caused by industrialization, population growth, urbanization, and the growth of technological warfare (Seed 2000:19). This secular apocalypse was different not only in the lack of divine intention, but also in that it did not contain any plan for continuation, such as ascension to a heavenly paradise, and instead was seen as an unavoidable end to everything. While previous apocalyptic views were fundamentally positive, in the sense of rectifying suffering and having ultimate purpose, the secular apocalypse tended to be pessimistic. These views generally became popular among the poor "masses" as part of a sense of disillusionment from unexplained change and failed social systems. Folklore scholar Daniel Wojcik and writer/artist Adam Parfrey have studied and written extensively on ideas and phenomena associated with contemporary life and historical transition. Wojcik references folklorist Victor Turner’s theory of these liminal historical periods as times of change and cultural crisis, which give rise to destructive imagery as a sort of rite of passage (1997:140). When cultural ideologies are changing, and ruling ideas are competing for dominance, "the idea of war in heaven emerges" (Parfrey 1990:340). Apocalyptic beliefs were often found in marginalized groups, but after WWII and the invention of the atomic bomb, they became much more pervasive, appearing in all segments of society. Even in its early development, the bomb was given religious connotations, such as the Trinity Site name and the comparison of the very first test detonation at this site to divine destruction. Test director Robert Oppenheimer envisioned the Hindu Krishna in All-Devourer form, and quoted from the Bagavad Gita: If the radiance of a thousand suns Were to burst into the sky That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds. (Paul Chilton, in Wojcik 1997:101)

After the bomb was dropped, the entire mindset of Western culture was changed, and anxiety developed into an everyday condition of existence (Parfrey 1990:343). The idea of nuclear attack was part of daily life after the war, and by the 1960s was a part of general cultural consciousness (Wojcik 1997:103). Many of the youth subcultures in post-WWII Britain were

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apocalyptic, with an emphasis on personal and social destruction, as shown in the punk slogan of "No Future" (Hebdige 1979:27). This has continued to be a feature of postmodern society, and this sense of doom has been expressed in many cultural forms, such as Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, or William S. Burroughs' 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night. Apocalyptic thought is an important theme in contemporary society. With the multiplicity of paradigms available through postmodern bricolage techniques, current versions of apocalypse myths interchange both religious and secular imagery to express their own versions of human destiny. Extreme metal themes play on these same central fascinations and fears, which is why fans perceive their ideas as being so important. Most of the people that I spoke with did not express a belief in the spiritual battle of Armageddon, but all of them thought that nuclear destruction was a good possibility, and some were certain of it. Dustin felt that the battle of Armageddon will take place, and said, "We should be prepared for it, that's why people sing about it" (2003). Even if a literal spiritual battle is discounted, Nihilist said, "We live in an apocalyptic world. The end will arrive soon enough for all of us. Be it nuclear, spiritual, chemical, biblical, zombie-related or astronomical. Something will happen soon enough. Just wait and see folks" (2003). This was echoed by M. Krutsinger, who said, "I think that humans are the only creatures just smart enough to kill ourselves and dumb enough not to figure out how to stop it from happening... If the apocalypse means human extinction... without a doubt, it will happen" (2003). Sociologist Deena Weinstein connects metal's characteristic concerns with good and evil and use of religious metaphor with millennial anxiety and the moral discourse prevalent in contemporary mass media (1991:294). However, the metal subculture is not generally viewed in the way that news, or science fiction, or even horror movies are. Scene members say that the ideas are often misinterpreted, and feel that the general perception of them is very negative. As Jimmie said, "They think we're all baby killers!" (2003). Metal themes tend to provoke much more outrage and are deemed more socially unacceptable than horror film or literature, even though they cover similar topics. This may be because of the strong connection between music and identity. Youth subcultures tend to focus on musical taste, and groups of people view themselves and others as defined and divided by musical preference. Film and literature, on the other hand, do not usually serve as the focus of subcultures. Although some genres may be associated with particular groups, there are much looser boundaries around film taste. Also, musical lyrics may be perceived as truer than film, since they are often written as fact and in first person. Lyrics are also sometimes written in the second person, or from a mixed first and second person perspective, directly addressing and involving the listener as a

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participant. Metal lyrics in particular, however, tend to be from the perspective of the perpetrator, and encourage identification and exploration of the psychological state that would drive someone to kill. There is often no narrative closure, and the listener is left with a provocative image but no answers. In contrast, horror films usually relate stories from the victims' or an outside observer's perspective, encourage viewers to identify with the protagonist against some evil, and tend to have a continuous narrative plot where the story line is closed at the end. Films that more closely resemble the narrative structure of extreme metal are usually relegated to B-movie status. For example, the film House of 1000 Corpses, directed by metal musician Rob Zombie, was initially funded by Universal Studios, but Universal backed out of the project after production, calling the film "too dark and disturbing for release under their corporate releasing guidelines" (House of 1000 Corpses 2003). Zombie bought the rights to the film and sold it to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, but then MGM also refused to release it. Even when it finally was released by Lion's Gate Entertainment it had an extremely short theater run.

Conclusion These apocalyptic themes do serve a purpose, even if they appear unrelentingly negative. J.G. Ballard, author of apocalyptic novels Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, views these themes in a positive way, since they are an attempt to deal with perceived negativity, even if that encounter takes the form of embrace. I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it in every conceivable way. (Parfrey 1990:8) These themes of death, destruction, and apocalypse can act as catharsis, releasing negative emotion, and as psychological explorations of the darker side of human nature. Jimmie said that he doesn't find any of the violence in metal disturbing because, although it can have a profound effect on real life, it is a positive one. It's not meant literally, it's an outlet. Numerous musicians have told me that. One said he'd be up in a bell tower with a rifle if he wasn't doing this... it keeps them sane...On 9/11 we were going to shut down, we felt kind of funny coming in and playing all this music about death...but we decided to do it anyway, and as my show went on I started to feel better...by the end I felt great. (2003) This use as an outlet can allow the release of mental tensions that would otherwise stay pent up and frustrating. It can also be a way to learn, an attempt

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to gain greater understanding of the world around us. Alex researches subjects that he finds interesting and then writes about them, and said, "I want people to notice everything, and not be stupid. The bad things too. You have to balance it yourself, the world is a pretty awful place, but it's what you make of it" (2003). In this sense, themes of death may play a positive role in a person's life, even if the message conveyed does not have an obvious aspect of redemption. The themes of extreme metal represent a modern approach to the ancient mystery of death, and allow people to reflect on society and life today. As Drew said, "It's ironic, all I write about is death, but all I really care about is living" (2003).

References Alex. 2003. Interview by author. 19 November. Baddeley, Gavin. 1999. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship, and Rock’n’Roll. London: Plexus Publishing Limited. Berger, Harris. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Burroughs, William S. 1981. Cities of the Red Night. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Carcass. 1992. Necrotism - Descanting the Insalubrious. Earache Records. Christe, Ian. 2003. Sound of the Beast: the Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: Harper Entertainment. Deathcrush. 2003. Interview by author. 19 November. Dollimore, Jonathan. 2001. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. New York: Routledge. Drew. 2003. Interview by author. 19 November. Dustin. 2003. Interview by author. 19 November. Epstein, Jonathon, ed. 1998. Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers. Feldman, Fred. 1992. Confrontations With the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrell, Jack. 1994. The Poetics of Destruction: Death Metal Rock. Popular Music and Society 18(1):91-103. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. “House of 1000 Corpses (2003) - About the Production.” 16 April 2003. Accessed 15 December 2003. http://www.hollywoodjesus.com. Jimmie. 2003. Personal Interview. 19 November. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1964. Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Sony Pictures. DVD, 94 minutes. Lovecraft, H. P. 1982. Bloodcurdling Tales. New York: Random House.

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Mayhem. 1994. De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Deathlike Silence/Voices Of Wonder. M. Krutsinger. 2003. Interview by author. 10 November. Morbid Angel. 1989. Altars Of Madness. Earache Records. Nihilist. 2003. Interview by author. 10 November. Parfrey, Adam, ed. 1990. Apocalypse Culture. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House. Purcell, Natalie. 2003. Death Metal: the Passion and Politics of a Subculture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Seed, David, ed. 2000. Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis. London: Macmillan Press. Sepultura. 1991. Arise. Roadrunner Records. Slayer. 1988. South Of Heaven. American Recordings. Vincent. 2003. Interview by author. 10 November. Weinstein, Deena. 1991. Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Lexington Books. Wojcik, Daniel. 1997. The End of the World as We Know it: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER FIVE SELECTING ETHNIC IDENTITIES THROUGH MUSIC AND DANCE SHEAUKANG HEW

I have participated in Irish music sessions held in Oklahoma City and Norman, Oklahoma regularly for the past two years. Through these sessions, I have met participants who are also active in Native American culture. As musical activities often reflect the wider cultural climate of which they are a part, I believe that the participation of white Americans in ethnic music activities reveals sentiments expressed by many native-born Americans toward ethnic identity. My interest in the issue of ethnic identity came from my own experience as a third generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia and now a first generation immigrant in the multicultural United States. In the process of negotiating my own ethnic identity, I have chosen to participate in the local Irish music community. The community has received me well, even though at times I was self-aware of my Chinese ethnicity when participating in this predominantly white American-born group. The Irish session provides a venue where the boundaries of ethnicities have become elusive. The all-inclusiveness displayed in the sessions indicates that the tie between ethnic music and ethnicity is rather ambiguous. It became clear to me that ethnic musical activities, such as the Irish session and the various Native American cultural events that I will discuss later, serve not only as a reminder of the cultural identity of the particular ethnic group, but also offer a broader meaning in the social context of postmodern America. In this paper, I examine how ethnic identity is manifested through expressive cultural activities. I argue that the ethnic identity expressed through such activities is one based on individual choice. Thus ethnic identity by choice is sometimes termed “dime store ethnicity,” meaning that a person can “choose a grandparent to identify with and thus become symbolically a descendent of that group, much as one might shop for a product in a dime store” (Waters 1990:6). But what are the factors influencing a person’s choice of ethnic identity? Richard D. Alba suggests that “the supply side of ethnicity—such

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collective features as ethnic neighborhoods and institutions, as well as the number of identifiers—makes some ethnicities more attractive than others or instills deeper loyalty to them, thus encouraging ethnic identity” (1990:72). In addition to my observation and participation in the Irish session, my case studies have led me to conclude that the communality and spirituality found in both the Native American and Irish cultural events often become significant ingredients that attract my consultants to identify themselves culturally or ethnically with Irish or/and Native American. In the following case studies, I discuss my consultants’ choices of ethnic identity, and their reasons for embracing such an identity. Conclusions presented here are based on interviews that I conducted with the consultants. I met these interviewees in the monthly Irish music sessions. It was during these sessions that I learned about their active participation in both Irish and Native American culture.

Case Study I—Mary Kennedy Mary Kennedy has been attending the Friday night Irish session in Norman for about two years. She often has a bodhran with her but only plays occasionally, since she is just beginning to learn the instrument. She likes to sing if there is someone in the session that will sing with her. Most of the time, she sits with the musicians in the circle and listens to the music or talks to her friends at the café. Although she does not participate in the music-making process very actively, she enjoys the music very much. She is very passionate about Irish music because she considers Ireland her home. Mary grew up in Oklahoma, but she can trace her Irish ancestry back a few generations, mainly on her mother’s side. Her father’s side came primarily from English Britain. As a child, she had always been close to the relatives from her mother’s side and she remembers hearing many Irish and American folk songs in her household. When she was fifteen years old, she befriended a girl from the Pawnee tribe and became close to her family. This friendship opened the door for her involvement with Native American culture. In 1980s, she met a Kiowa man, John Aunko, who later became involved in the American Indian Cultural Society (AICS). AICS was founded by Doc Tate Nevaquaya in 1989.1 At that time it was only opened to Indian membership. Mary, who was already actively participating in various Native American cultural activities such as gourd dances and powwows, joined the society in 1992 after her close friend John Aunko and other decision makers of the society began to accept non-Indian membership. In the beginning years of her participation in AICS, Mary, who is also an artist in her spare time, drew portraits of Doc Tate and was also responsible for the drawings on the bulletins of AICS. According to Mary, the membership of

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the society bordered around one hundred people, with about 30% of them being non-Indians. The goal of the society was to educate American Indian tribes about the culture, music, and dance of each other, and also to educate nonIndians about Indian culture. The regular programs of AICS meetings included beadwork, shawl making, basket weaving, lectures given by guest speakers, and sometimes flute playing or a flute making workshop. The society usually got together once a month. Mary used to be very active in the Society until about 5 or 6 years ago when her busy schedule with school and family got in the way. She said she remained a member but became less active in her involvement. Responding to my question about her ancestral history, she claimed that it is unclear if there was any Indian in her family lineage. She said that her greatgreat grandfather from Ireland might have married an Indian woman, but there is no proof. Nevertheless, the lack of Indian lineage does not prevent her from adopting the Indian culture. Her long-time friend John Aunko was planning to adopt her into his tribe by having a formal tribal adoption ceremony. Unfortunately, John became very sick and eventually died before this ceremony could be performed. According to Mary, there were many white Americans since the 1960s and 1970s that were known as “wanna-be Indians.” These “wanna-bes” are eager to adopt the Indian culture. However, her friend John told her that she was a “should-have-been Indian.” She explained to me that the “wanna-be Indians” are those who are not fully accepted into the community, while “should-have-been” are those who are accepted into the tribes by certain members. Even though the adoption ceremony never happened, she believes that she has a strong emotional tie to the Indian people. The quality that Mary appreciates most in Indian people is their sense of humor and optimism in spite of what happened to them in the past. She admires the spirituality of the Indian people and their generosity to give to their community, which are qualities that she believes to be very different from mainstream American culture. She especially likes the music of the gourd dance: The sound of the drum takes me back almost to the pre-birth time, it is like a rebirth … it is like the heartbeat, it is healing to me …When I am listening to it and dancing to it, I lose completely in the music, and I just feel so connected. I feel connected to those people right then and there, but I also have a sense of connection to the past and to the future. It is very … transcendental. (Kennedy 2004)

Mary has felt connected to the music since she was fifteen, although sometimes people teased her for “dancing like a white woman” at powwows. She respects the Indian culture very much and wants to see it maintained and

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grow. She believes that it is important for the Indian people to have a sense of self. I also had a chance to talk to Mary about her involvement with the monthly Irish session. She told me that she was first attracted to the opportunity to hear live music. She appreciates the openness and sharing of the people in the session, as well as having the opportunity to sing and play music. She claims that Irish music has always been in her soul; she recalls that even as a child, she would point to pictures of Ireland and call it home. She felt strongly connected to the Irish side of her family and had enjoyed the music of her mother’s side. She mentioned that there was never music from her father’s side of the family. When describing her family genealogy, she teased that she “is not purely anything.” “But one cool thing about being an American,” she half jokingly said, “is that you can pick and choose from all those different things and stay with one that you like.” Mary recently visited Ireland for the first time and said she felt at home there. Since then, she has visited Ireland several times.

Case Study II—Therese Matthews Therese Matthews is another regular attendee of the monthly Irish session. She not only participates in the session in Norman; she is also very active in the slow Irish session in Oklahoma City hosted by Jean Hill of the Irish Arts Oklahoma. Unlike the Irish session in Norman, the slow session is geared more towards beginning players. Like Mary, Therese is beginning to learn the bodhran. She plays her drum occasionally, but most of the time she sits in the circle and listens to the music. More recently, she added mandolin, flute, whistle, fiddle, guitar, and concertina to her instrument collection. Therese spent many years in Tulsa, prior to moving to Norman to work. She had heard Irish music in Tulsa but had not been actively involved with any musical activities in Norman until one day she accidentally came across the session at the local Borders book store. She soon became active in many music activities as people in the session introduced her to the local music organizations, including the Irish Arts Oklahoma, Oklahoma City Traditional Music Association, and the Scissor Tail Contra Dance Society. Tracing her ancestral lineage, Therese said that she has Osage blood on her father’s side and Irish blood on her mother’s side. Her father’s genealogy is a mixture of Osage, Welsh and English and she is considered one-sixteenth Osage, although she suspects that she might have more Osage lineage in her family. She studied the Osage language while in college. She recalls going to intertribal powwow dances when she was little but did not become actively involved in the Osage tribal annual dances Inlonshka until she was invited by her Osage college professor to attend the dances. Since then she started to go to

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Gray Horse, one of the three districts that hosts the annual Inlonshka in June. She also began to help in the preparation process of the dances every year. According to Therese, the Inlonshka was traditionally only danced by grown men and the eldest sons of the family. Spiritual renewal is an important aspect in the Inlonshka. The dance is held in a huge arbor. Each district selects a drum keeper who is responsible for the annual event. The event lasts for four days, from Thursday to Sunday. Women have been allowed to participate in the dance only since the Second World War. Therese used to go to the event and stay in the camp to help with the preparation process when she was still living in Wichita. She made her own dance outfit for the dance. It is considered significant to own a dance outfit because it is difficult and expensive to make one. After moving to Tulsa, she would drive back and forth from the dances. She said she missed the days when she stayed overnight in the camp because she enjoyed the rhythm of each day when people were getting ready for the dances. Since she moved down to Norman several years ago, she has been unable to attend the dances because of her work schedule. Even though she is active and eager to learn about the tribe and participate in the dances, Therese regrets that her parents and family are not as interested. She wants to learn as much as she can about the language and culture so that she can pass them down to the next generation. Her active involvement in Irish music activity also has little to do with her family. She became interested in American folk music and bluegrass music during her college years. She said that she is very eclectic in her taste of music and enjoys a wide variety of musical activities. But among all the activities in which she is active, she likes Irish music the most: [In the jam session,] I like it when it happens to be a tune that is maybe way too fast but everybody knows it. It is just like this mass energy starts coalescing. It is just so neat, it is such a neat feeling. It is like you don’t want the bubble to burst … everybody is pitching in … To me it is like a mass “chi” energy, when everybody is doing Tai-Chi … The camaraderie and everything, even though I may not have anything in common, other than Irish music, with these people … we get along great because we are playing music. (Matthews 2004)

Therese believes that her interest in Irish music is an outgrowth of her desire to acknowledge the different ethnicities in her ancestral lineage. She found out recently that all the European blood in her ancestry came from the ancient Celtic areas. “I am a hundred percent tribal in that sense,” she joked (Matthews 2004). Participating in Irish music activities enhances her Irish ethnic identity and helps her maintain a balanced view of her ethnic identities as a descendent of Osage and Irish ancestors.

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Case Study III—John McGaha I became acquainted with John McGaha mainly through playing in Celtic jam sessions held monthly in the Celtic Cup of Oklahoma City and Borders Bookstore of Norman. A young man in his twenties, John plays fiddle, hammered dulcimer, and has even started to learn Celtic harp. He also plays in a band called Boru’s Ghost, which mixes Irish tunes with instruments from other traditions such as African djembe and jazz bass. He grew up in a musical family in Oklahoma. His father is a long-time bluegrass banjo player and played in one of the first bluegrass bands in Oklahoma during the 1970s. His father encouraged him and tried to teach him fiddle when he was little. His maternal grandfather used to live in the rural areas and play fiddle for the barn yard dances. “Between my dad and my granddad, I learned how to play fiddle,” he said (McGaha 2004). Although he has been playing American old-time and bluegrass music for many years, he finds the challenges presented by the Irish tunes more appealing to him. When he listened to his first Chieftains recording during his teenage years, Irish fiddle music was “like a breath of fresh air” to him. He told me that Celtic music is the original version of old-time traditional/Appalachian music bought over by immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and England. When asked about his ancestral background, John said he had done some research in genealogy and found out how his last name “McGaha” came about. He said that “McGaha” can be traced back to a Northern Ireland county, one of the Protestant areas. He thinks his family came over from Ireland few generations ago. “One day I want to go back there and see if I can find some relatives there. That will be cool,” he told me. He said he also has some Viking heritage, and has recently taken up interest in Norwegian music and cultures. He started to find out about and become interested in his Irish heritage after playing Irish music. “Before that, I knew I was a mixed breed, I didn’t care,” he said, “but something ancient woke up in me when playing Irish music.” When asked what it means to be an American, he said, “In America, anyone can belong. Being an American is a vague thing, it doesn’t have to do with race. America is the blending of all the world’s cultures, kind of like a bus station. It used to be different, my father never saw any person other than a white person until he was seventeen. People now are more open-minded” (McGaha 2004).

Case Study IV—Malia Bennett Malia Bennett grew up in a musical household, with a father who owned a large collection of recordings that ranged from Western Baroque and

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Renaissance music to a wide variety of ethnic music, such as Scottish bagpipe music and Mexican mariachi music. As a child, she and her brother both took piano lessons, and she learned guitar on her own when she grew older. She left Oklahoma to attend the University of Wisconsin and minored in piano performance in the mid 1980s. Her college years in Wisconsin were filled with musical activities; she took piano lessons at the university, played bluegrass music on guitar with friends, and attended folk music concerts where she came across many performers who were associated with the radio program Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul, Minnesota. Malia had to put aside her musical interests when it came time to graduate from college, develop a career, and build a family. After about twenty years, the desire of Malia’s twin daughters to learn bluegrass fiddle music, after hearing a CD of the Dixie Chicks one day, revived Malia’s own interest in playing music. Malia brought her daughters to their first jam session at the Celtic Cup Café in Oklahoma City in 2003, and soon after, they began to attend sessions regularly in the Oklahoma City and Norman areas. Malia’s experience with playing bluegrass music and the Celtic music that she listened to in her college years all came back to her at the jam sessions; she was able to catch up quickly with the chord progressions of the Irish tunes that were played there. Through her participation in the jam sessions, Malia became friendly with other musicians and occasionally began to play with some of these musicians for contra dances. Together with Wayne Cantwell and Ian Brittle, Malia formed a band in 2005; they call themselves The Suspicious Contraband. Although they originally got together to play for contra dances, they soon extended their performance engagements to many other festivals and settings. Malia’s ethnic heritage from both sides of her parents includes Native American, Irish, and Scottish. She is listed as an eighth in the Seminole tribe, and the genealogy research that her brother conducted indicates that her ancestors came to United States from Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as from the Munster region in Ireland. Both her parents are actively involved in the affairs of Native Americans; her mother is a professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma, and her father is an Indian tribal judge in Eastern Oklahoma. As a child, Malia’s parents took her to powwows and other Indian dances, and she learned how to do round dancing, war dancing, buffalo dancing, two-step, and stomp dancing. As she grew older, however, she lost interest in the dances because she became self-conscious of her blue eyes and blonde hair which “stuck out like a sore thumb” at the dances. She has brought her children to powwow dances, and she said they enjoyed dancing at the powwows; however, cultural activities like these now have to take a backseat in the busy schedules of their lives.

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When I raised the question about the connection between her Irish/Scottish heritage and her affinity for Irish music, Malia believes that she was first attracted to the music itself: I think the main reason that I got involved with it really had nothing to do with the fact that I was part Irish or part Scottish. It was the fact that I enjoyed that music. I enjoyed the interesting, the modal form of the music. I just find it intriguing, it’s fun, it’s ethereal … I think it’s just the music itself, and the fact that we have ties to those countries where that music is from, I guess that strengthens my interest. But it was the music itself that got me at first. (Bennett 2006)

Because of her busy family schedule and her daughters’ involvement in sports and other extracurricular activities, Malia has not attended the jam sessions regularly since the fall semester of 2005. Her twin daughters continue to play Irish fiddle music, and call themselves The Flowers of Edinburgh, since part of their ancestry can be traced back to Edinburgh, Scotland. Malia appreciates the friendly environment that the jam sessions provide for her daughters to play with other musicians. “Everyone at the jam sessions … is very kind and generous for the most part … pull out the chairs and make the circle wider … everybody is happy to show somebody something, or … let people join in,” she said (Bennett 2006). Although Malia has not been able to attend sessions regularly, playing in bands and sometimes playing with her daughters has continued to bring her joy and relief from stresses in life. Playing music with her daughters is a privilege that Malia wishes she had enjoyed with her own mother. Music has created a common bond between Malia and her two daughters. She hopes that playing music will be an enjoyment throughout her daughters’ lives and bring them a fuller life.

Conclusion Although the extent to which each of my consultants identifies with an ethnic group differs, their decisions to identify themselves ethnically with Native American or Irish cultures are conscious choices they made as adults. Their choices are predicated by the desirable elements they found in the available cultural activities of these ethnic groups. An appreciation for the community created through making music or dancing together comes up frequently in my conversations with my consultants: Mary feels the connection with the people around her in the Native American Gourd Dance; Therese enjoys working together with other tribal members to prepare for the Inlonshka dance; Malia acknowledges the inclusive and friendly environment of the jam

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session. They all appreciate the friendships that developed from playing music together in the Irish session. This desire for community can be interpreted as middle-class Americans’ counter-reaction to mainstream culture as they envy the more “meaningful community” that exists among lower class racial and ethnic groups (Bellah et al.1996:152). Addressing the desire of middle-class Americans to reach out to others, the authors of the best-selling book Habits of the Heart put it this way: “With the weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living, Americans have been improvising alternatives more or less successfully. They engage, sometimes with intense involvement, in a wide variety of arts, sports and nature appreciation, sometimes as spectators but often as active participants” (Bellah et al.1996:291). Because of the willingness of session players to receive new members, the Irish session can happen almost anywhere in the world today. Nevertheless, despite the apparent absence of boundaries in Irish music, Timothy D. Taylor claims that “it still has ties to place, and has cultural power to invoke place” (2003:280). As demonstrated in my case studies, participating in music and dance events temporarily creates a sense of belonging to a particular ethnic group that is important for many Americans who feel uprooted in the highly industrialized and individualistic mainstream culture. John articulated this sentiment at the end of our interview, “My family lost touch with the past….I get in touch finally with my roots. I feel a sense of home when I play. It’s hard to explain, but I feel completed” (McGaha 2004). The intrinsic attributes of Irish music—the use of modal scales in many Irish tunes, the rhythmic drive of the dance tunes, and the emphasis on ornamentation—are qualities that appeal to many of my consultants. Most of my consultants had experiences in playing old-time or bluegrass music; Irish music, while fitting into a familiar musical structure of old-time and bluegrass music, offers melodic intricacies that are generally not found in old-time music, and for John, listening to Irish fiddle music was “like a breath of fresh air” to him. As noted in my case studies, the interest in an ethnic identity or heritage often develops after one’s active participation in the music or dance activities. Sometimes an unpleasant encounter in the music and dance activities may diminish the enthusiasm of one’s identification and participation in a certain ethnic culture. For Malia, the awareness of her physical differences from those around her in powwows discouraged her from any further and deeper involvement in Native American cultural events. Spirituality is an element that both Mary and Therese mentioned when describing their experiences as participants in ethnic music and dance activities. Mary describes her experience in the Gourd Dance as “transcendental, healing, and pre-birth.” For Therese, the Inlonshka dance is an event for spiritual

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renewal. The longing to explore various forms of spirituality has been a major characteristic of the New Age movement in postmodern American culture. In the process of rediscovering spirituality, the cultures of many ethnic groups are being embraced along the way (Taylor 2003:278). The emphasis on spirituality by Native Americans and the mythical ancient Celt culture embodied in Irish music are attractive qualities in this context. It should be noted that not all participants in the above-mentioned cultural activities identify themselves ethnically with Native American or Irish cultures. These case studies suggest that one’s choice of ethnic identity, affirmed through music and dance, represents one possible meaning for ethnicity in postmodern America. However, there are other implications. Expressive activities like music and dance can also serve as an external expression of one’s identity beyond ethnicity. Modern media technologies and the ease of travel provide us with a wide variety of music that in which we can actively or passively engage. Through exploring the choices we make, the essence of our identities gains clarity. For many people living in the United States, ethnic identities are choices that emerge most significantly through the selection and practice of the music and dance forms available to them.

Notes 1

AICS was dissolved in 2005.

References Alba, Richard D. 1990. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1996. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Malia K. 2006. Personal Interview. 24 February. Kennedy, Mary. 2004. Personal Interview. 21 October. Matthews, Therese. 2004. Personal Interview. 28 October. McGaha, John. 2004. Personal Interview. 5 March. Taylor, Timothy D. 2003. Afterword: Gaelicer Than Thou. In Celtic Modern: Music at the Global Fringe, ed. Martin Stokes and Philip V. Bohlman, pp. 275-284. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Waters, Mary C. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER SIX MARKETING CULTURE: THE BIG ROM ORCHESTRA OF AHIRKAPI, TURKEY AND THE MUSICAL INFLUENCE OF A MINORITY GONCA GIRGIN

In this article, I explore the cultural and musical life of a Gypsy group in Turkey, focusing on their traditions, customs, performances, and general perceptions of the world. Specifically, I concentrate on the AhÕrkapÕ Roma and The Big Rom Orchestra of AhÕrkapÕ, which is the first and the only neighborhood Rom Orchestra established in Turkey in 2000.1 I use this study to illustrate one contemporary example of an old phenomenon in the history of the Gypsies: how members of an ethnic minority, while subordinated in all other aspects of social life, can profoundly impact the majority in one specific domain: music. I would like to begin by clearly articulating my reasons for choosing this particular study and lay bare my methodology. According to current statistics, forty-one ethnic and religious minorities currently live in Turkey. I was particularly drawn to the Gypsy minority by the widely-circulated stereotypes associated with them, such as an unstable temperament, darker skin, and an attitude of carpe diem that supposedly shapes Gypsies’ body language, life, and music. I was also especially drawn to the Gypsy minority because of the extent to which these stereotypes, coalescing into what might be described as an “ethos” in the public imagination, shape the lives of the ethnic majority (and everyone else) around them; the Gypsy communities in Turkey have a powerful influence on the popular music of Istanbul, which is produced, supported, and consumed by Gypsy and non-Gypsy alike. During my fieldwork, I investigated and tried to interpret these interactions through the method of learning by doing as a dancer. Along the way, I learned that one of the aims of the orchestra, in addition to earning money as professional musicians, is to describe their culture and argue for their humanity .

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Geography and a Brief History of AhÕrkapÕ The district of AhÕrkapÕ is situated in the historically European part of Istanbul. TopkapÕ Palace is located in this district, and because of the presence of the nearby barns (ahÕr) in the same area, the name AhÕrkapÕ was given to the eighth of nineteen doors, built during the Byzantine period, which are set into the Walls of Marmara that surround the palace. According to residents of the region, however, the original name of the eighth door was Ahir KapÕ (or end door). Nevertheless, in time, the whole district came to be called AhÕrkapÕ. Because there are so many buildings located in AhÕrkapÕ that were constructed during the Ottoman and Byzantine periods, it has become one of the most important archaeological field sites in Istanbul. In Ottoman times, the cultural life of AhÕrkapÕ centered on the Palace. Although direct evidence is lacking, an analysis of the architecture of the region tells us something about the people that lived there. In the north of AhÕrkapÕ, the mosque and the public bath of øshak Paúa, built in 1482, provides evidence for the presence of Muslims in this area during the 15th century. Greeks traveled to the beach of Kumluca at the east end of AhÕrkapÕ to bury their bodies in the sand and celebrate the feast days of August (Eremya Çelebi, 1988: 209). These feast days were forbidden during the reign of Murad IV (17th century), but later these bans were lifted and Greek peoples continued to go there for the feast days until the beginning of the 19th century (Kuban 1994:102). Beginning with the Ottoman period, however, the monasteries and churches in this area, which were built in Byzantine period, were closed or rededicated for the use of the Muslim population. Thus, historically (at least since the Ottoman period), AhÕrkapÕ, along with its neighboring environs, has been primarily a Muslim settlement. Today AhÕrkapÕ is also a Rom settlement of thirty-five households surrounded by non-Gypsy populations, first arriving from Greece via the contract of the Turkish–Greek Population Exchange of 1923 after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. .

Living with Multiple Cultural Identities The Problem of Identity It is useful to examine Turkish Gypsy identity definition both with regard to “official” constructions of the nation-state as well as processes of socialization. Here, I will concentrate on the latter. In particular, processes of assimilation and integration are critical for understanding the orientation of ethnic minorities in Turkey more generally, but it is necessary to begin such an analysis by clarifying the differences between these two processes. In political and social

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sciences, assimilation is generally perceived as obligatory change of a set of practices, often extending to ideologies and perceptions as well, to a state of alignment with a dominant majority. This enforced similarity may be made mandatory by political forces of the state or social forces, but the more important point here is that it is the obligatory nature of assimilation that distinguishes it from integration. The obligatory nature of assimilation, has cast it as an extremely violating and destructive means of accomplishing a relatively stable living situation for people with quite different cultural backgrounds in the same society. Integration, on the other hand, consists of the alignment with a dominant majority’s norms and values motivated on the part of the minority group, and is typically viewed more positively.2 I approach these commonly accepted understandings of socialization processes suspiciously, however, as we enter the realm of the artificial once we conform to any definitive judgments about the where assimilation ends and integration begins. Peter Alford Andrews maintains that, in Turkey, general processes of socialization occurs at different levels, across varying ranges, and to different degrees (Andrews 1992:40).3 For the Gypsies who live in almost all regions of Turkey, assimilation varies according to geographical region, proximal ethnic and cultural groups, and Gypsy views about non-Gypsies (and the reverse). Thus, some Gypsy groups are partially assimilated into the majority while others remained quite separate and distinct. To take one example, five years ago, I traveled to the primarily non-Gypsy village of Tekirda÷ in Thrace, where I observed stark social segregation. The gypsies there avoid playing the zurna (a double reed aerophone) because they claim that when they play that instrument it exposes their Gypsy identity and renders them susceptible to legal restrictions imposed upon them by the majority non-Gypsy population. We can see a second example in the work of Andrews (quoted in Magnarella), where he describes the ways that three Gypsy families living in the same town actively pursue winning acceptance from the non-Gypsy residents. All three families modified basic aspects of their behavior while embracing Islamic practices to accomplish this assimilation: they took up prayer, they feast, they go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, their women are covered by Islamic clothes, and they do not meet with foreigners in public. In both of these examples, social pressure from the majority works together with individual motivation to modify the behavior of minority Gypsies. In other settings in Turkey, however, this works quite differently, as in the Dibekdere village of Mu÷la or in Edirne, where only Gypsy people live and practice their own languages, customs, and traditions. Thus, in Turkey, the degree of Gypsy assimilation to the majority may range from partial (in any sense) to complete eradication of all public display of Gypsy identity.

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The AhÕrkapÕ Roma The AhÕrkapÕ Roma, the focus of my fieldwork, is a Gypsy group that has assimilated to some degree. There has been almost nothing written about the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, and I first learned about the orchestra of AhÕrkapÕ from online newspapers. This is unusual, because a great deal has been written about other Gypsy settlements in Istanbul. This prompted me to ask the questions: Are they really Roma? Or is it possible that they simply do not conform to public displays of Gypsy stereotypes? In the beginning, I believed that the AhÕrkapÕ Roma lived contentedly in their own community, secure in their homogeneous cultural identity and social status as Roma. As time went on, however, I came to understand that a more complex, layered conception of identity lay at the center of AhÕrkapÕ Roma concerns. Initially, most of my consultants began with a statement that resembled the following: “I am not Turkish Rom, I am both Rom, and Turk.” These two identities seemed to form the core of what they held to be a kind of “third culture.” In their view, the AhÕrkapÕ Roma are culturally distinct; they are different from other Gypsies and non-Gypsies alike. According to pire (flea) Mehmet, however, there is also a European aspect that, when combined with their Roman and Turkish heritage, becomes equivalent to a superior identity:4 My father was ten and my mother was four when they came to AhÕrkapÕ. Atatürk exiled all Roma in Thessalonica to Istanbul by ship. The Roma who came from Thessalonica are also European. This is the reason for differences from other Rom immigrants in Turkey. In all the world, there is nobody who has as much passion for entertainment as Greek people. So, we inherited our amusing life from them, but we live this life in our own way. I mean, according to our conditions. As a mixed culture: Greek, Rom and Turk. (Demirdö÷en 2004)

I reminded pire Mehmet that many Roma living in other regions of Turkey are also from Thessalonica. He replied: Our biggest luck was to come to Istanbul. Here, we have modernized, and have become more westernized. We could save our European identity. (Demirdö÷en 2004)

I also come from Thessalonica; however, I do not conceive of myself as European in any way. I believe that the AhÕrkapÕ Roma’s claim to European roots is a way of regaining a sense of cultural superiority in the face of being designated as lower-class citizens in Turkey. Furthermore, in another interview, an interesting point emerged: while AhÕrkapÕ Roma equate the acceptance of Turkishness as a kind of loss of original identity, the phenomenon of

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westernization in Turkey allows them to preserve their Europeanness, which I believe they associate with progress and the modern world. Yaúar Uçar is one of the few AhÕrkapÕ Roma who conceptualizes his identity differently from that described above. Uçar’s concept of a distinct identity centers on the loss of original language, the use of which was forbidden in Turkey, and which he believes was the first step toward obligatory assimilation.5 This assimilation is the result of the combined destructive approaches of nationalism, racism, and discrimination. Ultimately, however, for Uçar, it is important to maintain one’s own distinct cultural identity while recognizing and appreciating that of your neighbors: Everybody is created by God. Everybody is equal in the eyes of God. People are the ones who create nationalism, racism, and discrimination. In the world, there are many different cultures and everybody reflects the culture of his/her own region. It does not matter whether you are indigenous or an immigrant. The important thing is living in the same place with different cultures at peace. Everybody should respect each other. You can be influenced by other cultures, but you should not break your own culture. The state also should not discriminate against any of its citizens. Immigrants also serve this country. For this reason, all peoples should be embraced and valued by both the state and society. For example, I should know and speak the language of my region, but you should not forbid my language, you should respect me. (Uçar 2004)

Despite the discrimination faced by the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, life is very enjoyable for them. They say that the aim of existence is firstly to believe in God, to smile in every condition, and then to sing and dance forever. This attitude seems to extend to all dimensions of daily life: money, for example, should be shared with others, but today’s earnings should be spent today. Although AhÕrkapÕ is located in the middle of Istanbul, most Roma there feel as if they live a great distance from this “cosmopolitan” city. Indeed, their way of life is quite different from the surrounding regions. In Turkey, many non-Gypsies believe that Gypsies possess no feelings of shame because of their life style. For most non-Gypsies, behaving “correctly” and living within socially acceptable limits are more important than living comfortably, and so when AhÕrkapÕ Roma take advantage of what they regard as part of their home to hang their laundry on the street to dry, it is widely regarded as uncivilized behavior. I think this is an unfair judgment. If Gypsies behave unusually, according to popular consensus, for their comfort, they do not hesitate to do so. The social rules of others are only important to them and must be applied if they actually violate laws. I believe the unusual lifestyle of the AhÕrkapÕ Roma is also related to their historically itinerant way of life. Not everyone, however, is so unaccepting of Gypsy culture. I spoke with a number of non-Gypsy residents in AhÕrkapÕ who accepted their Rom neighbors

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for who they believe them to be. This more tolerant view seems to emerge from the basic idea that “people need one another,” as in the following paraphrase of an interview with a non-Gypsy resident: Their view of life is different than ours, but we do not have any problems with them because life primarily refers to entertainment for these Roma. They are never vindictive. It is true that they always fight with each other, but it takes just a few minutes to make peace. Suddenly, they forget all of it and start talking and dancing together. Like everyone, of course they have many difficulties in their life, especially about financial matters, but they do not take life seriously. (Bolu 2004)

Sexual Segregation: Women and Men in AhÕrkapÕ Like most Gypsy communities of the world, sexual segregation was and is an overt practice, particularly when it comes to employment in AhÕrkapÕ. As one of the results of this segregation, in both the public and private dimensions, women still socialize primarily with other women according to age hierarchies.6 Since the beginning of the Turkish Republic, Gypsy men have worked as garbage-collectors, scrap-iron dealers, tinkers, musicians, and street vendors. As is typical of a patriarchal society, women are responsible for taking care of children and doing the housework. Unlike non-Gypsies, Gypsy women have historically worked outside the home with men among non-Gypsy women and men. Particularly in 1960s and 1970s, economic imperatives loosened sexual segregation and women began to work outside as florists, fortune-tellers, and vegetable and food sellers. Although other Gypsy women in Turkey could also become singers or dancers, AhÕrkapÕ women have never done so. They do, however, take opportunities to perform as amateurs at wedding or henna ceremonies, HÕdÕrellez celebrations, and birthday parties, often singing popular music hits as well as more traditional songs.7 Dance is always performed with standard “Rom Dance Tunes.”8 Particularly when it comes to dance, when comparing Gypsy Muslims to other Muslims in the Balkans, there is a more relaxed attitude towards sexual segregation among Gypsy communities. In AhÕrkapÕ, even though these Rom Dance tunes are especially sexual, they are not performed in public because the focus on the female body on the part of “outsiders” may possess negative intentions.9 The customs regarding appropriate female behavior thus remain conservative. For instance, in the 2005 celebration of HÕdÕrellez in AhÕrkapÕ, one young girl could not dance because her father did not give permission, in spite of her and her mother’s insistence. The father’s explanation was (while pointing at me), “Do not persist with this pumpkin. And also, you can dance at home

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until night. Look! You should watch that non-Rom lady. How beautifully she is dancing like us; it is great!” According to the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, these attractive female bodies are symbols of virginity, and they have to protect them from the potentially evil intentions of outsiders. Dancing and singing can intensify and increase the visibility of the attractive power of women.10 Interestingly, this view is not applied to women who sing when they go to the market or hang out the laundry, which is considered different—a more natural occurrence. As the eldest male resident of the neighborhood where I conducted my research commented: Our women are very proud and virtuous. In all the world, Rom women are usually thought of as prostitutes. Let’s go to the whorehouse and see how many of them are Rom. Or we can go to the prison to check how many of them are Rom. I know that these very absurd views are common, but they are misconceptions. Our women always take care of our children and do the housework from morning until night.....You can also see a Rom woman dancer or singer, but none of them live in AhÕrkapÕ. Never.... (Demirdöven 2004)

There are no such restrictions placed upon the musical performances of male Roma. They can sing, play, or dance wherever and whenever they want. For Rom men in AhÕrkapÕ , the most widespread way of making money is being a musician. There is at least one instrumentalist or singer in every household. Male musicians generally play Turkish folk or classical musical instruments in restaurants or in any place where they can earn money doing so. Music is indispensable for Rom men because not only does it allow them to make a living, but they consider it a primary need for maintaining happy and healthy lives. In this musical neighborhood in which many families are relatives and the rest of them are friends, life is built on strong ties of kinship and friendship. Everyone in AhÕrkapÕ knows who is related to whom, who has done what to whom, who is or was married to whom, and who might be sleeping with whom. The center of social life is sharing and community; in addition to simply making use of any of the personal commodities of their neighbors, AhÕrkapÕ Roma also share in each other’s happiness and grief. In this context music, like everything else, is shared with Roma and non-Roma alike.

The Big Rom Orchestra of AhÕrkapÕ When one of my professors, whose work I have always appreciated, encouraged me to research this subject for my fieldwork, I did not know I would have such a fun and interesting experience. I believe that the AhÕrkapÕ Roma accepted me because of my musical identity as a dancer and instrumentalist.

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This research began as a kind of business relationship, but later I came to be one of them. My fieldwork was really an unbelievable experience and a process of self-improvement. In the final section of this essay, I will explain the dynamism of cultural and musical life in terms of professionalism in AhÕrkapÕ by means of my general impressions from our rehearsals, which were both difficult to adapt to as well pleasurable. In the shared musical life of the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, the emergence of a neighborhood orchestra was explained as the first step in linking cultural presentation and professionalism by the oldest member of the orchestra: We always do music before we talk. I mean that we cannot live without playing an instrument or entertaining ourselves. When we hear any musical sound, suddenly we start to dance all together. One day, as we were making music, my wife suggested, “All of you can play very well without doing rehearsals. Why don’t you establish an orchestra? You can also make a huge amount of money.” As a result of that idea, we gathered together and this orchestra came to life. (Demirdöven 2004)

This orchestra consists of both Balkan and Western instruments, including the kanun, the ud, violins, the accordion, various types of drums, clarinets, cello, and keyboard. The orchestra also features an honorary female singer who does not live in AhÕrkapÕ. Although they call themselves an orchestra, as is obvious from the instrumentation, they do not resemble the Western model of an orchestra. In fact, this term is a strategic choice, a label charged with seriousness and associated with high culture. The Big Rom Orchestra carries with it a range of meanings for the AhÕrkapÕ Roma. The first thing most people will say about it is something like “We have a Rom Orchestra whose members have made an album, you must listen, and it is perfect....” They believe that the orchestra and their musical messages not only explain the cheerful life of Roma, but also make their cultures come alive via the most effective way of expression. With regard to their recording, the presence of three songs in the Romani language is remarkable, because their original language (according to them) is the most fragile issue in preserving the heritage of their culture. Yaúar Uçar, who is the composer and writer of these songs, is one of the few Roma that knows this language. He expresses their concerns: Local accent is shaped with the habitat. This is true for the Romani language, and sometimes the language is partly damaged by interactions. However, it is never completely lost.... Our fathers spoke the Western Romani language. Unfortunately, when they came from Greece, they were not allowed to speak their own language. They had to speak Turkish. Eventually, they forgot the original language. Maybe the pressure of the government has decreased today,

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but it is too late as we have already lost a big part of our language..... When my father and my mother talked to each other about something secret, I used to listen to them so carefully. I really wanted to learn it. And I just guessed what they did from what their behavior was after talking. As a result, I learned a few words and some grammar by means of this method of guessing. A few of us in our generation will be the last people who speak our language. (Uçar 2004)

For the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, these performances in the original Romani language might represent a hope for increasing the number of schools with Romani language education in their curricula. They believe that they can accomplish anything through the power of their music, As is well-known, in the long history of discrimination against Gypsies, music has perhaps been the only legitimate niche in which they have been perceived to excel by the majority of non-Gypsy communities (Silverman 2004:119). AhÕrkapÕ Roma are, of course, well aware of this stereotype, and use music to assert their general cultural superiority, (along with their multicultural heritage, described above) even as compared with other Roma: “We might be ugly, uneducated, belonging to the lowest class of the society, but nobody can play an instrument like us. We are the most talented community in all the world. Particularly, AhÕrkapÕ Roma are quite different from the others....” Music thus becomes a weapon of defense. I will now provide a few details about the musical features of Romani music in AhÕrkapÕ as learned in my rehearsals with the Big Rom Orchestra, features which, when emphasized in performance and combined with other stereotypes about Gypsy culture more generally, also help explain how the Gypsy minority in Turkey can so powerfully dominate the popular music market. As was described to me, rhythm is the foundation and source of their music. They claim everything that is related to music and dance comes from rhythmic formations. Furthermore, they explain, rhythmic patterns exist in every moment of our daily lives. All sound is arranged by God according to different rhythmic feelings of perfect harmony, like the steps of people, cries of a baby, heartbeats, speaking, smiling, and in the natural world in general: the sound of leaf, the waves in the sea, and the like. Consequently, for the AhÕrkapÕ Roma, rhythm takes on a holy quality that people apply to the deepest meanings of life. Related to this musical philosophy is the notion that all Roma were born with their own rhythmic feeling, a rhythm that basically consists of nine beats. Thus the most vital element in music-making is the percussion ”section.” In our rehearsals I learned that all pieces have one improvisational part that is performed by the drummer in the middle of the piece. Dynamic rhythmic shifts of this kind are pervasive, and are often used to entertain and engage as well as create a more melancholy musical atmosphere at times. For example, in the rehearsals, they practiced a song that was composed and performed by a Turkish

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pop music group that was very popular during the previous year in Turkey. Although the lyrics of the song contained a wistful love story told at a slow rate of speed and in 4/4 meter, the Big Rom Orchestra played a very different interpretation, arranging it as a quick instrumental piece in a 9/8 meter. Along with these rhythmic dynamics, it is equally important to understand that when the AhÕrkapÕ Roma play a piece, they use not only their hands, but their entire bodies as a result of their concentration. These elements make the music especially entertaining, and when combined with stereotypes of the carefree Gypsy lifestyle, help explain why Gypsy groups more generally dominate the popular music industry in Turkey; indeed, seventy percent of the industry is owned by Gypsy musicians. One finds players and singers of primarily Gypsy origin in most major popular music genres, including art, folk, pop, arabesk, fantezi, rock, jazz, etc., and the orchestra of the most famous singers in Turkey consists primarily of Gypsies. Producers understand that “the Gypsy soul” is a great attraction for Turkish audiences, and the members of the Big Rom Orchestra have been able to cashed in on this understanding. The youngest clarinet player in the orchestra, for example, has worked with many of the most famous names in Turkish art music and he is only twenty years old. Being described as a Gypsy musician is thus a highly effective marketing strategy and it is not uncommon for musicians to imitate the “gypsy style” or lay false claims to gypsy heritage. A poor and uneducated Gypsy virtuoso of the street is more admirable than the child of an aristocrat who graduated from two conservatories in Europe, in many people’s minds.

Conclusion I have tried here to paint in broad strokes a picture of the cultural and musical life of one minority Gypsy group in Istanbul, Turkey, attempting to show how they navigate the maintenance of their own cultural values and heritage while simultaneously accomplishing the daily work of making a living. This is possible in Turkey because of Gypsy domination of the popular music industry, in contrast to all other aspects of social life. We thus return to an old and widespread phenomenon in the history of the Gypsies: many of the very stereotypes that contribute to their social and political marginality are incredibly desirable qualities in marketed images of the musical artist. As with The Big Rom Orchestra of AhÕrkapÕ, Gypsy groups thus gain the ability to develop strategies that maximize both their commercial success , preserve their cultural heritage, and perhaps even correct popular misconceptions. So the lives of Gypsy musicians in Turkey are sustained and improved creatively.

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Notes The field research took place in AhÕrkapÕ, a Rom neighborhood of Sultanahmet, østanbul in Turkey, in 2005. This study is the first fieldwork I have done with the AhÕrkapÕ Roma. Interviews with members of The Big Rom Orchestra of Ahirkapi and residents of the region were also conducted during semi-regular field trips in 2004 and 2005. All Turkish interviews and Turkish sources are translated by Z. Gonca Girgin and this essay was first revised by Aylin Ya÷cÕo÷lu. 1

I avoid use of the term of Roma as a general descriptor, because some communities, in opposition to its assertion by Romani groups in Europe and America, reject it. Consequently, I use the term “Gypsy” for general explanations of the group as a whole, but when I mention specific communities, I apply their own labels. 2 According to another understanding of the relationship between these terms , however, integration is one of the components in the constitution of assimilation (see, Yinger 1994:69). 3 Given the difficulties of maintaining a rigid distinction between the concepts of assimilation and integration, from this point on I will refer to all such processes, regardless of the source of pressure involved (coercive vs. elective) as “assimilation.” 4 Pire (flea) is a nickname. In AhÕrkapÕ, most people go by nicknames like pire (flea) Mehmet, sarÕ (blond) Ayúe, baúkan (chairman)YalçÕn, köfte (meatball) Kenan, and the like; however, having a nickname is popular tradition in most of the small settlements of Turkey. Nicknames are often used to distinguish one individual from another, eliminating confusion over those with the same name. 5 For further details about the language of AhÕrkapÕ Roma, see Girgin 2006 6 For further details about the structure of the age hierarchy and for the ideal models of women and men of AhÕrkapÕ in accordance with this age hierarchy, see Girgin 2006. 7 In Turk-Muslim tradition, HÕdÕrellez is the celebration day that is commemorated for the meeting of HÕzÕr and ølyas Prophets. Hizir-ølyas becomes to be called as HÕdÕr-ellez over time. In Anatolia it is celebrated not only by Muslims, but also by Christians, and it starts on the night of May 5th and continues to the end of May 6th. HÕdÕrellez is not originally a Gypsy festival, but it became one of their traditional celebrations, as is the case with the other Turk-Muslim communities. For further details about the HÕdÕrellez celebrations in AhÕrkapÕ, see Girgin 2006:71-79. 8 There are two varieties of Rom Dance Tunes : songs and instrumental pieces. All of the pieces which accompany Romani dance and are performed in 9/8 meter are called “Roman Tunes”. These tunes are dominant in musical performances at weddings because they are particularly enjoyable and reflect Romani identity in the clearest way. 9 Here, the terms “public” and “outsiders” refer to people who are not acquaintances. 10 Additionally, the act of men and women dancing together is considered threatening for both sexes; for men, it endangers their masculinity while for women, it threatens their virginity.

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References Ahunbay, Metin. 1993. “Surlar” (Walls). In Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopedia of Istanbul), Vol 7:74-79. Aksu, Mustafa. 2003. Türkiye’de Çingene Olmak (Being Gypsy in Turkey) Istanbul: Ozan Publications. Alpman, NazÕm. 1997. Baúka DünyanÕn ønsanlarÕ (People of The Different World). Istanbul: Ozan Publications. Alus, Sermet Muhtar. 1995. “Eski østanbul’da Çingeneler” (The Gypsies in Old Istanbul). In Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society) 137(23):286-93. Andrews, Peter Alford. 1992. Türkiye’de Etnik Gruplar (Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey), trans. by Mustafa Köpüúo÷lu. Istanbul: Ant Publications. Aral, Fahri. 1998. “OtlarÕ Bile OynatÕrÕm” (I Even Make Dance Grasses). In Müzikalite 6:48-49. Asseo, Henriette. 2004. Çingeneler, Bir Avrupa YagÕsÕ (Gypsies are the Fate of Europe), trans. by Orçun Türkay. Istanbul: YapÕ Kredi Publications. Barth, Fredrik. 1998. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Illinois: Waveland Press. Bolu, Ziva. 2004. Interview by author. AhÕrkapÕ, østanbul, May. Cornell, Stephen, Douglas Hartmann. 1998. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World Londra: Pine Forge Press. Çay, Abdulhaluk. 1990. HÕdÕrellez Kültür Bahar BayramÕ (HÕdÕrellez, Bayram of Culture ann Spring). Ankara: Halk Kültürünü AraútÕrma Publications. Demirdöven, Mehmet. 2004. Interview by author. AhÕrkapÕ. Istanbul, January and February. —. 2004. Interview by author. AhÕrkapÕ, østanbul, June. Duygulu, Melih. 1995. “Türkiye Çingenelerinde Müzik” (Music in Gypsies of Turkey). In Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society), 23: 294-297 Emerson, Robert, Rachel Fretz, and Linda Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fonseca, Isabel. 2002. Bury me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, trans. by Özlem ølyas, Istanbul: Ayrinti Publications. Fraser, Angus. 1995. The Gypsies. 2nd. ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Furnivall, John. 1948. Colonial Policy and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gazimihal, Mahmut R. 1953. “Çingene ÇalgÕcÕlar” (Gypsy Players). In Milli Mecmua (National Periodical) 13(140):7-9. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic books. Girgin, Zeynep Gonca. 2005. Vital Influences of Minority on a Majority. Paper presented at The International Congress of Representation in Music and Musical Representation, Istanbul Technical University.

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—.2006. The Cultural and Musical Life of AhÕrkapÕ: AhÕrkapÕ Büyük Roman OrkestrasÕ. M.A. thesis, Istanbul Technical University. Greenberg, Robert. 2004. Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gronemeyer, Reimer. 1987. Zigeuner im Spiegel früher Chroniken und Abhandlungen: Quellen vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Chronological Early Gypsy in the Mirror and Treatises: Sources from 15th to 18th century). Giessen: Focus. Hancock, Ian. 2002. We are the Romani People. Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England: University of Hertfordshire Press. Kalafat, Yaúar. 2004. Altaylardan Anadoluya Kamizm ùamanizm (Camism and Shamanism from Altays to Anatolia). Istanbul: Yeditepe Publications. Kenrick, Donald. 2004. From the Ganges to the Thames. Hatfield Hertfordshire, England: University of Hertfordshire Press. Koptagel, Yüksel. 1973. “Çingeneler ve Sanat” (Gypsies and Art). Orkestra (Orchestra) 108:21-31. Kömürciyan, Eremya Çelebi. 1988. XVII. AsÕrda østanbul (østanbul in 17th century), trans. by Hrand Andreasyan, Istanbul: Eren Publications. Kuban, Do÷an. 1993. “AhÕrkapÕ.” In Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopedia of Istanbul), Vol.1:101-104. Magnarella, P.J. 1974. Türkiye’de Etnik Gruplar (Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey), trans. by Mustafa Köpüúo÷lu. Istanbul: Ant Publications. Manuel, Peter. 1989. “Andolusian, Gypsy, and Identity in the Contemporary Flemenco Complex.” Ethnomusicology 33(1): 47-65 —. 1989. “Modal Harmony in Andolusian, Eastern European, and Turkish Syncretic Musics.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 21:70-94 Mischek, Udo. 2002. “The Professional Skills of Gypsies in Istanbul.” KURI Journal of the Dom Research Center 1(7):2-7. Moermann, Michael. 1965. “Who Are the Lue?: Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization.” American Anthropologist 67:1215-29. Onur, Oral. 1995. “Çingeneler” (Gypsies) In Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society) 137 (23): 272-77. Oprisan, Ana. 2002. “Overview on the Roma in Turkey.” KURI Journal of the Dom Research Center 1(7):12-16. Özkan, Ali Rafet. 2000. Türkiye Çingeneleri (Turkish Gypsies). Ankara: National Library Publications. Seaman, Sonia Tamar. 2002. You’re Roman: Music and Identity in Turkish Roman Communities. Ph.D.diss., University of California. Silverman, Carol. 2000. “Rom (Gypsy) Music.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 8, Europe. ed. Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, pp. 270-293. New York: Garland Publishing.

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—. 2004. “The Gender of the Profession: Music, Dance and Reputation among Balkan Muslim Rom Women.” In Music and Gender: Perspectives From the Mediterrenean, ed. Tullia Magrini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Somersan, Semra. 2004. Sosyal Bilimlerde Etnisite ve Irk. (Ethnicity and Race in Social Sciences). østanbul: Bilgi University Publications. Stokes, Martin. 1994. “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music.” In Ethnicity, Identity and Music, ed. Martin Stokes, pp. 1-29. Bridgend, UK: WBC Bookbinders. ùener, Cemal. 2004. Türkiye’de Yaúayan Etnik ve Dinsel Gruplar (The ethnical and Religious groups of people in Turkey). Istanbul, Etik YayÕnlarÕ Uçar, Yaúar. 2004. Interview by author. AhÕrkapÕ, Istanbul, April and November. Yinger, Miltan. 1994. Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? Albany: State University of New York Press. Yükselsin, øbrahim Yavuz. 2000. BatÕ Türkiye RomanlarÕnda Kültürel Kimlik, Profesyonel Müzisyenlik ve Müziksel YaratÕcÕlÕk (Cultural Identity in Western Turkey Roman, Professional Musicianship and Musical Creativity). Doctoral thesis, øzmir Eagean University.

SECTION II: UNDER THE SUN

CHAPTER SEVEN INTRODUCTION ADAM ZOLKOVER

There is an old saw — a proverb appropriate to the studies of Ethnomusicology and Folklore, and especially appropriate to the project of this volume — that claims: there is nothing new under the sun. All our insights, our ideas and analyses and frames for analysis, are little more than the remains of older insights, and those insights, simply the remains of what preceded them. We think, we write, we publish, we hale our theories as gleaming new; but in fact, the bulk of what we do is to take the pieces of an ancient puzzle, reshuffle them, turn them upside down, and put them back together in a way unconventional enough, we hope, that no one will be the wiser. It is not dishonest and it is not uncreative, and it is done, most of the time, with such genuine zeal for the prospect of new truths that we ourselves hardly recognize that the pieces are familiar despite the way that they are laid out. It is, in essence, a sincere act of slight of hand in which, through misdirection, we seem to cause something previously unseen to materialize out of thin air. See here, I have nothing up my sleeves. This phenomenon — this scholarly reshuffling that so often masquerades as progress — has not gone unnoted. Looking at the state of Folklore in 1975, Henry Glassie commented that: Sometimes it embarrasses us, but we folklorists are the heirs of the romantics. Our new theories are theirs, refracted through modernism. Like them, we still search for the authentic outside of ourselves in folk art. While the world changed fitfully, we sought the authentic in the perduring, the timeless, the traditional. Now, in a time of efficient mass communication, we are seeking the authentic in artistic, symbolic, face-to-face encounter. (Glassie, 1975: 64).

For him, the project is one of nostalgia. Like the Romantics, we see a world fast escaping — a world in which the small, the individual, the delicate, and the artistic are being submerged and subsumed in a vast, monolithic, Adorno-esque cultural machine. And so we take up the tools of Herder, of Ruskin, of Morris,

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of Yeats, and we reorder them. We rename the parts and deny their origins, but even so, we raise their banner as our own. Our ideas, at heart, are the ideas of the Romantics, reassigned and rearranged to preserve the illusion of new truths. And Glassie is right. The project is indeed one of nostalgia, but not only of the type that he suggests. If, rather than looking at nostalgia as a longing for things past, we view it as a longing for things imagined, we get much closer to its core. When we look backwards with desire, either at the intimate society that seems so thoroughly to be escaping us in the era of mass culture, or at the simple truths that Romanticism expounds, what we seek are not those things specifically, historically, as they have been configured. Rather, we seek the abstract idea of those things — the simplicity and the intimacy that, when we search ourselves, we find lacking in our own lives. As anthropologists do, we could just as well look outward, toward the geographically distant, the exotic, with the same longing eyes. We could, as Claude Levi-Strauss does in Tristes Tropiques, seek locales and societies more pure than our own by virtue of the fact that they are more isolated, insulated from the sullying hands of Western modernity. These quests, no less than those back in time, are in fact internal — responses to some sense of profound loss. These quests are no less nostalgia. It is this type of nostalgia — the quest for the ideal, rather than the quest outward or backward, that lays the boundaries of our scholarship. We purport to build on scholarship’s past in order to cement its future. None of us is Francis Bacon or John Wilkins. There are no iconoclasts in contemporary Ethnomusicology or Folklore who, like Bacon, would suggest that we disregard the wisdom of the past, roots to branches, and begin again with a new scientific enquiry; and there are none like Wilkins, who would suggest that language itself, with its metaphors and its ambiguities, must be superceded with a system that bears a one-to-one relationship with the world. We look at these scholars, we shuffle the pieces, and we understand from Wilkins’ failures that signification can never be transparent. We reshuffle again, and we learn from Bacon that methodologies and high-minded rhetoric aside, the past does not go anywhere. Our idealized past — our sense of what is not, but what was and what could be — shapes the board on which we play scholarship’s game, just as those who have played it before us shape the pieces. Of course I am not suggesting that any of this is so bad. There is a second proverb, after all, that reminds us that we can see farther for having stood on the shoulders of giants. We may, as Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, live in a world of others’ words — our insights may be his insights, or Glassie’s insights, or the insights of ancient and anonymous proverbs — but this is a prospect for better, as well as for worse. The illusion that scholars perpetrate is that with all due drama, we claim to have discovered something new about the world — some new insight or theory to astonish and amaze — when in fact, through elaborate

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cutting and pasting, we have simply recapitulated our elders. The illusion’s result, however — the effect, which I have previously omitted — is that the act of recapitulation yields more than the sum of its parts. By existing in dialogue with prior scholars — by maintaining a nostalgia that limits our imagination to what they have done — we, in effect, exceed the bounds of our imagination, finding the unexpected and the insightful, if not the new, in their mundane and familiar words. I may reference Glassie, here, and Bakhtin, and Yeats, and Bacon and Wilkins; and the result may be that I have not said anything that has never been said before; but by juxtaposing them — by placing them in dialogue with one another, and myself in dialogue with them — I have clarified my thinking and pointed out a nuance, perhaps, that had not been sighted before. The effect of the illusion is not new truth. There is no such thing. The effect, rather, is a change in perception and emphasis that keeps us pushing, if not exceeding, our boundaries.

CHAPTER EIGHT NA‘AU POI: SPIRITUAL FOOD FOR CULTURAL ENLIGHTENMENT ALOHA KEKO’OLANI

E ola mau i ka lewa, E ola mau i ka honua, E ho’opulu mau i ka ua o ka aina, E ola mau i ka waokele, A laila, Mohala i ka Pua, Ho’ola hou i ke kanaka e...ae! Amama, ua noa, ha’alele aku. Translation: Long live the heavens, Long live the earth, Long live the rains which fall on the land, Long live the forests, And there in these places, A flower blooms, And when these things come to pass, when they come to life, Humankind will surely rise again! The prayer is free, the prayer has flown (Lake 1997). There are certain things that Hawaiian individuals are meant to understand instinctively. These are passed down to us from our kupuna (Hawaiian elders). Their hard earned wisdom was once prized as a valuable resource, and as a light brightening the path to the future. These traditional Hawaiian values have definite purposes that are relevant today even if they are not fully appreciated. As this chant illustrates, there is a particular way of thinking that accompanies these values and keeps them in the forefront. Further, certain concepts are simply unintelligible or confusing if discussed in non -Hawaiian ways. A few other terms that are frequently distorted, confused, and misunderstood are ‘‘Hawaiian’’ and ‘‘Native Hawaiian.’’ As defined by federal legislation, a ‘‘Native Hawaiian’’ is ‘‘a descendant of the aboriginal people who, prior to 1778, occupied and exercised Ea (sovereignty) in the area that now comprises the State of Hawaii’’ (Hawkins & Stafford, 1988). The term ‘‘Native Hawaiian’’ is used more specifically for people of 50% or more Hawaiian ancestry (Trask 1996). The broader common label of ‘‘Hawaiian’’ includes so-called ‘‘full-bloods’ ’ as well as those with only a relatively small proportion of ancestry tied to the islands’ original inhabitants (Barringer & Liu, 1994). Having introduced the potential complication but necessary premise of Hawaiian Thinking (Mana’o Hawai‘i), let us precede to that most Hawaiian and Polynesian of ideas, na‘au.

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Na’au holo’o’koa: The Na‘au Unity of Mind, Body and Spirit When a Hawaiian person wishes to describe an urge, an intuition, or inspiration, you’ll hear him talk about his na‘au, meaning his “gut”. The Revised Hawaiian Dictionary by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Elbert describes the literal definition of na‘au as “Intestines, bowels, guts; mind, heart, affections; of the heart or mind; mood, temper, feelings”. Hawaiians located emotions in the bowels. This is often referred to as the “gut instinct” (Pukui & Elbert, 1986). The term na’au, used alone or in compound phrases, was used to convey ideas related to intelligence, character, or emotional states. The association of emotions with the viscera was a pre- missionary concept; yet, the similarity with non-Hawaiian ideas like Biblical phrases such as "bowels of compassion" is striking. The contemporary slang term "gut emotions" is also very close to the Hawaiian concept of na’au (Pukui 1972). The Hawaiian idea of the body’s relation to mind and spirit, in particular, differs from the Western model, where the brain is the seat of Mind and rational thought and the “heart” is the center of emotions. This view reflects a cultural bias in the West which organizes reality around polar opposites with examples including: (a) Mind versus Heart, (b) Rational versus Irrational, (c) Form versus Function, (d) Positive versus Negative, (e) Secular versus Religious, and (f) Sacred versus Profane. The Polynesian model of reality, embraces the concept of existential opposites, but departs radically from the West in its treatment of their polarity, which is seen as complimentary rather than adversarial. The Hawaiian principles of palua (duality of complimentary opposites) and lokahi (balance, harmony, co-existence of opposites) seek stability through unification and synthesis (ho‘oponpono) rather than formal resolution. In this way, neither “peace” nor “victory” per se is essential for a stable Universe, and without harmony and balance nothing can exist. Within the spirituality of na‘au, these opposites exist in the Polynesian reality without the familiar psychic and moral “tension” associated with symbolic opposites in the West. Instead they co-exist and flow into one another with surprising fluidity. This sensibility is reflected in the Hawaiian na’au concepts of mind, body and spirit. Information and knowledge are not processed by the mind alone. Instead, these are believed to be experienced simultaneously at all levels: intellectual, emotional, spiritual. Compartmentalization and isolation is minimal and ideas and words become rich complex things. This is Mana’o Hawaii (Hawaiian Thinking). It is broad and contains secondary meanings, also known as kaona.

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The poetic device of kaona was developed by Hawaiians to express parallel meanings into a single idea or word and infuse ideas with mana (spiritual energy). According to Mary Kawena Pukui: Ancient Hawaiians believed in the literal power of words: language as a kind of energy. The term “olelo”, or “word”or “speech”, was far more than just a means of communicating. To the Hawaiian, the spoken word did more than summon forces of destruction and death, forgiveness and healing. The word itself was a force. In prayers, not merely the words and the inner meanings of words and phrases (kaona), but also the total rendition of the prayer was a psychic instrument. The ritual ending of a prayer, “Amama ua noa,” “Now the prayer is free, now the prayer has flown” carried a sense of an actual power traveling from petitioner to deity. Therefore, the entire performance must be flawless so the gods would be pleased. In a traditional, memorized prayer not a word could be changed (Pukui 1972).

Ke kino kanaka: The Human Body The Polynesian conception of the human body reflects the unity of spirituality, intellectuality and the physicality within the world of ideas. Rather than emphasizing functional differences between body and mind as in the Western view, the body’s function emphasizes its place via Time (Past, Present, and Future), especially in relation to ancestors and descendants. According to the Hawaiian elder Kekuni Blaisdell, M.D., “Human anatomy reflected spiritual relationships, such as in the concept of na piko ‘ekolu (three body points): (a) Piko po‘o or manawa at the top of the person's head, also evident as the open fontanel in the infant's skull, was the opening that connected the individual's ‘uhane (spirit) with the spiritual realm beyond, including one's 'aumakua, departed but ever-present deified ancestors, since the beginning of time. (b) Piko waena, or the navel, represented the remnant of the person's intrauterine umbilical connection to his parents in the contemporary world. This piko covered the na‘au (gut) that was the seat of knowledge, wisdom and emotions. (c) Piko ma‘i was the genitalia, which linked the person to his descendants forever into the future. In spite of this prevalent spirituality, all was natural. There was nothing Supernatural in the Western sense. Events could, and were, influenced by all of the numerous forces in the material and spiritual realms, favorable and adverse, and from the past as well as the present and into the future. These forces included each kanaka's thoughts and attitudes, as well as his actions” (Blaisdell 1991). One cultural practice nicely portrays the Hawaiian sense of na‘au and how it related to the complete person. In traditional Hawaiian society, parents sometimes gave their own child to another couple as a gift and as a bond

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between families. This is the practice of hanai. When they presented the child to the new parents they said, "Nau ke keiki, kukae ka na‘au." The literal translation meant, "I give you this child, guts and all." To give the guts, or na‘au, was to give the unified wholeness of the child. It was to transfer the spirituality, physicality, and intellectuality of the child to the care of the new family. It said, "I give you this child with all its present and potential qualities of intelligence and character, and all its capabilities for love, hate, fear, courage, grief and happiness." This phrase, spoken out loud for all to hear, made the agreement a permanent and binding one. The child was then given outright, with no attachments to the birth parents (Pukui 1972).

Na’au ‘oia‘i‘o: Truthful Guts Linguistically, na‘au served as an all-purpose root word for things that were related to development of human character. The wide range of Hawaiian phrases built on this concept include such varied terms as na‘au ali‘i (benevolence), na‘au‘ao (enlightenment), na ‘au ‘ino (evil), na ‘au po (ignorance), helu na‘au (arithmetic book), po kole ka na‘au (short tempered), ho‘opa‘ana ‘au (to memorize), na‘au ‘ike mua (foresight), ka na‘auao loa ‘ana (the instruction, education), ho‘o na‘auao (to educate, instruct; educational, instructive, civilized), ua ho'ona ‘auao ‘ia ‘oia (he was educated), and ku'u home ho’ona ‘auao (my home of learning). The actual list of na‘au based terms includes many more listings in the Hawaiian dictionary, all related to fundamental qualities of human development and conduct (Pukui, 1986). "Truth telling" was an important idea in old Hawaii. The idea of truth is central to understanding na‘au. The Hawaiian term ‘oia‘i‘o is defined as “absolute truth; sincere, sincerity; or the spirit of truth”. Statements given honestly and with every effort towards accuracy are considered ‘oia. Plain or unvarnished truths are the facts or conclusions told without embellishment. There is no innuendo, or emotional involvement in the telling; "My canoes are sturdy; perhaps others made faster ones," said the builder of old. "I have studied the clouds carefully. They show this is not a good day for fishing" said the kahuna kilo kilo (expert sky watcher). Hawaiians believed that truth emanated from na‘au. "Oia‘i‘o is truth in the feeling sense. You feel whether or not what you are saying is ‘oia‘i‘o or not. Real truth—real sincerity—comes from na‘au ‘oia‘i‘o, from 'truthful guts'", says Mary Kawena Pukui (Pukui 1972). There are many Hawaiian concepts that have crossed over into common usage. The English speaking public is now comfortable with talking about the aina (land), pono (justice) and ‘ohana (family). However, na‘au, especially in its sense of “truthful guts” remains an essentially Native Hawaiian phrase and concept, rarely used

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outside the community. In general, literature that refers directly to the history of spiritual ideas like na‘au is scarce. Much must be derived from studying related areas of Hawaiian and Polynesian culture, such as ethics, values and religion.

Ka leo hanauna like ‘o ka na’au: The Contemporary Voice of Na‘au But one rich source of information on na‘au is today’s Hawaiian population. Studying contemporary belief in na‘au provides valuable information that helps to reconstruct the missing historic record. A variety of interview subjects were questioned about na‘au and these persons reflected a reasonable cross section of modern Native Hawaiian life (Keko’olani, 1996). In most cases, interviewees who talked about na‘au usually had very strong feeling about what na’au was, and how it affected their lives. Many believe that through na‘au, one is able to access deeper spiritual dimensions of Hawaiian culture, including pule (prayer), ‘Olelo Hawai‘i (the power of Hawaiian words and language), ho'onani (personal religious practice), hula (dancing), mele (singing and musical instruments), mana'o (solitary deep thinking), kama'ilio'ana (conversations and interaction), pi kai (ritual cleansing), wai (water), hana ka lima (use of hands in a spiritual manner), hana no‘eau (native arts and crafts), ‘Olelo No‘eau (spiritual poetic sayings and proverbs), ahi (fire) and ‘uhane (spirit). Na‘au is the ultimate source of understanding and creativity. Artists and cultural practitioners are among those most adept in the cultivation of na‘au. Expression through music, art and performance art forms reflect the deepest part of our being; our na‘au ‘oia ‘i‘o our truthful Hawaiian existence. Na‘au is inextricably tied to being and feeling Hawaiian, in a deep cultural sense. This sense of na‘au draws on the ancient connection of na‘au to genealogy and the religion of Old Hawaii (Pre-European contact period).

Na’au i ke ao nei: Polynesian Spirituality and Na‘au The aspect of modern life that connects na‘au to its origins in the past, is faith. Hawaiians are a society of believers. In light of Hawaii’s religious history, the massive and relatively sudden conversion to Christianity in the early 1800's is not surprising. Hawaiians would have recognized in the Christian concept of a Trinity many of their own ideas like the unity of mind, body and spirit (associated with na‘au). Hawaiians were a people who believed deeply in various gods and spirits, and they prayed throughout the day. They prayed believing their prayers were heard. A tree is to be felled for canoe making, the body of a beloved relative is

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being consigned to the ancestor gods, a high chief takes his medicine, a woman plants potatoes by moonlight: for the Hawaiian of the past, all times were occasions for prayer. “Long before the missionaries came, Hawaiians were haipule or religious (spiritual)”, says Mary Kawena Pukui. “Everything they did, they did with prayer” (Pukui 1972). Ceremonies, offerings, protocols and oracles punctuated daily life. The humblest homes contained small shrines. There was a cultural predisposition to believing in divine favor, ancestral spirit guardians, destiny and good fortune. Three particular religious ideas are of importance in understanding na‘au: (a) the interconnectedness of the spirit and material worlds (b) the importance of order, precision and control (c) and the harmonious relationship between Man and Nature.

‘Ao a me Po: The Interconnectedness of the Spirit and Material Worlds The Hawaiians believed there were two worlds: the material world (‘Ao; the world of man or world of light) and the spirit world (Po, realm of the gods, or world of darkness). The epic chant Kumulipo is a cosmic odyssey across the space-time continuum. It begins with Po (Beckwith 1951). The story of Hawaiian religious development is to some degree the story of how two opposite worlds, Po and ‘Ao, eventually are synthesized. Over time, the boundary between the spiritual world (Po) and the material world (‘Ao) became increasingly intertwined, and then finally practically non-existent (Kanahele, 1986). Moral guidance, esoteric knowledge, and religious instructions flowed freely into the world of man from the gods through an astounding array of spiritual phenomena, including na‘au. The Hawaiian view of reality was based on deep and profound ontologism in which the spirit world (Po) was near enough to the material world for man to access the knowledge of God, through sensations of na‘au. This knowledge was considered the foundation and guaranty of all other knowledge. This concept is in stark contrast to the idealistic psychologism of the secular West, with its emphasis on controlled observation, logic, and methods of scientific investigation.

Pono: The Importance of Order, Precision and Control There is a second ontological idea in Hawaiian culture that helps us understand na‘au. This is the belief in a deep and profound urge, generated by the Universe itself, to seek balance (lokahi) and order (pono). This principle

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continues to be the basis of values today, surviving in the practice of referring to any state of correctness, fairness, or justice as pono. The Polynesian view of the Universe was based on the optimistic belief that things gravitate toward order, rather than chaos. And when it became necessary for chaos to be contemplated by the Hawaiian mind, the concept of Palua (dualism) helped defuse its threat by explaining it in terms of complementary opposites. Disorder could be understood as a necessary evil, an “ingredient” in the cosmic recipe for order. In moral values, the desire for organization and order (pono) generated, among many things, the idea of seeking perfection of the Self. Traditional Hawaiian proverbs explain the importance of individual choice in the development of character and instruct the disciplined student in the various aspects of perfecting of the self. “Lele no ka ‘ohe i kona lua”. The ‘ohe taro leaps into its own hole. Each person defines his own place and purpose (Olelo Noeau, Pukui 1983). The standard Western model of the reality assumes no such inherent fairness or order. Instead, the Universe becomes increasingly erratic and unreliable over time. Life is ultimately defeated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics with its grim prediction of increasing entropy and cold death of the Universe. This cosmic ending is silent and uneventful. Energy and matter gradually become absolutely scattered and disorganized, and the last light of the Universe simply flickers out. By the beginning of the 20th century, the specter of material and spiritual disorder was a popular theme of American and European industrial society (Yeats 1902).

Ke kanaka i ka honua: The Harmonious Relationship between Man and Nature Many pre-modern Hawaiians were farmers. In addition to producing food, this vocation encouraged the spiritual, moral and physical development of the individual. Farm culture was based on delayed gratification and the mahi‘ai was a successful farmer who planted kalo (taro). If the mahi‘ai diligently worked with others in the lo‘i (the taro patch), from season to season, then he would eventually reap an abundant harvest. Working the lo‘i kalo is not an easy task. The land had to be cleared, kalo had to be planted, watered, weeded, and tended often. Even after the kalo was harvested, it must be washed, cleaned, and pounded into poi for food. This ancient lifestyle was built on the idea that hard work eventually produces desired results. Working amidst the abundance of his lo’i patches and other crop gardens, there must have seemed to be no boundary between the Hawaiian planter and the natural world. Religious doctrine and spiritual beliefs would have been able

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to convince him that he “belonged” in nature, based on the sophisticated idea the he was ultimately genealogically related to it. But this was unnecessary, for his actual experiences working on the land informed him that the natural world was hospitable, reliable and even benevolent (Handy, Handy & Pukui 1972). This is radically different than the traditional Western view of Nature, in which the biological dynamics of the natural world are portrayed in religion, art and myth as hostile Dionysian forces (Borchert 1994; Freud 1936; De Rivera 2000). This optimistic approach to life originates not only in the Hawaiian’s natural surroundings, but also in his relationship to God, which was also characterized by an absence of boundaries (Twain 1873). While God is sometimes sacred and even remote, he was not foreign or alien.

The Palua of Polynesian Religion Like their shared linguistic pedigree, Polynesians also have in common a history of spirituality with each other. One unique feature of this pan-Pacific belief system was its simultaneous embrace of both monotheistic (belief in a single Supreme Deity, as in the Hebrew “Jehovah”), and polytheistic practices (New International Bible 1973). As we will see, these existed side by side, making for a vibrant religious culture built on the foundation of a monotheistic origin, but re-invigorated by an open-ended evolving polytheism. This is another example of palua, the principle of harmony in complimentary opposites: in this case, the subtle dichotomy of “one” versus “many”. In the end, it was the polytheistic tendencies in Hawaiian religion that eventually dominated society, but the monotheistic tradition was persisted in tandem with its own intact priesthood up to the final destruction of the Hawaiian temples in 1819. By the time of Cook’s arrival, polytheistic practices dominated and had advanced to the worship of actual living persons (Malo 1898).

‘Io: Supreme God and First Cause The belief in na‘au is in and of itself a corollary of a belief in God. Na‘au is felt to issue from within, but is understood to ultimately originate from outside the Self, in a Higher Power of some sort. Na‘au seems reliant on this exterior source to serve as a psychologically satisfying explanation for the experience (ie. “It was the Lord guiding me”). While various agents—angels, the Holy Spirit, the Universe—are often credited for the na‘au experience, it is usually God himself (‘Io) that is acknowledged (Kikawa 1994). During the pre-

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European contact period of Hawaii, the direct worship of ‘Io – the Supreme Being was eventually restricted to the royal families of Hawaii and Kauai (Amalu, 1955). However in contemporary Hawaii, ‘Io is worshipped by Hawaiians in every status and is often referred to as God in a single, omnipresent, omniscient form. Kapu, Mana, and the Living Gods. Mana was the energy of the Universe itself, which in the Polynesian model of the cosmos is understood to emanate ultimately from ‘Io, the Supreme Being (Johnson 1983). Mana was everywhere, but was often concentrated in certain important people, places and things. Mana, according to John Dominis Holt in The Art of Featherwork in Old Hawai‘i, was: . . .the source of spiritual power, the source of intelligence and excellence. Mana was hidden in the divine ancestry of a person. Mana was hidden in the kaona (the metaphor) of chants. Mana - elusive and subtle, much sought after but not easily attained (Holt 1985).

There were four degrees of Religious Exaltation and Royal Honor in the Ali‘i Kapu (Amalu 1955). Some of these Royal Chiefs were considered to be living Gods.

Na Ali’i ‘o Ke Kapu Ahi: The Keepers of the Sacred Fire In 1902, the ali‘i (High Chief) Solomon Lehuanui Kalanimaioheuila Peleioholani (1843-1916) wrote a genealogy verse of poetry celebrating the sanctity of the high chiefs, especially the House of Keawe. He was my great great grandfather. The name of his poem, “The Keepers of the Sacred Fire”: Na Ali’i ‘o Ke Kapu Ahi refers to the mana of the sacred chiefs. His writings also reveal the foremost chiefly genealogies and spirituality as symbolized in the great sacred fire of Keawe (Peleiholani 1902).

Na‘au Poi: Spiritual Food for Cultural Enlightenment In ancient Hawaii, na‘au was actually a complete system of ideas. I call this the “Na‘au tradition”. I describe it as a recovered tradition, because we have lost it in its original form, but understand parts of it through reconstruction. We have no direct descriptions of it. But we know it existed, because of the imprint it left on language. There are a total of twenty na‘au terms in the standard Hawaiian Dictionary, many are pairs of complimentary opposites. What unfolds is a compact self-contained system of ideas. Most of these individual ideas are, in and of themselves, multi-faceted perceptions. They are linguistically formed by

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affixing to na‘au a suffix concept, one that is usually filled with its own profound imagery. Po means “darkness or chaos”. Na‘au po, “to feel the darkness or chaos”, was used to describe ignorance. ‘Ao means “light”. Na‘au‘ao, “to feel the light”, was used to describe intelligence and wisdom. Aloha means “breath of life” or “love, kindness, and grace”; na‘au aloha, “to feel the breath of life”, described benevolence and charity. Ali‘i means “king, chief, aristocrat, royalty”. Na‘au ali‘i, “to be like the king or chief”, was used to describe someone who was kind, thoughtful, forgiving, loving and benevolent. When the basic na‘au terms, the secondary suffix concepts, na’au sayings and other related concepts are studied together, three things become apparent: (1) The na‘au ideas form a systematic pattern, (2) This is a system of belief containing concepts, principles and values, and (3) These na’au terms outline a philosophy of human conduct or “ethics”, addressing and organizing a system of good and evil, vice and virtue Twenty na‘au words cannot describe the complete ethical philosophy of the Hawaiian people. But the na‘au tradition encapsulates the basics of a Hawaiian moral sensibility. From other traditions, we know that morality and ethics played an important role in shaping the Hawaiian character (Malo 1951). Hawaiians had developed a strong appreciation for the complexity of the human nature, including its dark side, reflected in the proverb, He ana ka mana‘o o ke kanaka, ‘a‘ole ‘oe e ‘i keia loko ; The thoughts of man are like caves whose interiors one cannot see (Olelo Noeau, Pukui 1983).

Na mea pono: Na‘au Values The na‘au belief system catalogs the main forms of virtue and vice that man is free to choose from. It also gives a description of “good” and “evil” as independent forces, distinct from man himself but influencing his behavior. In this respect, na‘au is “discernment”, roughly equivalent to Western culture's Christian notion of the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit or the Eastern idea of the Divine Third Eye. The Maori of Aoteroa also recognize this Third Eye, calling it Whatumanawa. It is carved into the foreheads of woodwork ancestors (tipuna) on the marae or sacred houses. In Tonga, the idea most related to na‘au is ngakau that like na‘au means literally “intestines or guts”. In the na’au tradition, a man’s choice to knowingly ignore his own na‘au, or guidance from the Higher Power, is considered in and of itself to be a kind of vice, and a serious one at that. It is given the specific name by Hawaiians, na‘au po (which when used to describe a person means “one who causes or promotes ignorance”). In contrast to ignorance, we find enlightenment, na‘au‘ao, the

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highest possible moral achievement. This is reached when one is seen to be in compliance with the needs of the universe and of society. One has fulfilled his or her spiritual and ethical duties. He is pono. In the days of the traditional Hawaiian planter of the pre-European contact period, the enlightened man was rewarded with a spontaneous and often unexplainable understanding and enjoyment of life. He appreciated life on its own terms, not someone else's life, but his own. He recognized its subtle pleasures, relished its ups and downs and felt personally fulfilled. Where others were dissatisfied, he was content. Where others felt oppressed and threatened, he felt challenged and optimistic. Where others sought after opulence and luxury, he sought after the beauty and elegance in ordinary things. Where others felt life had no purpose, he was grateful to be alive. This is the true embodiment of the Hawaiian character, as described in traditions, in mo‘olelo (narratives and chronicles), and as recalled through my own family history. More than blood quantum levels, or even ancestry, it is "knowing how to live", na‘au‘ao or personal enlightenment that makes one Hawaiian (Peleiholani 1902). It is na‘au‘ao that produces the state of mind that my kumu, Professor Edith McKenzie, called "Hawaiian Thinking". All Hawaiian cultural practices, from hula to canoe making, receive their authenticity, vitality and grace through na‘au‘ao. Na‘au is not only a guide to conduct, it is also an intellectual system that explains the nature of man's existence as a struggle between good and evil. Na’au goes beyond a philosophy of human conduct (ethics) and serves as a general philosophy that provides a value base. Creating an indigenous philosophy based on traditional values for contemporary native Hawaiian society is a critical issue (Kanahele 1986). There may indeed be a need for a Native Hawaiian intelligentsia, but with the exception of a few key phrases, such as na‘au pono, most of the na‘au words and systematic ideas are remain mostly forgotten in the larger Native Hawaiian community. What I have discovered is that most people are familiar with what I have identified as the “core concept” of na‘au. They understand it to be approximately equivalent to intuition or inspiration. Individuals involved in the Hawaiian arts, particularly dance and music, often speak of how na‘au guides their creativity and performance. And among the general Hawaiian community, some people talk about listening to their na‘au (gut instinct) when they must make important or difficult decisions. However, the interpretation of this inspiration as direct spiritual guidance from God, the Universe, or the traditional Hawaiian spiritual realm is becoming less common. And the idea discussed earlier, of na‘au as a small, but self-contained system of moral ideas, is completely unknown to many Hawaiians.

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‘Imi ‘ike: Cultural Recovery The Na‘au tradition belongs to a class of Hawaiian ideas that I call invisible culture. These are the ideas, customs and practices for which we have little or no direct description. These are the parts of Hawaiian culture that have suffered most from the passing of time, an oral tradition, and the absence of a written record. To bring them out of obscurity is an act of cultural recovery. As in other Polynesian cultures, lost Hawaiian traditions like the philosophy of na‘au must be go through three recovery phases. They are first reconstructed, then restored. Finally, they are re-introduced to the indigenous people and society in general. During this process, one may recognize that the recovered tradition resonates with other parts of the culture that were not lost and had continued to develop. A noticeable affinity between the recovered old tradition and some existing custom cannot be ignored. The ethnographer, anthropologist and museum curator may have an opinion. But in the end it is the cultural practitioner, and the indigenous people themselves, who must decide how these traditions will affect each other. In the best of all possible worlds, we are able to keep the individual customs distinct through careful study and preservation and yet still also use them to revitalize recovered traditions through synthesis. Established language, imagery, and practice drawn from the existing customs can provide a vehicle for reintroducing a recovered tradition. The benefit for the recovered tradition is that it is re-introduced to the indigenous population as quickly and effectively as possible.

Holomua Pono: Outline for a Theory of Kalo Culture and Philosophy of Na‘au Poi The existing custom that seemed to resonate with na‘au was the idea of the taro patch. Kalo is a powerful symbol in many Polynesian cultures, but in Hawaii it is the symbol par excellence. From the imagery of the kalo plant, the lo‘i, and poi come some of the most powerful influences in Hawaiian life. Kalo is said to be the first child of Wakea (Sky Father) and Papa (Earth Mother), who were the godly parents of Mankind. But this first child, named Haloanakalaukapalili, was stillborn. From its buried body sprang the kalo plant that fed man, and became known as man’s “older brother”. Ever since, kalo has been a symbol of the goodness of nature. From the kalo plant’s root system (‘oha) ancestors created the Hawaiian word for family, ‘ohana. From the life giving waters (wai) that irrigate the taro patch comes the Hawaiian word for wealth (waiwai or “much water”) and for

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law (kanawai or “pertaining to water”). From kalo comes poi, the most important staple food in the Hawaii. The poi is traditionally eaten from a communal bowl and this social custom is approached with reverence. Once the poi bowl is placed on the table and the lid removed, no harsh words can be spoken in front of the exposed poi. In the pre-European contact period of Hawaii, fights could be ended by lifting lid off a poi bowl. The taro patch is a sacred place to gather for many Hawaiians. Today many Native Hawaiians are taroists, and they grow taro for philosophical and spiritual reasons. Here, in the water, the soil, among the kalo plants, the Hawaiian person is able to quietly rediscover himself through the humble act of pulling weeds. Finally, there are the traditional values and qualities of the Hawaiian planter himself which include, among many other things, humility, patience, diligence, cheerfulness, generosity, a spontaneous love of work, a sincere affection for living things, and a deep psychological and spiritual connection to the aina or land. I call all these kalo symbols, traditions and values, “Kalo Culture”. The synthesis of this Kalo Culture (which are customs and values) with the recovered Na‘au Tradition (which are ethics and spirituality) produces a new philosophy of Hawaiian ethics and values that I have begun to call “Na‘au Poi”. Na‘au Poi draws on the taro patch tradition (Kalo Culture) for the creation of new mo‘olelo, new kaona, and new metaphors, such as Na‘au Kalo Roots (traditional Hawaiian values learned from one’s ‘ohana), Na‘au Kalo (values purposefully cared for and cultivated in oneself), and Na‘au Poi (values one teaches to others, spiritually feeding them, society). These three metaphors represent multiple levels of identity for transferring values: “the family,” “the self,” and “society” (to whom one renders service). But when completed, the Na‘au Poi philosophy will address a total of nine progressively broader levels of identity and corresponding broader values. Na’au Poi at its most accessible level, is a Hawaiian idea for world culture that includes information on: (a) Personal Identity (b) Familial Identity (c) Cultural and Social Identity (d) Spiritual Identity (e) Mental Identity (f) Physical Identity (g) Hawaiian Cultural Identity (h) Pacific Islands Identity and (i) Global Identity.

E a’o aku , e a’o mai: Na‘au Poi Educates and Instructs a. Traditional values embodied in Kalo Culture b. Traditional Hawaiian values drawn from other existing customs c. Ethics derived from analysis of the Na‘au Tradition d. Values derived from the ethical requirement of the Universe for pono and lokahi e. Cultivating and using na‘au itself

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f. Problem solving techniques based on interpreting life as moral challenge to values g. Foundational concepts for further development of a Native Hawaiian philosophy and aesthetic The historical analysis of Polynesian spirituality, the cultural recovery of the Na‘au Ethics Tradition, the theory of Kalo Culture, and the philosophical synthesis called Na ‘au Poi are all “works in progress,” presented here in broad strokes. In fact, Na‘au Poi is truly in flux. In the meantime, I wish to leave you with this thought, one of the first I developed and shared with my own family, derived from the concept of Na‘au Poi (Keko’olani 1996): I know that inside each one of us is a poi bowl. When we seek to improve ourselves and our world, when we seek cultural enlightenment, we stir that poi bowl. When we lift our fingers and taste the poi, it is always good and it will make us want to stir the bowl again. And so we do. This is our spiritual food. It is my hope that you find the poi bowl inside yourself and that you never eat poi alone.

References Amalu, Sammy Kapiikauinamoku. 1955. “The Story of Hawaiian Royalty: Solemn, Sacred Nuptial Rites for Keawe, Lono", Honolulu Advertiser. September 11, 1955 —. 1955. “The Story of Hawaiian Royalty: New King Must Select Priest of Exalted Rank", Honolulu Advertiser. October 3, 1955. —. 1955. “The Story of Hawaiian Royalty: Liloa’s Ruling Authority Came from God of Light", Honolulu Advertiser November 15, 1955. —. 1955. “The Story of Hawaiian Royalty: Rejoicing Marks the Birth Of Son to Royal Couple", Honolulu Advertiser September 22, 1955. —. 1955. “The Story of Hawaiian Royalty: Keawe is Initiated in Sacred Ceremonies", Honolulu Advertiser September 14, 1955. Barringer, H., & Liu, N. 1994. The demographics, social, and economic state of native Hawaiians, 1990. Honolulu: Alu Like, Inc. Beckwith, Martha Warren. 1951. The Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, Kalakaua Text.University of Chicago Press. Blaisdell, Kekuni M.D. 1991. “Historical and Philosophical Aspects of Lapa‘au, Traditional Kanaka Maoli Healing Practices”, Published by Motion Magazine April 28, 1996, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

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Borchert, Bruno. 1994. Mysticism: Its History and Challenge. Samuel Weiser, Yorke Beach ME. Pp. 120-121 Davenport. "Hawaiian Feudalism". Quoting Handy, Handy, and Pukui. 1972. Native Planters In Old Hawai‘i, Their Life, Love and Environment. 676 pages. Bishop Museum Press. De Rivera, Joseph. 2000. “The Role of Suffering in Theories of Emotion”, Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology, Clark University. http://www.clarku.edu/academiccatalog/facultybio Freud, Sigmund. 1936. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, London: Hogarth Press. Handy, Handy, and Pukui. 1972. Native Planters In Old Hawai‘i, Their Life, Love and Environment Bishop Museum Press. 676 pages. Hawkins, Augustus F. & Robert T. Stafford. 1988. Elementary and Secondary School Improvement Amendments, p. 363. Holt, John Dominis. 1985. The Art of Featherwork in Old Hawai‘i Topgallant. Honolulu, Hawaii. Johnson, Kawena Rubellite. 1981. Kumulipo, The Hawaiian Hymn of Creation. Topgallant Publishing Co., LTD. Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 188 pages. —. 2000. The Kumulipo Mind: A Global Heritage In the Polynesian Creation Myth., Published on-line by Fatbrain. —. 1983. “Native Hawaiian Religion.” In Native Hawaiian Study Commission Volume 1. Washington D.C. Kamakau, Samuel Manaiakalani. 1961. Ruling Chiefs of Hawai‘i. Revised Edition. Indexed. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate. 513 pages. —. 1976. Ka po‘e Kahiko: The People of Old. 174 pages, Illustrated. Indexed. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. —. 1976. Tales and Traditions of the People of Old, Na Mo‘olelo a ka Po‘e Kahiko. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. —. 1869. Kamakau’s translated writings from the Newspaper Ke Au ‘Oko‘a. Kanahele, George Hu‘eu Sanford. 1986. Ku Kanaka—Stand Tall, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii. Keko‘olani, Aloha. 2002. Translation of Solomon Peleioholani by Aloha Keko‘olani Oct. 14 - 18 2002. Hepalapala ‘o Solomon Peleioholani - Ke Kapu Ahi ‘o Na Ali‘i Nui Kamehameha Nui -Kapu Ahi -The Sacred Fire of Hawaiian High Chiefs, Bishop Museum, Micro 232.6 GI.10. 13 pages Keko‘olani, Dean Pua. 2004. Na‘au inoa & mo’o ku‘auhau, genealogies by Dean Pua Keko‘olani. Keko’olani, Dawn Aloha. 1996 -2004 . Na’au Poi Spiritual Food for Cultural Enlightenment. University of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific Collection, Appendix A Interview Subjects. 96 pages.

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Kikawa, Daniel. 1994. Perpetuated in Righteousness, Aloha ke Akua Ministries. 241 pages. Lake, Keola John. 1997. E ola mau chant from Pu’u Kohola Ceremonies, Mo’okuauhau (Genealogy) and Papa Oli (Hawaiian chanting) Workshop. MacMillan, Inc. 1995. Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, 734 pages. Lexi- Comp Inc. Malo, David. 1898. Hawaiian Antiquities Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i by David Malo, translated by Dr. Nathaniel B.Emerson. Bernice P. Bishop Museum Special Publication 2 Second Edition. McKenzie, Edith Kawelohea. 1983. Hawaiian Genealogies, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. —. 1986. Hawaiian Genealogies, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. New International Version Bible (NIV) 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society Daniel 6:4-23; Hebrews 11:32; Hebrews 11:33 Peleioholani, Solomon Lehuanui Kalanimaioheuila. c. 1903. The ancient history of Hookumu-ka-Lani. Hookumu-ka-Honua (The Creation), Translated by J.M. Poepoe, Bishop Museum Manuscript Collection HI.L.1.3 —. c. 1902. He palapala ‘o Solomon Peleioholani – KeKapu Ahi ‘o Na Ali‘I Nui Kamehameha Nui - Kapu Ahi - The Sacred Fire of Hawaiian High Chiefs. Bishop Museum, Micro 232.6 GI.10, 13 pages. Translation of Solomon Peleioholani by Aloha Keko‘olani, October 14 - 18 2002. —. 1903 The Story of Kamehameha, unpublished handwritten manuscript, Ms HI L9.4, Page 48. Bishop Museum Archives, Honolulu, Hawaii. —. 1907. Newspapers, Volume Two, McKenzie, Edith Kawelohea, editor. 1986. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. —. 1908. Genealogy of the Robinson family and ancient legends and chants of Hawaii. Honolulu Bulletin Publishing Company. Pukui, Mary Kawena. 1972. Nana I Ke Kumu: Look to the Source, Volume I. Honolulu: Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center. 221 pages —. 1972. Nana I Ke Kumu: Look to the Source, Volume II. Honolulu: Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center. 333 pages. —. and Samuel H. Elbert. 1986. The Hawaiian Dictionary. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 572 pages. Pukui, Kawena. 1983.‘Olelo No‘eau Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings. Honolulu: Museum Press. Russell, Bertrand 1917. "A Free Man's Worship" [in Mysticism and Logic, Allen & Unwin, London, 1917, Pp. 47-48] Smith, S. Percy. 1913. The Lore of the Whare-wananga; or Teachings of the Maori College On Religion, Cosmogony, and History. New Plymouth, N.Z. Printed for the Society by Thomas Avery.

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Trask, Haunani. 1996. Feminism and indigenous Hawaiian nationalism. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 21, 906–916 Twain, Mark. 1873. “The Sandwich Islands”,New York Tribune, January 6, 1873. Yeats, William Butler. 1902. “The Second Coming".

CHAPTER NINE THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND CHINESE FOLK ART JIANG LU

The Historical Background Discussions of the current development in intellectual property rights in China should begin with a review of the historical background in order to understand it in its rather unique historical and cultural context. The history of contemporary China can be divided into three major cultural periods. The first division point is the 1949 revolution. Before the revolution, many of the ancient cultural traditions were still in practice. The society was based on private ownership of properties. After the revolution, China entered its socialist phase in which the private ownership of means of production was gradually transformed into public or collective ownership. This period ended in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the following new period of modernization, the private economic sector came back. The awakened sense of property ownership and profitability exploded and is occupying every corner of the cultural landscape (People’s Congress of PRC 1982:Preamble). In the Chinese cultural tradition, intellectual property was a rather foreign concept. The things that can be called intellectual property such as traditional remedies were not protected through legal means. They were often kept as family secrets and passed from father to son only. As both sustainable family resources and sacred family tradition, these family secrets were seldom for sale. The famous Yunnan baiyao, or white medicine of Yunnan, is such an example (Frakin 1997:46). In additional to family-based inheritance, knowledge and skills could be passed on through long-term apprenticeship, through which special family-like relationships between the apprentices and the master was formed. The loyalty of the apprentices was highly valued to prevent piracy. The traditional folk arts were further away from being intellectual properties. They were shared by the folk as what might be termed, in modern parlance, “open source” components or the “public domain”. In the literary tradition, it was a

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virtue for a writer to give credit to the cited work by others, and citations were not required in publications. Since the Chinese literary tradition was evolved in the literati tradition, writing was primarily for self-expression instead of publishing for profit. The idealistic objectives of literary activities were to use the literary work to establish an ever-lasting fame even beyond one's own lifetime. Generally speaking, the concept of copyright was not well established in the old Chinese society. During the period of socialism, the private ownership of means of production was gradually replaced by public ownership. Theoretically, since the state assumed ownership of almost everything, and the individual member of the society was supposed to work under a general plan made by the state, the intellectual property rights lost their significance. Although the reality was much more complicated than the theoretical assumptions, the social and political environment was against private ownership of properties in the most general sense. All intellectual properties were actually in the public domain under a totalitarian social system. In such a way, the originally weak sense of intellectual property was further washed out during this period. China began its modernization movement at the end of 1970s. The modernization movement is also known as reform and opening-up. Reform means changes in the previously socialist social system that was established in the early 1950s. The most significant and profound change in the reform is the privatization of properties after the nearly thirty-year period of full socialism. Today private ownership of enterprises is protected and encouraged. Entrepreneurs became and are presently the heroes of the time. To accommodate the privatization, the national constitution was amended (People’s Congress of PRC 2004:Amendments). The opening-up refers to the national policy to open the door to the overseas investment to attract the capital needed to develop the economy. Doing business with other industrialized capitalist countries requires China to follow the laws and regulations governing the international trade. The laws regarding intellectual properties are perhaps the most important ones. Under international pressures, the Chinese authorities tried hard to crack down on intellectual property piracies in computer software, music and video CD's (Huang 1996). Inspired by the international disputes on the intellectual property issues, the domestic litigations over intellectual properties have made national news in China from time to time, especially when people with celebrity status were involved. The Chinese calligrapher Guan Dongsheng’s lawsuit against Dow Jones is an example of such an event (People’s Daily, October 8, 2003). Entering the WTO aroused the curiosity and the anxiety of the whole nation. This has sensitized the people's consciousness about intellectual properties.

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The privatization of properties and the Western influence worked together and awakened the sense of property ownership and profitability. In the 1990s, almost all the population was looking for business opportunities in all possible ways. There was a saying that described this phenomenal explosion of entrepreneurship. It says “there are nine thousand million merchants among the one billion Chinese people.” Under such circumstances, everything was evaluated for its potential profitability. Cultural resources and intellectual properties were no exception. Ownership was claimed. Copyright and patent were applied everywhere. While tourism is becoming a more and more important source of income for many communities, the value of local folk traditions increases greatly. Claiming ownership has become a way to secure resources for future development of tourism. In many cases, profitability overweighs issues of cultural conservation.

Patented Folk Art Style In the summer of 2004, I went to China to do fieldwork in Chengde1, a city about 200 miles from Beijing. Chengde is famous for the imperial summer palace and resort of the Qing dynasty and now is a major tourist destination. When I was in Chengde, I noticed some interesting phenomena in the local art market that reflect an increasing awareness of the intellectual property issues among the local artists. When I was walking on a street, the display in a store window attracted my attention. The featured display was a painting-like artwork. It looked like a traditional decorative painting but the elements were three-dimensional. Here and there, I found that the traditional Chinese rope knots were used as decorative accents. I had never seen such work of art before. It looked wonderful. Entering the store, I saw more such works on display. I learned from the store manager that this new artistic genre was known as Meng’s1 stuffed cloth picture, named after the inventor. The elements in the picture were made of pieces of cloth stuffed to give their three-dimensionality. The store was an outlet dedicated to this type of artwork produced in Mr. Meng’s factories. In the store, there were photographs of Mr. Meng shaking hands with many highranking government officials, indicating that his work and products had gained recognition from far beyond the local community. There were also nicely printed brochures giving information about Mr. Meng and the Meng’s stuffed cloth picture as an art. Meng’s stuffed cloth picture was invented by Mr. Meng ten years ago. This new artistic genre was developed from the traditional cloth collage with a creative addition of the third dimension and ingenious combination with the traditional Chinese rope-knotting art. As I learned later from one of Mr. Meng’s

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relatives, Mr. Meng was a mechanical engineer and manager of a manufacturing factory. He had dreamed all his life about becoming an artist. After he retired from the factory in 1993, he started a family-based workshop in his home village to produce cloth collage that had been a local craft tradition. But the traditional style could not satisfy his artistic sensibility. He wanted to create a new form of art that could combine the Chinese painting, cloth collage, rope knotting, and Western oil painting. He aspired to something that was a novel mix of traditional forms. He then developed this new art form and the techniques used to produce it. The works produced in the new art form became very popular in the market. Since Chengde at that time was already a major tourist attraction that drew visitors nationally and internationally, the Meng’s stuffed cloth picture was in demand locally, nationally, and even internationally. As an entrepreneur with previous experience running a manufacturing business, Mr. Meng saw the business opportunity and expanded the familybased workshop into a village-based factory, and later further expanded the factory from the village to the county. To protect this new art form, Meng’s Cloth Stuffed Picture was patented in China in 1995. The factory is now a very successful enterprise privately owned by Mr. Meng and his family. In 2002, an exquisite piece entitled “Peace and Prosperity,” was selected to decorate the wall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. That is the highest honor for an artist. Up to now, Meng’s Stuffed Cloth Pictures have been collected by art collectors from Japan, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia and became more valuable than traditional cloth collage. Mr. Meng now has handed the management of the company to his daughter in order to concentrate on artistic design and creation. This is quite an interesting story. It poses some difficult questions about the nature of the new art form. Should it be seen as folk art? As demonstrated by Henry Glassie, defining folk art is a matter complicated by many different definitions of folk and definitions of art (Glassie 1989: 88-92). In this case, the question is more about if the art can still be seen as belonging to the folk. To answer this question, we may go back to the very definition of folklore being the artistic communication within small groups. Based on this notion, close attention should be paid to how Mr. Meng’s art communicates with the folks in his community. Mr. Meng has his root in the local community known for the traditional art of cloth collage, although none of his brochures admits that. A newspaper article (People’s Daily, April 2, 2005) claims that he invented the art form by accident when trying to use cloth to make toys for his grandson. His invention is shared within his immediate family – his wife and his daughter. The family name is associated with the art form to claim ownership. This practice has been common in the traditional Chinese society when there was no law to protect intellectual

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property. With his fame and production expanding, Mr. Meng began to take apprentices who would work in his corporation. If people in this family-based corporation qualify for “small group” in the definition of folklore, Mr. Meng's art may qualify as folk art. However, Mr. Meng's art does not really communicate artistically with the community beyond his corporation. The family monopoly of the art form protected by patent prevents it from being adopted by the folks in the community. Mr. Meng's contribution is more limited to providing employment to the people in his community. In his corporation, the production process is in a hierarchical organization that does not provide an equal foundation for communication. Therefore, Mr. Meng's art may not qualify as folk art if we stick to the existential definition of folk (Glassie 1989: 88). While we are struggling with the question regarding the nature of Mr. Meng’s art, we can be certain that Mr. Meng’s art can be seen as a new development based on some well-established folk art traditions. The significance of the case of Mr. Meng's art is that it demonstrates the effect of the application of intellectual property protection on the artistic production in a new development taking off from traditional folk arts. The impact of the artist's resorting to patent protection of an art form may be better shown with an assumptive scenario. If Mr. Meng's art were not protected by the patent, the folk artists in his community would have learned it and formed natural artistic communications among themselves. Then, the art would have truly been a folk art that would fit all the different definitions of folk art. In other words, the practice of using the patent protection may have changed the nature of the art, alienating it from its folk art root. This special case shows that an artist grown out of a folk art tradition has an awareness of intellectual property concerning artistic forms, as a new result of ongoing rapid social and economical development. Here the artwork is viewed as product. The new art style is viewed as a personal property. It is no longer freely shared by the community. In the development of the Meng’s stuffed cloth picture, Mr. Meng is certainly a key factor. As an artist, he is a product of the local folk art tradition. As an entrepreneur, he is a product of the recent economic boom. The convenient combination of the two has taken place in him and resulted in the creation of his brand – Meng’s stuffed cloth picture — and he has monopolized it through patent. It reflects the profound impact the socialeconomic development on the society in general and the folk art tradition in particular. We have to give credit to his ingenuity. Meng is creative not only in the invention of the artistic style of the stuffed cloth picture based on the traditional local folk art, but also in the industrialization and commoditization of the local folk art tradition. The reason why Mr. Meng set a patent protection to his art form is obviously for profit and survival. Without the patent protection, the popular art

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form could be easily copied by other entrepreneurs to produce similar products that would form tough competition in the market. That might reduce Mr. Meng’s market share or put him out of business. Patenting the art form actually eliminated the possibilities of competition. Since patenting an artwork style is a new concept for the Chinese, no one is willing to pay for it. Therefore, patenting an art form is to make it inaccessible to others. In reality, that is what has happened. Up to now, the stuffed cloth picture is only produced in Mr. Meng’s factories. In addition to the patent protection of his artistic invention, Mr. Meng followed the Chinese tradition to protect the intellectual property by keeping it in his family. From an artistic point of view, what the patent does is create an individualization of this art form — the fact is that it is now Mr. Meng’s own art. No one else can touch it. One could raise the question if his art is still folk art, because the folk participation is no longer there. The people who are involved in the production process are more like labors than creative artists. If folk art, as a component of folklore, is supposed to be artistic communications in small groups, the people involved in the creative process should be able to express themselves freely. The industrialized approach in the artistic process contradicts the essence of folk art. This contradiction in a time of industrialization in contemporary China reminds us the voices of the founders of the Art and Craft movement, such as William Morris who believed that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labor (Ruskin 1892:v.). While I was very much impressed with the artistic talent of Mr. Meng and admired his work, I was a little concerned about the future of this art form. With the patent protection in effect, no one else can actually learn it. Will it survive after Mr. Meng’s retirement from his artistic career? I also had a question about the possible evolution of this art form. Will new patents be set up for Mr. Meng’s new creations?

Copyright of Folk Art Work Wang Shuyun is an 80 years old folk artist from Baishan County, an area known for its folk art. Her paper cut is highly recognized by local people. When she was a little girl, Wang learned paper cut skills from her family members and local masters. She loves this art and uses it to express her life values: optimism and happiness. Wang had a miserable life as she became a young widow and she had to raise her five children. Even at that time, she still kept making her paper cut, that gave her optimism and relief. A reflection of her own work reveals a lot of her mind. “I didn’t feel tired when I was cutting papers as I was young. Now I feel very happy when I am cutting. Also, I want to use my own paper and scissors to depict the flowers in my heart.” Her paper cut style at that time was

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traditional. However, she challenged the traditional style when she reached 60, when her life had been improved economically when her children were all grown up. The artistic style of her art became more energetic with inner strength and freedom. From then on, her paper cut had been more and more recognized and admired by the local people. Wang’s artwork can only be seen now in the folk art museum where her eldest son Yang Shimin is director. Previously, people could copy her examples and have her real work for free. Now, it is absolutely impossible. Her children monopolized her and isolated her from the outside to prevent her art from circulating freely. Years ago, some of her master pieces were collected by the department of cultural affairs of the county government. Now her son, Yang Shimin, is trying to reclaim them as personal property. However, the government agency declared that those works had been lost. As the director of local folk art museum, Yang would continue to use both copyright and intellectual property right to negotiate with the government to recover the works. I met Yang Shimin and had a conversation with him about his mother’s work and the work of the folk art museum. Yang works for the district bureau of cultural affairs as the director of the museum and the manager of an affiliated hotel. In this sense, Yang had the dual role as both a cultural conservation officer and businessman. In addition, he also served as an agent to represent his mother. In our conversation, I mentioned how we should study the different styles of his mother’s work during different periods in her life. Yang became very interested in the idea and explored the possibility to work with me on this. But he would not allow any direct contact to his mother or any access to her artwork. The property right issues became very sensitive. In this case, we see intellectual property awareness is awakening in the field of traditional Chinese folk art. Although the artist may not directly deal with the property right issues, there were mediators to represent them to protect their intellectual property rights. The multiple identity of Mr. Yang as the director of the museum, the son and legal representative of the artist, and a businessman who manage the hotel, is again very convenient for the concept of value in business to be transplanted into the administration of art and cultural conservation. The protection of Wang’s work is essentially based on economical considerations. In a time when the economic development is the priority of the society, who owns it becomes very important. This story also tell us that sometimes, folk artists are not the people who require copyright or law protection, but business people around these artists sense profits from the art work and require the protection for their own business interest. I agree with Lessig’s arguments about protectionism: “this is not a

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protectionism to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of business (2004:9)”. This concern over the property right was not a local phenomenon, but a national obsession. We can see this through another example that is hundreds of miles away in the Shaanxi Province. Hu Ke is a famous paper cut artist of the Shaanxi Province. He is from the Fenxian county. Hu’s work represents the typical folk art of north central China. He started as a peasant paper cut artist. His work is deeply rooted in the folk art tradition of north central China that is forceful, energetic, bold, and full of vitality. In recent years, Hu’s work has received recognitions beyond his local community. His works were exhibited nationally and internationally. Fame has also made him active in the public scene. He has served in many artist associations of different levels. His titles include the following: special guest artist in residence at the Art Research Institute of China; the member of Peasant Artist Association of Shaanxi Province; the chairman of the board of directors of the Paper Cut Association of Fenxian County, Shaanxi Province. My interest in Hu Ke started from a piece of his work I acquired in a market in Beijing. His packaging of his paper cut caught my attention more than the paper cut itself. The paper cut is a traditional auspicious theme that symbolizes a life with yearly surplus. The style is typical northern, strong and simple. The paper cut has a paper backing and it is laminated. On the backing, the artist’s name is printed in large sized font on the right side. It says: the folk art of the Shaanxi Province, Hu Ke’s special styled art of paper cut. On the other side of the paper cut, there is a list of the artist’s titles. Under the titles, there is the artist’s seal in the authoritative bright red color. On the backside of the backing, there is an introduction to the artist. The information is also translated to English. Traditionally, the paper cut is used to decorate windows. That means the paper cut will be pasted on the pane glass or paper. For this reason, the packaging is usually in the form of a paper folder. Usually, the folk artists sold their work without any information on themselves. Hu’s packaging indicates that his work is not for practical use, but for collectors. The large printed name serves as his brand name. The seal certifies the authenticity, and the official title of the artist provides the credibility. After all, it is a commodity carefully designed for sale with a substantial price. This piece of paper cut is ten times more expensive than an anonymous one of comparable design. Since it is copyrighted under an individual artist’s name, it obtained an increased value as a collectable artifact produced by a famous artist. This is my first time seeing a paper cut that has been copyrighted. The artist is certainly capitalizing on his fame.

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Looking at the paper cut by Hu Ke, I felt that the decorative framing and the textual information, or infomercial as we may call it, formed a firm grasp of the art piece in the middle. It seems to me that the art piece is being hijacked and overwhelmed by the commercialism that has taken over the entire nation. The plastic laminate is rather symbolic. It symbolizes the protection, both physical and copyright, and at the same time, the isolation of the artist and his work from the collective folk art environment through the individualization of the art work in the traditional folk art form. It suddenly reminded me Wang Shuyun, a genuine folk artist surrounded by her children.

Cultural Appropriation: Social and Economic Purposes There is an interesting new phenomenon in Chinese traditional paper cut: Santa Claus has become a new character in Chinese paper cut recently. Santa Claus appeared in the Chinese public scene since China opened its door to foreign investment in the 1980s. Images of Santa were displayed during the Christmas season in big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. It was more for commercial reasons than religious belief. Red and green colors were the main decorative elements. The Santa Clause figure wore the same cloth and carried the same type of big bag as an American Santa Clause would do, standing in the shopping center and waving to people. It was really hard to tell the difference between American Santa and Chinese Santa because they look the same. Beside the typical western style Santa, there were some Chinese versions of Santa, too. For example: Santa images created in the traditional paper cut style were glued on windows of the McDonalds in Beijing. These Santa images were created by folk artists of Peixian County, a rural area west of Chengde. Looking at these Santa paper cut images, one would find that they are different from the images in the standard western style that we saw in shopping centers or on toys that we can find all over the world. Santa in these paper cuts looks unhappy and tired. This indicates that the Chinese folk artists who made these paper cuts may not really know Santa and understand his cultural background. From a Chinese perspective, young people are supposed to take care of the elderly people. They pay respect to the aged people especially in holiday season. How can they make an old man like Santa to deliver toys to kids in a cold and slippery winter night? It is very inappropriate! Therefore, these Chinese folks believe that Santa must be having a hard time and feeling sad to carry such a big sack. He must be unhappy. Although the paper cut Santa looks unhappy and tired, he is happily decorated. Not only Santa’s sack but also his clothes are all beautifully decorated with typical Chinese paper cut floral patterns and motifs. Folk artists reinterpreted Santa Clause

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with the traditional Chinese style. When they tried to create a foreign looking man, they still kept original principle of the traditional paper cut style. At the same time, they added new international elements to appreciate western culture: a panda sitting inside Santa’s sack! Now, the interesting question is why the Chinese folk artists want to create Santa. It is obviously driven by the force of the market and globalization. Tourism may be an important factor. Although the artist who created the artwork did not leave his or her name, we can safely assume that these works were commissioned by merchants according to the market demand. And the production is very likely to have been organized or industrialized as Mr. Meng’s factory. From this example, we can see that the paper cut as a traditional Chinese folk art, is no longer produced only for the local community to appreciate their own life. It becomes an industry to make profits in a globalized market. The market demand introduced foreign themes into the creative process. However, the folk artists are still working in their folk art tradition that draws inspiration from their folk life. They try to reinterpret these western themes with their traditional style and social and cultural values. Through their reinterpretation, Santa, the Western Christian saint, is treated as a member of their community, because he shares their values. These artists are very creative, flexible, and absorbing. It is very important to notice that there is no copyright claim on the package of the Santa paper cut. No particular artist’s name is given to declare authorship. The only English phrase “Made in China” on the back cover of the package reminds us that it is a product catering the tourist market. When copyright is concerned, this paper cut Santa seems to be a product of the public domain. It would be impossible for this cultural fusion to take place if intellectual property regulations apply to protect Santa images by a western organization. Santa Clause is in the public domain here for Chinese folk artists to adopt, and the traditional Chinese decorative motives, the paper cut as an artistic style, and the techniques are in the public domain available for use in new themes. The resulting artwork is set free in the market without any legal strings attached to it. Other artist could pick it up and continue to make contributions to further enrich it or change it following their own inspirations. Last, I want to point out that we have to recognize the positive impact of the market force on the development of the traditional folk art. It provides a large world for the artist to work with. It motivates the people, not only the artists, but also the business people as mediators to connect the artists with the needs of the world. The interaction between the artist and the outside world through the globalized market as medium has changed the folk art style and enriched the artistic themes to accommodate new and different life. At the same time, the artwork becomes

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more accessible to people than ever before. In a sense, the traditional folk art has been modernized. As Adra points out, traditional and indigenous are often viewed as synonymous with backwardness (2001:16). This example of the paper cut Santa actually shows that the traditional paper cut as a traditional folk art is quite responsive to the new social and economic development.

Conclusion From the previous discussion on the historical and cultural context of the intellectual property issues in the Chinese society, we know that China is relatively new to these problems. From the cases as previously presented in this paper, we can see that in the recent rapid economic development as a part of the globalization, however, people have learned these new concepts very fast and used it extensively, including the area of traditional folk arts. In the cases of the intellectual property right claims in the traditional folk arts such as cloth collage and paper cut, the driving force was economical. The ultimate concern was about profitability and monopoly. The privatization of property in contemporary China after thirty years of socialism ignited an explosion of the desires for property ownership and individualism. This created an ideological context in which some folk artists tried to individualize their works and themselves by means of copyright. This actually isolated the artists from their communities, and changed the nature of their work. Folk arts belong to their community, and circulate in the public domain in order to be supported by the folks of the community and to support future development of the art. The art works usually belong to the communities that provide creative resources and supports. An artist without such community support and contribution to the community can hardly be seen as a folk artist, and his or her work can hardly be seen as folk art. Another alienation that has been taking place is the division of artist and labor. When the copyright protected design of individual artist was produced in a factory, the nature of work actually changed from art to product. Under the folkish appearance of product, the true meaning and essence of folk art became lost because the channels of artistic communication among the folk artists are blocked and the traditional harmonious and equal relationship among the folks are replaced by commercial proprietary competition. As Michael Brown points out, the concept of copyright often contradicts the values of indigenous communities (2004:5). As we see in the case of the Chinese folk arts, this type of contradiction actually leads to alienations that will undermine the cultural tradition that is involved. As shown in Kirk Dombrowski’s3 study of the Alaska’s Tlingit village, cultural phenomena are rooted in the political and economic development of the community. This is true also in the cases shown in this paper, where the

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economic forces were overwhelming. The economic interest of people and the mode of production have made profound changes in the practice of the traditional folk arts. The market has injected great energy in the traditional folk arts and directed the artists’ attention. In the interactions between the folk artists and the market, the business people have played an important role to translate market demands into new artistic themes and contents. However, when they played the role to represent the folk artist, they tended to bring the rules of business into the world of art. Compared with the problems of representation found in the bioprospecting in South American countries,4 the Chinese case is much smaller in scope and has its unique nature. The representation of an artist by family members who tries to monopolize the artist’s work can be seen as a modern transposition of the ancient protective strategy of keeping the secrete treasure inside the family. The effort Yang Shimin to reclaim his mother’s masterpieces is very different from the American Indian’s reclaim of their ancestors’ remains.5 There is no religious or cultural reason, except for economic gains. In the last example, we see some interesting development in the traditional art of paper cut. The new themes from the West show that the globalization has provided the artist with a broader scope and enriched life experience. The rather free artistic interpretation of the themes shows that the spirit of the folk art is still alive. The free appropriation of the Western theme and the free distribution of the art in the market give an example of free environment where the folk arts can prosper. When artistic creation is concerned, what really matters most is freedom. We need a free culture as Lawrence Lessig suggests: free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon (2004:30). That is exactly how the Chinese folk arts have been evolving until the recent development of intellectual property protection amongst the explosion of commercialism.

Notes My thanks to the following people for background information and feedback: Jason Baird Jackson, Feng Jin, Adam Zolkover, Wang Shijie, and Wang Liping 1

Chengde is a mountain area of Hebei province. It is famous for its Ancient Mountain Resort built from 1703 to 1792, which is the largest ancient imperial park of the Qing Dynasty. 2 In order to protect the people mentioned in this article, their real names and the real places are not used except Chengde and Shaanxi. 3 In his study on an incident of burning native dancing regalia in an Alaska village, Kirk Dombrowski (2001) demonstrates that the cultural conflict among the natives was a

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result of social and economic development brought forth by the establishment of the state and the Alaska native Claims Settlement Act. 4 According to Shane Greene (2004), the representation of indigenous people by organizations acting as mediators caused politicization and culture being treated as property, in cases of bioprospecting in Sourth America. 5 In her book, Kathleen Fine-Dare S. (2002) gives an account of the historical context of the American Indian repatriation movement, the NAGPRA, the enforcement of the law, and the problems. Different people have different opinions about the NAGPRA. Some see it as a legislation restoring cultural, religious, and property rights to the Native American people. To many Native American people, the law is a beginning step toward individual and community healing.

References Adra, Najwa. 2004. The Relevance of Intangible Heritage to Development. Anthropology News 45(3):24. Brown, Michael. 2004. Owning Culture: Anthropology and Its Intellectual Properties. Anthropology News 45(4):5. Chinese Calligrapher Won Lawsuit against Dow Jones. 2003. http://english.people.com.cn/200310/08/eng20031008_125547.shtml, accessed May 31, 2006. People’s Congress of PRC. 1982. Preamble. http://www.usconstitution.net/china.html#Preamble, accessed May 31, 2006. —. 2004. Amendments to the Constitution. http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html, accessed May 31, 2006. Dombrowski, Kirk. 2001. Against Culture: Development, Politics and Religion in Indian Alaska. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002. Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fratkin, Jake. 1997. Chinese Herbal Patent Formulas. Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications (M) Sdn. Bhd. Glassie, Henry. 1989. The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. Greene, Shane. 2004. Indigenous People Incorporated? Culture as Politics, Culture as Property in Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting. Current Anthropology 45(2): 211-237. Huang, Cheng-China. 1996. A Brief Chronology of China’s Intellectual Property Protection. http://www.american.edu/TED/hpages/ipr/cheng.htm, accessed May 31, 2006.

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Lessig, Lawrenc. 2004. Free Culture: How Big media Uses Technology and the law to lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press. Ruskin, John. 1892. The Nature of Gothic; a Chapter of the Stones of Venice. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press.

CHAPTER TEN THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE MONARCHY AS IT EXISTS IN PRESENT DAY ENGLAND CHANTAL CLARKE

Divine kingship—the doctrine that a king is either some form of a god or is given his authority to rule by a god—has been a fairly common institution throughout history, from the ancient Egyptians who worshipped the Pharaoh as a deity, to the Sumerians, the Israelites, the Romans, who all used the concept in one form or another. In England, few have ever gone so far as to contend that their monarch actually was a god, but many believed that the right to rule came directly from the Christian god and that the king was thus responsible to God (or his representatives) alone. This concept at times gave a power to the kingship that few countries could match. Some believe that the divine kingship died with the beheading of King Charles I or William and Mary’s signing of the Bill of Rights, but I will argue in this paper that it has continued in some form to this day. In his book Mythologies Roland Barthes defines myth as, “a system of communication…a mode of signification, a form…everything can be myth provided it is conveyed by discourse”1 and uses Saussure’s conception of the sign as made up of the signifier and signified to create his definition of it. Barthes sees myth as a “second-order semiological system”2 on the level of what he calls “metalanguage.” He believes that most people interpret a text or an image on one level to create a sign. Barthes then takes this sign and turns it into a signifier and reads the text or image on a second level. Mythic signs and metaphors can be found throughout our daily lives but are somewhat concealed and require close attention to be made apparent. The idea that an image can be mythic language is important when the monarchy chooses to represent itself through visual symbols. Barthes’ article “The Blue Blood Cruise” is useful here because it focuses on how the European monarchs of the past portrayed themselves to the media on an annual pleasure cruise. Barthes posits one of myth’s rhetorical forms to be the “privation of history;” this idea says that, “myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all

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History. In it, history evaporates.”3 This definition places myth into a sacred and special time outside the present. One final point of Barthes’s that is that “myth is on the right…it invents itself ceaselessly.”4 Few systems of government are more “right” than the monarchy and monarchies certainly have a strong interest in preserving traditions. What’s interesting about Barthes’ quote is the idea that myth can change while preserving the status quo and the interests of the same people. This is in contrast to some people’s view of myth as unchanging. Myth is always being reworked and reinterpreted, even in systems that rely on literary texts such as Christian mythology. Of course it is harder to do this when myth is in a written form; myth represented as an image or oral ideology is easier to manipulate. England is a predominantly Christian country and the English monarchy is very much tied up with England’s official church, the Church of England. Most people in England and the United States (and throughout the world) are familiar with this mythology but I will review it briefly as it applies to this paper. In the Bible, Jesus Christ is the son of God who has been sent to earth to die for the sins of humankind and thus redeem them. In the story Christ is not only the son of God; he is God at the same time. This sets the stage for familial succession in monarchies. If the monarch is God, then so, potentially, are his relatives and offspring. Other stories that English monarchs have historically drawn upon to justify their power include examples from the Old Testament. In I Samuel 16, David is anointed king by God directly and in I Kings 1 he declares that Solomon his son will be king after him. The English monarchy, who believed themselves the heirs of David, took this as proof of their right to power. “When, after 1337, Edward III claimed the French crown…it was likened to Jesus’ descent from the house of David.”5 One of the most ancient British monarchical traditions is called “touching for the evil.” Under this practice hundreds or thousands of the sick would come to the king and he would stroke the side of their faces and necks to heal them. The king was thought to be particularly good at healing scrofula, (tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, especially in the neck, which can result in lesions of the skin), and epilepsy. Some kings and queens refused to do this because they found it distasteful but Charles II was reported to have touched as many as 70,000. The practice was discontinued in the mid-1700’s but the idea of the monarch as a healing figure has been constant throughout history. Another practice of the British monarchs was washing the feet of the poor and diseased at Easter. This evolved into a tradition called, “distributing the Maundy money” where the monarch gives money to the poor on Easter, still carrying the bouquet that was intended to ward off the smell of stinky feet.6 The washing of the feet

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must be intended in some measure to draw a parallel between the monarch and Christ, since Christ washed the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper in St John 13. Christianity was important to early and later kings because, among other things, the Bible presented good examples of divine power, king-lists, and dynastic histories. Alfred the Great, known for his piety and considered the first true king of England, very frequently used Christian arts and imagery to cement his role as monarch and saw himself as a latter day David.7 The early kings were not simply dependent on the Church for power, the Church was dependent on them as well to spread Christianity and maintain support for it. In this way each served as publicity for the other while at the same time trying to keep the other from gaining too much independence. The Church has been associated with the inauguration of kings of England from as early as the 6th century. Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church in 1530 (before this England had been proud of its unwavering support for the Papacy) was a revolutionary move that would eventually change the role of the English monarch forever. Henry affirmed his right to define the Church’s articles of faith and even briefly claimed the ‘cure of souls’ until reprimanded by the Church. This move has had lasting consequences; even today Queen Elizabeth II is head of the Church of England and one of her official titles is “Defender of the Faith.” Of all the kings, James I perhaps made the strongest claims to divine kingship. Also James VI of Scotland, he ascended to the throne after a very precarious and often threatened rule in Scotland. It may have been for this reason that he felt the need to make clear his divine status; the idea had previously existed but no English king had yet stated it so openly. James lay out his philosophy in two documents: The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and the Basilikon Doron (1599). In the former he wrote, “‘kings are called Gods by the prophetical David because they sit upon God his throne in the earth and have the count of their administration to give unto him.’”8 In a speech to Parliament in March 1610 James said, “Kings exercise a manner of resemblance of divine power on earth…they have power of raising and casting down; of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only.”9 The idea that the king was a god was fairly blasphemous even for the time, but it was not until the execution of James’s son Charles I that tensions would come to a head. The execution was a severe blow to the power of the monarchy in England. It clearly went in the face of the idea that the king was answerable only to God. The monarchy was restored in 1660 and enjoyed a fair amount of power but twenty-eight years later William and Mary were forced to sign the Bill of Rights before taking the throne. This and the later Act of Settlement established Britain as a constitutional monarchy with limits to the powers of the monarchy and a

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ban on Catholics or anyone married to a Catholic ascending the throne. These actions further diminished the idea of the divine monarchy; the king was accountable to Parliament and no longer had direct power over his subjects. Concerning the monarchy of Elizabeth II, Jeremy Paxman writes, “The supreme embodiment of the idea of Britain is the royal family…. The institution of the monarchy belongs to the world of red tunics and bearskins, the Union Flag and the Gatling gun and Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are almost the last representatives of Respectable Society.”10 Monarchs throughout history have made use of symbols to give people the feeling that monarchs are somehow more than human. Artistic representations of the monarchy, their presentation in the media, and the symbols they are associated with are all part of the monarch’s power. Although the queen’s power today is largely ceremonial, she remains one of the richest women in England (after J. K. Rowling and Madonna, of course). Just because she has less political power doesn’t detract from her almost divine power as a symbol of England. One of the ways that the monarchy has chosen to represent itself is as a family on the throne. In his book History in Our Time David Cannadine writes: At first glance it may seem paradoxical for Britain’s kings and queens, the inheritors of one of most stable and magnificent thrones on earth, to project an image of monarchy which has often been deliberately bourgeois and literally non-majestic. But it has resonated successfully down the generations, and part of the reason for this success is that it has resonated at a variety of different levels.`11

These different levels of resonance can be viewed as different mythical readings of ways the monarchy portrays itself. Cannadine believes that the monarchy, in a time of diminishing military power, intended to place itself in a paternal or maternal role over the British empire. Another possible reading could be that the monarchy was unconsciously imitating the way that systems of gods are often represented as a family (the Greek pantheon, the Celtic gods, even Christ as the son of God). Cannadine states that there are two ways that the monarchy presents itself as a family: the happy family and the dysfunctional family. As an example of the latter he uses the children of Elizabeth II; “three of them have been divorced, and the fourth is reputedly living in sin.”12 According to some sources the English have the second highest divorce rates in the world after the United States. Divorce seems a good way for the monarchy to relate to or appear to relate to the people. While Elizabeth and Philip are of an earlier generation and don’t seem to want to talk about their personal lives with the public, their children and children’s ex-spouses seem to almost relish and need their public confessionals. In Mythologizing Matter Gregory Schrempp writes:

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For the purposes of this paper the “blow” that Schrempp speaks of could be extended to include other things that are hard to take on blind faith, such as the idea that God exists or that people in positions of unearned wealth and privilege are entitled to their subjects’ loyalties. Also, portraying the monarchy as a group has the advantages of associating the power of the present king with the future king, and presenting the monarchy as a fertile, expanding group that has little chance of dying out. Keeping up to date with the times, and hoping to connect with the common people, the monarchy has created an official website.14 Obviously the website is not maintained by the queen and the entries about her are not in the first person but the site shows a definite attempt to make her appear more accessible. The overall tone of the website seems to be one of dull friendliness. Some of the quotes under the description of the Queen’s duties are, “Behind and in front of the cameras, The Queen’s work goes on. No two days in The Queen’s working life are ever the same” and “On almost all matters [the Queen] acts on the advice of ministers” and “In both England and Scotland, the established Churches are subject to the regulation of the law. The principle of religious toleration is fully recognized both for those of other creeds and for those without any religious beliefs.” Prince Charles’ section of the website is a little bit friendlier with pictures that have captions such as, “Prince Charles in a relaxed pose.” His page begins by saying, “The Prince of Wales takes a keen and, where possible, active interest in all areas of public life” and goes on to list the many charitable organizations with which he his involved. Diana is only mentioned on the website to say that she was his wife and she died. The kind but dull overall tone that I mentioned earlier is good for inspiring confidence but is unlikely to lead to the public devotion accorded to Princess Diana. On August 31, 1997 Prince Charles’s ex-wife Diana Spencer was killed in a car crash in Paris while chased by the paparazzi. Some who believed in the stereotype that the British were a cold and reserved people were amazed to see their huge displays of public mourning. For weeks the royal palaces and much of London were covered in cards, flowers, and trinkets and people stretched along her funeral route for miles to pay homage and snap pictures. During this time the monarchy, particularly Queen Elizabeth, was heavily

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criticized for not showing enough outward emotion about the death. Jeremy Paxman explains this phenomenon writing: This astonishingly favoured young woman had become a victim with which the public could identify, because the House of Windsor (the ‘Germans’ to the ratpack of reporters) found itself in the position of one monarchy after another – out of touch with the people in whose name it purported to rule…No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon in a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable.15

Diana was indeed an extremely privileged woman who married into royalty and lived her life very publicly (she admitted on camera to bulimia and infidelity) yet nevertheless, after and to some degree before her death she was genuinely worshipped, more than most monarchs in England had been for centuries. She remains at the very least an icon but to many she is also a goddess. About 5500 hundred websites came up on Google in December 2003 when “Princess Diana” and “goddess” were entered as search terms. The websites range from the somewhat sedate to the insane. A popular theory is that she was murdered by the monarchy, while other websites tell of people who claim to have seen her image in a multitude of materials. Some declared the site where she was killed an ancient sacred site or an ancient temple to the Goddess Diana. The Church of Diana has been formed and the Bible written; Diana is thought to have descended from ancient Merovingian kings; some think that Nostradamus prophesized her death and evangelical congregations purport to have had messages from her on the day of her death. Almost all the sites call Diana a goddess or “goddess in the making” but some go farther to say that Charles is the Devil and that Diana’s sons William and Harry are, “like two Jesus Christs, the sons of a worshipped and adored goddess figure.”16 The English are not a religious people; nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord Melbourne once joked, ‘“Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.’”17 Despite a lack of outward displays of religion, fringe religion-like practices such as New Age and Wicca have gained strong footholds in Britain, becoming much more accepted and practiced than they are in the United States: the British seem somewhat tired of the Church of England. The Church of England had mixed reactions to the frenzy that followed Diana’s death. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Coggan was quoted almost a year after its occurrence as saying to the Sunday Times, “‘Our nation has become godless. Man is made with a hollow which only God can fill. Then along came this false goddess and filled the gap for a time. But like all false gods it could not last.’”18 It is amazing that such a high-ranking member of the Church would feel threatened enough by Diana’s status as goddess to publicly

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comment on it and risk severe criticism from the people. Around the same time, in August of 1998, lay ministers in the West Midlands told a Sunday school class of children that Diana was in hell because of her immoral lifestyle. In this case the two ministers were condemned by church leaders who said that their words were, “barmy and perverted theology.”19 In this case the church realized that they had to counteract anti-Diana rhetoric to maintain the support of the people. Even authoritative, respected sources continue to refer to Diana as divine. Paxman writes, “It is not that Diana was a mere victim. Her funeral assumed the dimensions that it did because it became a pagan rite; Diana was a sort of goddess in a godless age…, the patron saint of a country preoccupied with its own failure.”20 The question remains of whether this adulation is any different from that accorded to a movie star or pop star. That is to say, has increased media exposure of famous figures made the royal family into just another celebrity family? I believe that interest in the monarchy transcends interest in any other celebrity group because they have the double whammy of celebrity and historical/traditional power. Diana’s blond good looks and her premature death, combined with the above, made her a quadruple threat. Since the spread of mass media the press has taken on an almost priest-like role in the presentation of celebrities; if there is a “cult of Diana,” then the press her priesthood. After Diana’s death the media were widely blamed for the car crash that caused it, yet this did not seem to stop people from purchasing and obsessing over the images the media provided of her. The media and not the monarchy have been responsible for the way in which the public viewed and views Diana; they control the images and text that are presented about her. Any of her images or interviews could be read in exactly the same way that Barthes reads French popular culture. In the aforementioned “Blue Blood Cruise,” he described royals who for a few weeks play at being commoners. The affectation is that they are people just like us, however the actual and intended effect is to reinforce their power, “To flaunt the fact that kings are capable of prosaic action is to recognize that this status is no more natural to them than angelism to common mortals, it is to acknowledge that the king is still king by divine right.”21 Thus, that the media chose to display Diana talking about her divorce (England has one of the world’s highest divorce rates) or about her fight with bulimia, merely elevates her to a higher status; she can have flaws and still be “absolutely fabulous.” The decision to juxtapose Mother Theresa and Diana after their concurrent deaths to the benefit of Diana was the choice of the media and to some extent the choice of the people. However, Diana was complicit with most of the ways she was presented during her lifetime. Some of her earliest displays of public charity were highly publicized visits to hospitals where she was lauded for touching patients who were contagious, namely AIDS patients and lepers. In

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theory, these visits were a way for her to show the world that these diseases could not be spread by touch, but they could be read as something quite different. I mentioned earlier the traditional powers of kingship, which included healing through touch. One of the particular diseases that the king healed was scrofula, which was associated with swollen glands and bodily lesions. In this charity work Diana could have been consciously or unconsciously referencing this practice with patients whose symptoms resembled those of antiquity. One of the most common symptoms of HIV in cases that lead to AIDS is lymphadenopathy, which is according to Merriam-Webster, “abnormal enlargement of the lymph nodes.”22 Compare this to scrofula, which the same dictionary describes as, “swelling of the lymph nodes.”23 Also, some AIDS patients and certainly leprosy patients suffer from bodily lesions. Diana may have been proving to the people that she possessed the full powers of and was as deserving of attention as any royal; that is, she had their traditional power to heal. That the media or at least historians recognized the connection is apparent as Cannadine writes, “for a time it seemed as though the Princess of Wales was going to revive the legendary royal touch in her close, tactile encounters with AIDS victims.”24 One of the articles in Mythologies, “The Face of Garbo,” considers the way that the public perceives images of celebrities. Fixating on the meaning of Greta Garbo’s face, Barthes writes, “The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light….the essence was not to be degraded [by aging], her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection.”25 This passage could easily be a literate fan’s ravings about Princess Diana; Garbo’s face that did not decay with age is akin to the idea that Diana’s beauty will not fade in the mind’s eye because of her early death. Indeed, the media was always trying to read and interpret for the public Diana’s face, as well as her actions and overall appearance. One of the press’s favorite phrases to use when describing Diana was “her shy smile;” by this phrase they certainly meant to attribute a certain kind of personality or aura to Diana. “Shy smile” functions as shorthand for stating that she was not a manipulative, publicity-seeking woman. Another Barthes article, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” explains that a news photograph has more power to transmit ideology than an advertising image because people think of the news photo as natural, while they may be on their guard against advertising.26 The pictures of Diana that the media presented had great power in influencing how the public viewed her. The portrayal of Diana as shy goes hand in hand with the portrayal of Diana as of the people, (“the people’s princess”) even though both sides of her family were of the aristocracy and her family had been friends with the royal family since she was a child.

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In the beginning of her marriage Diana was often described as a fairytale princess and her wedding as a fairytale wedding. By the end of her life and afterwards she was often referred to as a goddess. This changing terminology reflected the changing way that the press and the people viewed her, as she went in their minds from a celebrity to an icon. In the beginning it was her circumstances that were larger than life; by the end she had become larger than life, a symbol wide-open open to many significations. It is telling, however, that the people still worked within the framework of traditional religious terminology to name her power. Due to a lack of goddesses in Christian mythology, most people when speaking about her had to reference Greek mythology, the parallel strengthened by her sharing a name with the goddess Diana. The closest parallels that could be found in Christian mythology were saints, martyrs, and the Virgin Mary. It is interesting that the media often uses the fairytale as a feminine metaphor and myth and legend as masculine metaphors. This may be because of the structure and position in society of each. Fairytales, not usually told as true, often start with a commoner, who because of possessing certain virtues, is in the end elevated in status and usually married. Legends and myths on the other hand, which are usually told as true, have heroes who begin either as gods or as sons of gods and whose status in the end as a deity is merely confirmed. The tendency to use a fairytale metaphor to describe a woman’s life may be unintentionally drawing from and reinforcing the subordinate (commoner) role of women in society. If women elevate themselves it becomes something not quite to be believed. When men’s lives are described using a legendary or mythic metaphor it affirms the idea that men, from birth, already hold a privileged status in society. In the case of Diana, it seems that she was finally seen to possess enough power to be elevated to a mythic or legendary (saint, goddess, or martyr) rather than fairytale (princess) status. Early folkloristic scholars such as Otto Rank and Lord Raglan came up with the idea that there was a certain pattern that the lives of most heroes in legends followed.27 This did not mean that the heroes had never existed but rather that their lives had been adapted to this hero pattern to increase their legendary status through association with other heroes. None of the heroes considered by Rank or Raglan were women but I would suggest that the media did the same thing with Diana’s life, pasting it onto a sort of Cinderella framework in order to increase her intrigue, even when the pattern was untruthful. For example, as I mentioned earlier, it was popular to refer to Diana as “the people’s princess” and indicate that she had common roots. Other news stories made much of Diana’s “wicked stepmother” who moved in after her parents divorced. In his Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp surmised that almost all fairytales end with a wedding.28 After her “fairytale wedding,” the press was forced to

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move into new realms to find referential vocabulary upon which to draw. Myth and legend were the directions in which they moved. In “The Forms of Folklore,” Bascom defines the folktale as something that is outside of time (e.g. once upon a time).29 In “The Structural Study of Myth” Claude Lévi-Strauss echoes this sentiment but applies it to myth, stating that myth can and should be analyzed synchronically, without the element of time. He calls mythological time, “both revertible and non-revertible, synchronic and diachronic.”30 Also echoing Barthes’ idea that myth is a sort of higher level language, Lévi-Strauss writes, “It is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically in “taking off” from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling.”31 While taking celebrities outside of time, the media and storytellers attribute a false history to the individual that belongs in the realm of myth or fairytale. The celebrity loses her individuality and humanity but gains a sense of immortality by drawing on the power of myth and fairytale characters through intertextual juxtaposition. Diana’s story draws upon the power of an overabundance of idealized, worshipped identities: monarchs, celebrities, women, beauties (or at least blondes), and those who die young. Mythologies provide the worldviews upon which people act. One of the first, most obvious actions relating to Diana’s identity was the huge reaction to her death. Tearful memorials that bordered on mass hysteria surprised many who thought of the British as reserved and unemotional. Those who were surprised neglected to consider that people have been given many models, in the last sixty years or so, by the mass media of how to act in times of mourning. They have seen mourning in movies and on news broadcasts and the people obviously felt Diana’s death to be a good catalyst for emotional displays. It is difficult to say whether Diana changed people’s lives or permeated their every thought. Because of her huge and frequent presence in the media, she was at least involuntarily in most peoples’ minds on an almost daily basis. Women certainly copied her fashion and probably felt inspired as she discussed her infidelity, divorce, bulimia, and suicide attempts openly. However, we cannot know if these candid interviews inspired woman to emulate Diana or rather to aspire only to gain a similar degree of exposure and adulation from the media. Reality television shows such as Big Brother caught on in Britain very soon after her death. Who can say that Diana’s life, captured very much as if she were on a reality television show (everything exposed and purporting to be unscripted) did not lay the ground work for this trend? What remains in modern times of the concept of divine monarchy for the English monarchy? In the more traditional sense of the word only vestiges remain. Queen Elizabeth is still the head of the Church of England and remains “Defender of the Faith.” Parts of the coronation ceremony have changed little since 787 when Ecgfrith was the first monarch anointed with holy oil.32

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Elizabeth still distributes the Maundy money and has the historical power of her ancestors behind her. In the less traditional sense of the idea, the divine monarchy is still alive and kicking, figuratively speaking, in the figure of Princess Diana. Even seven years after her death there seems to be monthly books or magazine articles about her. However, Diana is not yet and probably never will be the basis for a complete mythological system. Her power rests intertextually in relation to other myths: divine kingship, the mythological system of Christianity, and celebrity. Yet the effects of her life and the way it was portrayed will be long lasting, particularly in the way that we regard the media in our daily lives.

Notes 1

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 109. Ibid., 114. 3 Ibid., 151. 4 Ibid.,148. 5 John Cannon and Ralph Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 273. 6 For these and other practices of the monarchy, see Cannon and Griffiths. 7 Ibid., 79. 8 Ibid., 354-56. 9 Ibid., 356. 10 Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2001), 240. 11 David Cannadine, History in our Time (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 3. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Gregory Schrempp, Mythologizing Matter: Reflections on Popular Science Writing. (Unpublished manuscript, 2003), 156. 14 http://www.royal.gov.uk 15 Paxman, The English, 243. 16 http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/goddess.html 17 Paxman, The English, 101. 18 BBC News, “Diana 'false goddess' says former archbishop,” August 22, 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/156745.stm 19 BBC News, “Kids told 'Diana in hell',” August 18, 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/154217.stm 20 Paxman, The English, 243. 21 Barthes, Mythologies, 32. 22 “Lymphadenopathy,” Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 1993. 23 “Scrofula,” Ibid. 24 Cannadine, History, 29. 25 Barthes, Mythologies, 57. 2

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26

See Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” Image, Music, Text. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32-52. 27 For excerpts of Ranks and Raglan’s works see Robert A. Segal (ed.), In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 28 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 29 William Bascom, “The Forms of Folklore.” Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 6-29. 30 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1958), 87. 31 Ibid., 86. 32 See Cannon and Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated, 118.

References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. —. "The Rhetoric of the Image." In Image, Music, Text, edited by Roland Barthes, 32-52. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bascom, William. "The Forms of Folklore." In Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, edited by Alan Dundes, 6-29. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. BBCi. 22 August 1998. Diana 'False Goddess' Says Former Archbishop. In, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/156745.stm. (accessed November 16, 2003). —. 19 August 1998. Kids Told 'Diana in Hell'. In, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/154217.stm. (accessed November 16, 2003). Cannadine, David. History in Our Time. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Cannon, John, and Ralph Griffiths. The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2000. Dundes, Alan, ed. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." In Myth: A Symposium, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 81-106. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1958. "Lymphadenopathy." In Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1993. The Making of a Goddess. In, http:www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/goddess.html. (accessed June 30, 2005). The Official Website of the British Monarchy. In, http://www.royal.gov.uk/output/Page1.asp. (accessed November 18, 2003). Paxman, Jeremy. The English: A Portrait of a People. Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2001. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.

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Schrempp, Gregory. Mythologizing Matter: Reflections on Popular Science Writing, Unpublished manuscript 2003. "Scrofula." In Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1993. Segal, Robert A., ed. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER ELEVEN A GOOD OFFENSE, EXPLORING CINEMATIC TALE TYPES DANIEL PERETTI

In his essay “Narrative Motif-Analysis as a Folklore Method” Stith Thompson addresses the question of why his index had to be cross-cultural in scope. He writes: “This decision came from the belief that the practice of storytelling is one of the most nearly universal of human activities and that its study should not be piecemeal, but should include, sooner or later, all parts of this narrative continuum.”1 His use of the phrase “narrative continuum” is compelling. It refers to the continuum of cultures, but his statement that the study of stories “should not be piecemeal” leads me to think that it should apply to stories told in all manners as well as in all places. Why exclude stories told using technologies? Actually, folklorists haven’t. One need only look to Mikel J. Koven’s “Folklore Studies in Popular Film and Television: A Necessary Critical Survey”2 or the 1957 symposium on folklore in literature3 to find examples. But the endeavors of folklorists into these media have been rather limited, whereas members of all corners of the social sciences and humanities use folklore freely. Folklorists see folklore as meaningful and important, an importance which men and women in other disciplines also recognize as they apply their methods to the study of folklore as literature or history. But if folklorists have benefited from finding folklore in other media, wouldn’t an application of some of the methods of folkloristics to these media be beneficial? In other words, instead of having other disciplines steal our subject matter, let’s steal theirs. Turnabout is fair play. The studies already referenced in this essay reveal that folkloristic endeavors into the realms of literature and film have largely treated the novelist or filmmaker as a collector of folklore; folklorists use the descriptions and depictions of ballads, folk tales, proverbs, games and the like to illuminate the whole work. They might find Aarne-Thompson tale types in butter commercials or the use of indexed narrative motifs by novelists. This is but one

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perspective. Another is to treat, say, film, as a storytelling medium akin to verbal art. If we create another narrative continuum, with medium as its orientation, we might place verbal art on the far left, along with any manner of telling a story that involves nothing beyond the human body. Toward the center would be the written word and pictures made with dyes, inks, pens, typewriters and the like. Moving further to the right, we find audio recording, broadcast radio and television, cinema, and the things now being called “new media”. The continuum could potentially, well, continue. Should we take the notion of a narrative continuum in this manner, we must endeavor to explore Thompson’s dictum to its fullest potential. In keeping with my own range of interests, this study will apply some of the methods of folkloristics to film. Film has evolved into a largely narrative medium, and so it seems natural to utilize the folkloristic method of identifying and discussing tale types. Here, then, is one that seems to have become rather prominent in movies during the last decade. A person feels something is unfulfilling about his or her current life. He or she meets a “free-spirit”, a person who has what the protagonist lacks. They fall in love. Their affair ends. The protagonist returns to his or her life, now content. This comes in two sub-types. The first, Subtype A, occurs if the protagonist is married. Subtype A: A married woman feels trapped, like she has given up her dreams. She meets a transient man who offers to take her away from her oppressive life. They have an affair, but in the end she stays with her family while the transient leaves. It is the plot of the films The Bridges of Madison County, A Walk on the Moon, The Horse Whisperer, Adaptation, and The Good Girl. Then there is Subtype B: Subtype B: This usually begins in a city, where a person lives a superficially happy life, though her/his friends know differently. Meets the “free spirit”, usually from outside the city, and they often leave the city together. They have an affair, which ends when the free spirit dies. The protagonist returns to the city and now can live happily ever after. It can be seen in such films as Titanic, City of Angels, A Walk to Remember, Message in a Bottle, Sweet November, and Autumn in New York.

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The rest of this essay will explore these subtypes and their characteristics. This is not an Aarne-Thompson tale type, and because of its singular nature it does not warrant any numbering system at this time. While the very act of formulating a tale type seems to necessitate the formulation of other tale types for comparison, this task will also have to wait. Should this type of inquiry prove beneficial, a numbering system for comparison could be developed later, with the Aarne-Thompson Index as a model. But film is not verbal art (though it does employ verbal art), and while a medium might borrow tales from others, it will have stories that are unique to it. Thus it is interesting to note how rarely Olrik’s Epic Laws of folk narrative apply to film. For example, the "Law of Two To a Scene" is not necessary when all the characters are visible and easily differentiated. It may apply to film, but the medium does not require it. Yet the Law of Tableaux Scenes seems to hold true. That is a study for another time, however; this essay must remain concerned with the single tale type, save for this one note: Perhaps the most interesting of the epic laws in regard to this tale type is the Law of Contrast, which states that the oral story must always be polarized. “This very basic opposition is a major rule of epic composition: young and old, large and small, man and monster, good and evil.”2 And, as we shall see, life and death. The tale type described above is rife with contrast. Please note that this story does not originate in the cinema. Its conventions and structure, with some variation, go back at least as far as Kate Chopin’s novels and short stories, specifically in The Awakenin—though with a different ending. A similar theme is present in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Michael Cunningham’s book The Hours (and the film based on it), in which Woolf appears as a character. Despite this literary origin, the tale type described above seems to have attained its greatest popularity and fixity in the cinema. As shall be illustrated, when films take a novel as their narrative source, they are likely to alter the structure of the original story to fit this structure, which is evidently considered more cinematic. In this light, it might be interesting to delve further into the origins of the cinematic tale type by interviewing screenwriters and producers. For whatever reason, filmmakers have come to consider the basic structure of this tale type one that works for the medium of film. In this medium, it has also reached its point of deconstruction, in the film Adaptation. While every effort was made to collect and examine all the movies that exhibit the plot of the tale type, these are probably not all of the examples available. However, they represent a decent sample with which to work. As with so many other stories, these begin with a character who feels a poignant lack. It’s not a physical thing; it’s emotional. The protagonists live unfulfilling lives. They have given up their dreams. They have forgotten how to love. In

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short, they’re unhappy. The lack is liquidated through the lessons taught by another person, who is simultaneously a teacher and a lover. They have an affair, sometimes long and intense, sometimes nothing more than a kiss. There is often a journey involved. Then they separate. In many cases, the teacher/lover dies. The subtypes hold true every time. If the protagonist is married, then she is female and the teacher/lover/free spirit will live through the end, though the woman will stay with her family. If the protagonist is unmarried, then the gender varies with the movie and the love interest dies. This holds true even when the story varies considerably in the other media from which it was adapted. An exploration of the characters will illustrate the main points. But first, we must examine the main oppositions of these films. Even upon a cursory examination, it becomes obvious that all of these stories oppose dynamism and stagnation, but through different avenues. It is tempting to say that they are about city and country life, but that’s not always the case. Quite often the protagonist—the person in need of a change—lives in a rural or otherwise non-urban environment. This is the case in Bridges of Madison County. Also, both characters might live in the city, which is the case in Sweet November, Autumn in New York, A Walk to Remember, and City of Angels. Still, the urban/rural opposition shows up in many of the films where it’s not a major part. The films, taken as a type, do not limit themselves to a rural/urban dichotomy; so stagnation and dynamism will have to do. Still, as city and country are convenient opposing terms—which are also quite common settings in the movies—they will serve. Here’s how they play out. The city is stagnant; just about everything else is dynamic. The city might be opposed to the coast (Message in a Bottle), the ranch (The Horse Whisperer), the woods (City of Angels, A Walk on the Moon), or the swamp (Adaptation). The dichotomy also applies to things other than location, such as occupation. Associated with stagnation and the city are jobs such as ad executive (Sweet November), researcher (Message in a Bottle), editor (The Horse Whisperer), housewife (Walk on the Moon, The Bridges of Madison County), and restaurant owner (Autumn in New York). The jobs opposed to this are an artistic hat maker (Autumn in New York), a photographer (The Bridges of Madison County), a boat builder (Message in a Bottle), a sketch artist (Titanic), and a dog groomer (Sweet November). But also opposing these jobs are things such as religion (A Walk to Remember), unemployment (Titanic, Sweet November), and transience (the blouse salesman in Walk on the Moon). The important aspect to note is that people in dynamic roles have boundless passion for what they do. The stagnant person muddles through. Cinematography and editing portray this far better than words ever will. In every movie where the city is a major setting, it appears as monolithic as

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possible. The streets are crowded and dirty; the buildings are overwhelming. Rarely will a sequence of shots portray parks and large buildings. The opening sequence of The Horse Whisperer juxtaposes the raw beauty of fields of snow around a family’s cabin with the desolate griminess of city streets. Message in a Bottle continually alternates between the elevated trains and skyscrapers of Chicago right and the coastlines and harbors of North Carolina. The city never appears anywhere near as appealing as these other settings; the camera shows it as oppressive and claustrophobic. Nor are the inhabitants of the city as appealing—or even developed—as the other characters. Likewise, the protagonist’s friends are not nearly as interesting as those of the love interest. We should now delve more deeply into the characters, beginning with the protagonist. This is as often a man as it is a woman, though in Subtype A the protagonist is always a woman. The images associated with this character are uninspiring, confined, and mundane. This person’s environment is fabricated, with little room to breathe. A watch (Autumn in New York) or a cellular phone (The Horse Whisperer) anchors the character to the city. Also, an object opposes this anchor and represents new liberation: a pear (City of Angels), a drawing (Titanic), a tie-dyed shirt (Walk on the Moon), a dress (The Bridges of Madison County). The career of the protagonist has already been discussed, but it is pertinent to note further that this person is never a teacher, a scientist, a librarian, a painter, or anything that is commonly associated with a passion for work. The protagonist’s job tends to separate him or her from the dreams of youth. The dialogue makes this separation and unhappiness clear. Pearl in Walk on the Moon tells her husband that she doesn’t want their daughter “to end up like us.” She confides to her friends, “Sometimes I wish I was a whole other person.” Francesca in TheBridges of Madison County tells Robert that she gave up teaching because her husband wanted her to, that she lives in the middle of nowhere. Susan in Adaptation declares, "I wan to be a baby again. I want to be new." In the voice over narration that begins The Good Girl, Justine tells us that "As a girl you see the world like a giant candy store...But one day you look around and see a prison, and you're on death row." In Subtype B, the protagonist never articulates this as clearly, but either the plot makes it evident or the characters around them do. Jack tells Rose in Titanic: “You have to break free or you’re going to die.” Here the issue of gender must be addressed. Why must the protagonist of Subtype A always be female? This is especially interesting because the protagonist of B can be of either gender. The fact that the movie is almost always found classified as a romance by marketers provides what may be a clue. The movie is made to appeal to a female audience, so the use of a female protagonist makes sense. This does not explain why Subtype B might have a

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male lead, but it does shed light on the gender. Where tales of the tedium of being a housewife were scarce in the first half of the twentieth century, the Feminist movement, Civil Rights, and other societal changes have made it possible to tell these kinds of stories. Before 1968, censorship actually made it impossible to make films about marital infidelity; thus Subtype A was not even a feasible plot in cinema before that date. The film The Seven Year Itch fosters further discussion of this point. Here the protagonist, Richard Sherman, is male, married, and feels an "itch" to commit adultery. But the film, which was released in 1955, fell under the timeframe during which motion picture production was governed by what's known as the Hays Production Code, effectively censoring it. Under Section II: Sex, the code reads: 1. The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing. 2. Adultery and illicit sex, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively.3

Since, as shall be examined below, several variants in Subtype A depicts marital infidelity that results in a distinct improvement on the protagonist's life, it could not be portrayed. This film is as close to a male version of Subtype A as we find (and it still falls outside the type in another way: it's a comedy). Yet it still does not contain a protagonist with the same lack as portrayed in the tale type. Richard Sherman's temptation comes not from unhappiness, but from what's portrayed as a natural, male tendency to infidelity. Never does the protagonist feel any genuine love for the other woman (which might be argued is the case in every variant of Subtype A); it's merely physical. In films of this time at least, men are happy with the "traditional" marriage as much as they can be, which is to say not entirely. But to women in films after the code was abandoned, no censorship dictated that infidelity must not be portrayed "attractively". So filmmakers were free to address the issue from a female perspective. In light of this, the male perspective is not the important one for female audiences. It's not that men do not necessarily feel the same lack; it's more that a film in comedic mode shows us that audiences in 1955 were already more accustomed to male infidelity. Though the protagonist in The Seven Year Itch does not actually commit adultery, as he does in the play upon which it was based, the point is clearly made. We can laugh at it. We cannot laugh at an

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unfaithful wife. Her story must be one of hardship and difficult choices. The film tells us that she may commit adultery, but only to preserve her family. The Seven Year Itch does not even bring the dissolution of the family into discussion. In the tale type under consideration presently, it is a major theme. If the wife's unhappiness will result in her departure, she must commit adultery in order that she might stay at home. She can do so only for a short time, and only to rid herself of her lack. Moving on at last to the love interest, in this tale type we have a free spirit, a transient soul who can show the protagonist how to fix her life. The love interest is closely associated with the natural world, if in a mediated way. He or she is often on the road, always artistic, and driven by passion and whimsy rather than by societal convention. This character often takes the protagonist away from daily life, be it just for a picnic in the next town (The Bridges of Madison County) or to a cabin at Lake Tahoe (City of Angels) or to the seashore (Message in a Bottle). While the love interest doesn’t always intend these getaways (such as the trip to the farm in The Horse Whisperer), they do occur in every instance. (In Sweet November, the protagonist goes to actually live in the love interest’s apartment; in Titanic it’s merely the prow of the ship that serves to sever Rose from her daily life by giving her a glimpse of nothing but water, the natural world set off against the height of human culture: a supposedly unbreakable ship that stood as the pinnacle of human achievement.) The characters flee human society. The oppositions of dynamic art and nature against stagnant city life are made explicit. In Titanic, the first time we see Rose, in her golden years, she is making a clay pot—an activity that her family would never have allowed her to perform in her youth. Her fiancé sees art only in financial terms. Maggie Rice in City of Angels is first seen weaving her way through jammed traffic—on a bicycle in Los Angeles. Walker Jerome in A Walk on the Moon tells Pearl that he doesn’t follow a schedule, but simply goes where the road takes him. Describing the character in each film seems almost unnecessary. They are close to nature, free-spirited, and artistic. In these films, art and nature provide elements of a truly satisfying life. But for these things to exist for everyone—at least for the protagonist—there must be sacrifice. The love affair ends. If the protagonist is married, then the woman returns to her family. If both of the characters are single, then the artist dies. This rule is so firmly set in American cinema that the filmmakers will alter the endings of other sources to stick to it. Near the end of the Nicholas Evans novel The Horse Whisperer (Subtype A), Tom Booker (who could not live in the city even to stay with his wife) dies when he’s battered by the hooves of a wild horse. Tom's outstretched hands and willingness to walk into a dangerous

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situation give the scene the feeling of a suicide, perhaps as repentance for loving a married woman. The film removes the entire subplot involving the wild horses, and Tom Booker survives to watch the second love of his life abandon him for the big city. In the German film Wings of Desire (Himmel über Berlin), upon which City of Angels (Subtype B) is loosely based, the fallen angel and the woman he loves only meet in the final scene, at which point their relationship begins. Maggie Rice and Seth (the angel in City of Angels) meet frequently, though they only consummate their affair at the end. Then Maggie gets hit by a truck. The sacrifice must be made, and the audience (at least this member of it) must wonder why. Subtype A emphasizes moral responsibility at the cost of abandoned dreams. Pearl of Walk on the Moon got pregnant at 17 and became a housewife instead of living what we must assume would have been a wilder life. Her dreams are vaguely defined at best. When she pursues the freedom she has longed for, it not only puts her marriage at risk, it also wreaks havoc on her children. Much of the rest of the film is spent trying to repair this damage. Annie in The Horse Whisperer does much the same thing, but to two families. Tom’s sister-in-law warns her against it, recognizing the consequences for Tom (who has been hurt by divorce) and also for the operation of the ranch. There are many hints that Annie’s daughter also senses the trouble, and she distances herself from Annie as the film progresses. And yet good does come of these affairs. The family in Subtype A always reunites, and we are led to believe that they will be a stronger group than before. Problems that had festered between family members are now brought into the open, and thus are ostensibly being solved. Because the protagonist can now lead a more fulfilling life, those around her will be happier. This is perhaps most apparent in The Good Girl, wherein the affair actually enables the married couple to have a child. The affair ends with no permanent harm done, except perhaps to the free spirit. Subtype B, because it does not deal with adultery, lacks the moral element. Where the Subtype A story reflects unfulfilled dreams, B focuses on fulfilling those dreams. In Subtype A, the protagonist recognizes the value of sacrificing dreams to something greater; the protagonist of Subtype B must recognize the value of the sacrificed person. The visionary shows the protagonist a new perspective, and then dies. This character is almost above reproach: the few instances of character flaws always have sympathetic explanations: For example, Garett in Message in a Bottle is closed off or confrontational when it comes to his late wife. Yet he is noble,

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even heroic: he dies saving a family from drowning. His death, while noble, is still unrelated to the overall narrative, as are most of the deaths of the free spirits. Often the love interest has a terminal illness (Autumn in New York, Sweet November, A Walk to Remember), and their deaths are foretold early on. In the hands of these storytellers, those on the brink of death—whether aware of it or not—are the most fully alive. When there is no congenital illness, the character still dies; either in an heroic manner (Message in a Bottle, Titanic), or in one such as City of Angels, where the character appears totally at peace. The question, however, remains unanswered: Why must this character die? Before moving on to answer that question, we must consider this tale type's deconstruction in the film Adaptation. In it, parallel plots relate a pair of writers desperately trying to liquidate their own lack of happiness, while one tries to adapt the other’s book to film. Susan Orlean, an author, finds what promises to be her happiness through John LaRoche, who introduces her to a drug made from orchids that opens her mind and “makes people feel interested.” LaRoche and the drug give her passion. Charlie Kaufman, a shy screenwriter, finds his answers in the words of his brother, who teaches him about living life to the fullest and not caring what other people think. But the entire movie succeeds in pointing out how cliché the very premise is, and Kaufman tries to avoid it in his writing; although he winds up living the story and “learning valuable life lessons to succeed in the end”—which is exactly the type of story he said he didn’t like. He attempts to maintain his artistic integrity, but he fails. Yet he comes to terms with it after the death of his brother, the free spirit whose demise is in a car accident, random and apparently without meaning. Why does it happen? An analytical answer might postulate that these stories, while ostensibly love stories about freeing the spirit and living a fulfilling life, are in actuality about controlling nature and subduing the creative spirit for progressive, urban ends. Thus these visionary characters—who represent the untamed countryside, the artist, artisan, and salt of the earth—must die in the name of progress. What they represent can become a part of progress, but they cannot, as natural resources are irrevocably transformed in the process of civilization. In city life, elements of the so-called natural world can only exist in controlled environments such as parks and zoos. True happiness can be found in realms outside of city life, but it cannot be seamlessly assimilated into the urban environment. The free-spirited visionary is crushed to make way for the urbandwellers. The folk vanishes. One possible conclusion from all of this is that these stories attempt to assuage the guilt that strikes those who know that progress comes at a cost. These stories seem to say that it’s okay to eradicate the artist and the visionary because we can bring their lessons with us, inside us,

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when we return to city life. They have made us better people, even sometimes given us a child or a new reason to live. But this analytical answer is not the only one. To the question of why these characters have to die, a different answer comes, as it so often does, from art itself. In the film The Hours, Virginia Woolf describes her new novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to her husband Leonard. He asks this same question: Why must the artist die? Virginia, who would later end her own life, tells him, “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life. It’s contrast.” That may not be the answer sought by scholarship. It may not be the answer that ties up all the loose ends. It may not be the answer that enables the reader to close the book with a smile, or the answer that enables the audience to leave the theater happily. It may not be the answer, but it’s a good one.

Notes 1

Stith Thompson, Narrative Motif-Analysis as a Folklore Method, Folklore Fellows Communication 161. (Helsinki: Suomalainen Teideakatemia, 1955), 6 2 Mikel J. Koven, "Folklore Studies in Popular Film and Television: A Necessary Critical Survey," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 116 No. 460: 176-195 3 Daniel G. Hoffman; Richard M. Dorson; Carvel Collins; John W. Ashton, "Folklore in Literature: A Symposium," Journal of American Folklore, Vol 70, No. 275, 1-24 4 Axel Olrik, "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative," in International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes. (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers: New York, 1999), 91. 5 David P. Hayes, The Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry, http://procode.dhwritings.com. 2005

References Hayes, David P. The Production Code of the Motion Picture Industry. http://procode.dhwritings.com 2005 Hoffman, Daniel G. et al. "Folklore in Literature: A Symposium," Journal of American Folklore, Vol 70, No. 275, 1-24. Koven, Mikel J. "Folklore Studies in Popular Film and Television: A Necessary Critical Survey," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 116 No. 460: 176-195. Olrik, Axel, "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative," in International Folkloristics, Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes. (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers: New York, 1999), 91. Thompson, Stith. Narrative Motif-Analysis as a Folklore Method, Folklore Fellows Communication 161. (Helsinki: Suomalainen Teideakatemia, 1955), 6.

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Filmography Adaptation. DVD, Directed by Spike Jonez. 2003; Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 2003. Autumn in New York. DVD, Directed by Joan Chen. 2000; Santa Monica, Ca: MGM Home Entertainment, 2000. The Bridges of Madison County. DVD, Directed by Clint Eastwood. 1998; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1997. City of Angels. DVD, Directed by Brad Siberling. 1998; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 1998. The Good Girl DVD, Directed by Miguel Arteta. 2003; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2003. The Horse Whisperer. DVD, Directed by Robert Redford. 1998; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Video. 1998. The Hours. DVD, Directed by Stephen Daldry. 2003; Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2003. Message in a Bottle. DVD, Directed by Louis Mandoki. 1999; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 1999. The Seven Year Itch. DVD, Directed by Billy Wilder. 1955; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2001. Sweet November. DVD, Directed by Pat O’Connor. 2001; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 2001. Titanic. DVD, Directed by James Cameron. 1999; Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures,1999. A Walk on the Moon. DVD, Directed by Tony Goldwyn. 1999; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Video, 1999. A Walk to Remember. DVD, Directed by Adam Shankman. 2002; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002. Wings of Desire. (Himmel über Berlin). DVD, Directed by Wim Wenders. 1988; Santa Monica, Ca: MGM Home Entertainment, 2003.

CHAPTER TWELVE OVER MY DEAD BODY JENN HORN

Introduction What happens to our bodies when we die? We always assume that our “final wishes” regarding our bodies and funeral services will be carried out, regardless of what those wishes may be. After all, wouldn’t the loved ones we “left behind” want to honor those final wishes? Incorporating research about the funeral industry and it’s practices, as well as alternative means of “disposing” of the deceased such as medical donations, this creative paper takes an “ethnographic” look at certain aspects of our society in which death and dying are still taboo subjects, kept in the hospital wards. Through the “narrative,” this paper explores what the living expect from the dead, what the dead expect from the living, and what happens when those expectations are challenged.

The Narrative Let me just start by saying being dead is no fun! There were so many things that I had wanted to get done in this lifetime and to have it cut short like it was…Well, it’s just not right! But I promise you, this is not going to be a tirade about the evils of society. It’s a different kind of story, written with the help of my sister’s slightly possessed body! (And by the way, I don’t really recommend possessing someone. The living tend to be a little resistant to possession and it’s really not the most comfortable thing for a spirit to do.) I guess I should introduce myself first. My name is Jenn and at this moment, I am a spirit waiting “to cross.” When I was living, I was a graduate student at Indiana University in the Folklore Institute – the “Harvard” of Folklore you might say. I was thirty years old and had just successfully defended my master’s thesis on tattoo narratives - That forever-lurking, unfinished thesis was actually finished and I was enjoying life again. I woke up

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each morning smiling and thinking life was pretty good….Not that it wasn’t good before but it was certainly better now that damn thing wasn’t haunting me! So how did I leave the living? Well, it’s kind of ironic actually especially considering my addiction to sweets…It was the last week of classes and I had just met with one of the professors I wanted on my dissertation committee. Not only had she agreed to be on my committee but she agreed to be the chair as well. I had several other faculty members I was planning on meeting that day. However, I had nearly an hour before my next appointment and I was starving. With any luck, I would be able to ignore my craving for a Sweet Shop cookie and have something healthy! Luck was NOT on my side. I was standing in line at the Sweet Shop, cursing my sweet tooth while waiting to pay for my cookies when we heard screaming down the hall. There were three other people in line with me plus the two ladies behind the counter. We all just kind of looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and continued with our business. We were in the Union after all and students screamed about anything! I walked out of the Sweet Shop, breaking off a piece of my cookie and as I looked down the hall, I saw a young man, mid-twenties or so, standing there with a shotgun. As he turned and looked at me, I suddenly understood the screaming. “Shit.” I can’t tell you what dying feels like. I don’t remember. I don’t remember the bullet hitting me. I don’t remember any of the actual “dying.” I DO remember looking down at my body – a very odd sensation to say the least. I had done some research about near death experiences and somehow knew this wasn’t one of them. There was no bright light, no relatives calling me over, no sense of an all-loving, all-powerful being. There was just me looking at me. I was moved to a morgue of sorts. There were 10 of us all together, shooter not included…apparently the jerk forgot to leave a bullet for himself. I followed my body… mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I’m don’t know if spirits “sleep” but I definitely lost some time – some “living” time that is and the next thing I knew, I was back in my apartment. My friend Rhonda was there with her husband Mike. She was checking on my cats, Max and Matilda. Clearly I had been gone for longer than the cats expected because both of their dishes were empty and neither was happy! My Mad Max and Tilla Mae…Who was going to care for them now that I was gone? They were “treasured” (not spoiled!) cats, making them a hard pair for anyone to adopt! I knew Rhonda would be willing to take them but Mike wasn’t “cat people” and they already had Lucky, a very big German Shepard. Cathy would also volunteer to adopt them but she’s not “cat people” either. I guess I had to hope my mom or sister would be able to find room for them.

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Suddenly Max looked right at me and I swear he saw me! His pupils got real big and he ran into the bedroom. Rhonda and Mike looked at him a little weird, shook their heads, and carried on with their business. I looked into the bedroom and Max was sitting on my bed, staring right at me. They say animals can sense the presence of spirits. Matilda came in and stood in front of my legs just like she did when I was living. That’s when it hit me. I was dead. I couldn’t pick up my cats and tell them everything was okay. If I could have cried, I would have. Instead, I worried about who would care for them and if they would miss me. To some people, they were just cats but they were my family. I was getting depressed and depressed spirits aren’t a good thing. Fortunately, I heard laughter in the living room and decided to let Max and Matilda get back to their busy day of napping. Rhonda and Mike were standing in the living room laughing about my eclectic mix of stuff - on the walls framed posters of Beauty & the Beast, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and my sister’s photography and in my bookshelf books of fairy tales, Neil Gaiman, forensics, funerals, Calvin and Hobbes and Beauty & the Beast. It was a sad laughter but laughter none-the-less and it made me feel better. Being dead was still no fun but, for that brief second, I was me again. Rhonda and Mike left, promising Max and Matilda they would be back later. In the meantime, still unsure of what a wandering spirit does, I curled up on the bed between Max and Matilda, waiting for something to do. Rhonda and Mike returned. I felt bad. This wasn’t something a friend should have to do and now I couldn’t even pay her back. The “business” of death is no fun for anyone but your family is obligated, your friends aren’t. From what I could gather, my parents and sister in New York had been told of my “passing.” I heard Rhonda telling Mike there had been some “discussion” about who would actually be coming to Indiana to take care of “business.” My mother was an emotional wreck but was willing to come. My father would come but he wanted to bring his second wife. My sister would come but thought bringing the kids (age three and one) would just add to the stress of the situation. My mother was upset my father wanted to bring his second wife. My father didn’t understand what the big deal was but he refused to come without her. My mother wouldn’t be caught dead (pardon the expression) on the same plane with “that” woman and wouldn’t allow “that” woman to step foot in my apartment. “If he insisted on bringing ‘her,’ he better leave ‘her’ at the hotel.” Of course, my father wouldn’t be leaving his “her” at the hotel. The “discussion” continued to escalate until everyone stopped speaking all together. They finally decided my sister would come out alone, my mother would watch my nieces, and my parents would work together on whatever “business” aspects of my death they could take care of from New York.

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I shook my head as I heard Rhonda telling Mike the story. It was nice to know not even my death could help heal a bitter divorce. I knew I could count on my sister to take care of things the way I would have wanted. Rhonda fed the cats and then left to pick my sister up at the airport. Mike wondered if there was something they should do before Samm arrived and Rhonda said “no.” My sister insisted on helping empty my apartment, contacting friends… Samm knew I wouldn’t want anyone to have to do all this death business alone and Rhonda didn’t mind waiting. I lost track of more “living” time but eventually, my sister and Rhonda arrived at my apartment. Together, they found my “will” on my computer – thank goodness I was so organized! They read it and both commented it was pretty much what they expected… especially the body farm part. I had recently developed an interest in forensics and if I liked “hard science” more, I would have actually considered pursuing a career in forensic anthropology. What I found instead was the next best thing – The Body Farm at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. It was a place where they took body donations and used those bodies for various forensic studies. I thought it was a great thing and immediately got all my official donation paperwork into the University. Needless to say, my Catholic mother had a few issues with my decision! We battled for a long time about my “final wishes.” She didn’t have too much of a problem with organ donation but this “body farm thing” was just too much for her. She thought it was gross and disturbing while I thought it was one of the coolest things! Rhonda and my sister sighed and looked at each other. Rhonda said “Well, I guess we should let her friends know ….” “I guess.” “So how should we do this?” Rhonda asked. “I don’t know,” said my sister. “How do you tell people that someone died? I mean, I know ‘snail mail’ letters would be better but we don’t want to do that because then no one would have the chance to attend a service… so it has to be by email….” “Speaking of the service, when is it?” “I don’t know. Mom and Dad should be working on that. Let me call them before we talk to her friends.” “Good idea.” My sister got up to call my mother in New York. Although I could only hear one side of the conversation, it became clear pretty quickly there was some disagreement over where the service was going to be held. I had lived in Indiana for nearly seven years now and had no real ties to any special place in New York. Most of my family wanted a church service before my burial but I had no plot anywhere and didn’t belong to any church. They had settled on a

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service at my grandparents’ church (which was actually okay with me) but it seems there was still a scramble going on for a burial plot and the money to pay for it. My sister had the unfortunate job of reminding my mother of my final wishes to go to the Body Farm. And just as she was when I first told her, Mom was not excited. In fact my mother refused to allow it to happen. But I had trusted the job of my final business to my sister for a reason. Samm stood her/my ground and after a lot of crying, yelling, silence, and talking, my final wishes would be carried out. All my parents had to do was take care of the memorial service. It was scheduled to take place in five days - five days should allow my sister enough time to notify my friends and those who wanted to, could attend the New York service. My sister talked to her kids for a few minutes and then hung up. “Well, this is what I think we should do. Since it made front page news, why don’t we email a link to the article to the people in Jenn’s address book, include the information about the service in New York, and ask everyone to pass it on to someone we might have missed or who doesn’t have email. And we should probably mention that there will be some sort of memorial service here in Indiana for those that can’t travel to New York. What do you think?” Rhonda asked Samm. “I think that’s a great idea. If we send the article, then we don’t have to explain what happened. I’d send an obituary from the paper but Mom and Dad are still arguing over it.” “Arguing over it?! What is there to argue over?” “Who knows?! What to put in, what to leave out, how long it is….! I think they’re both just so lost by the whole thing …” My poor sister. Not only did she have her own emotions to deal with but she also had my parents and their emotions. It couldn’t have been easy and I hope when she reads this she’ll know how much I appreciate all she did. Rhonda and Samm found a copy of the article that detailed what happened. They attached the link to an email message with the details of both services… Aaahhh, the wonders of technology! Everyone would know in a matter of seconds what had happened. Rhonda needed to go home and check on her boys. There wasn’t much else to do at this point so my sister stayed at the apartment and promised she would call if she needed anything. Samm looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, didn’t see anything, and shut the door. She walked into the living room and flopped down on the couch. She just sat there, not crying, just sitting. I wanted to give her a hug and tell her I was okay, tell her I was grateful she was taking care of things, tell her I would always be keeping an eye on her, just tell her something so she wouldn’t feel so alone. But then the phone rang.

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She got up and looked at the caller id. “Hello? … This is she. … What do you mean ‘funeral home’? … No, that’s a mistake. The body is to be shipped to the University of Tennessee as soon as possible. I have copies of the signed donation forms for the Body Farm. Who did you talk to? … Her Mother! …She was thirty years old! How can her mother still have control of her??! … So what you’re telling me is that I need to get Jenn’s mommy’s permission to have her final wishes carried out even though she has stated her final wishes in her will, filled out the necessary paperwork, and had a lawyer validate the paperwork was done correctly? … Yes, a lawyer. Would you like to see the paperwork? … Alright so the body will be shipping to the Body Farm when? … Good. I’m glad to hear that. … Yes, I’m glad we could straighten all this out too. … Yes, thank you. … Bye.” (Granted there was no lawyer but Samm was good at bluffing and what were the chances the guy was going to really want to check?!) Samm hung up the phone and then quickly started dialing. “Mom? … What ARE you doing? … You know what I mean. … I just got a call from the morgue asking me what funeral home we were using in New York….You know Jenn has donated her body to that Body Farm place. … It’s in her will and she’s got all the necessary forms and signatures… It doesn’t matter that you think it’s creepy. It’s what Jenn wants. … Look, she left me in charge of making sure her wishes were carried out and I intend to do it. … She was an adult Mom, you can’t make those decisions for her anymore. … No, it’s too late. I’ve already straightened things out with the morgue and Jenn will be going out later this evening. … Why are you having such a problem with this? You were fine with it after she first mentioned it. … Well as soon as you saw the signed forms you should have known she was serious. … But it’s not her, it’s just her body,. … I know, I wouldn’t do it either but Jenn wants to and that’s really all that counts. … Well why do you have to explain it to anyone? Why can’t you just say she donated her body to science? I mean, technically that’s what she’s done. … You told GRANDMA??!! Are you nuts? … Well of course Grandma’s going to think it’s a bad idea. … Yeah but …. Yeah but … I know but … Look, it’s too late. You can tell people whatever you want to tell them. If it bothers you to say that she’s at the Body Farm, then just say she donated her body to science. If they ask for more details, lie and say you don’t know any other details…Why is it better for her to be a cadaver for some pre-med student somewhere rather than being at the Body Farm??? … It’s all the same thing Mom … Well, that’s your opinion. This is what Jenn wanted and this is what she’s going to get. … Hey, she’s your kid! I can’t explain her! … Besides, I know I don’t want her haunting me which is what’s going to happen if she doesn’t get to the Farm!! … I know. I miss her too but not following her wishes isn’t going to bring her back. … I know. … How are my girls? … Well, I think there are only a few

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more things to take care of here so I’ll probably head home in another day or two. … Yeah, I’ll call before I leave here. … Actually, I think we’ve taken care of most of the business stuff and Rhonda said she’d take care of Jenn’s stuff. … I know, she’s been great. … Yes, she promised to get all of Jenn’s friends to help clean the apartment. I doubt it, I think they’ll just go to the second service here. New York is a long way to go for a memorial service especially if there’s going to be one in your back yard. … Okay. Well, give them a kiss for me and tell them Mama will be home soon. … Love you too. Talk to you later. … Bye.” Samm shook her head. “Jeez Jenn, I hope you appreciate this! She freakin’ told Grandma and Grandma managed to convince her that you should have a church service and a burial plot! Man, could you imagine! I can’t remember the last time you stepped foot in a church! What a nightmare that would’ve been – big ol’ stone roof collapsing on the entire family! Jeez. Oh well. I think I’ve got it all straightened out. I wanna win the lottery or something for all this work! There’s got to be some way you can influence that isn’t there?!!?” I did appreciate it and I would definitely have to see about the lottery thing. All this debate reminded me of that thing with Terri Schiavo and all the controversy around it. What would Terri have really wanted? Her parents said one thing and her husband said another. Regardless of your own beliefs, you have to admit you wondered what Terri would have really wanted and what you would want in the same situation. I know no one ever thinks death is going to happen to them until they’re old or “ready to go” – I certainly thought I would lead a long life. But clearly the universe had something else in mind. But I knew I had done right by leaving my sister in charge though. Samm would make sure that my final wishes were carried out, no matter what. Samm looked around the apartment. She laid down on the couch with Max laying on her legs and Matilda laying on the arm of the couch near her head. They looked so peaceful once everyone fell asleep, grateful for each others company. I hung out with Samm during the next few days. She called Max and Matilda’s vet, got their records and some drugs so they could fly to New York. She stopped by the Folklore Office to make sure there was nothing she had to do for my graduation. Susan assured her that it had been or all would be taken care of and I would actually graduate! I know it’s a minor thing but I can’t tell you how glad I am I completed and defended that thesis! I remember talking to a fellow graduate student once and he said that if he died tomorrow, he’d have nothing to show for all this student loan debt he’s racked up. He hadn’t completed his masters but was already working on his dissertation and, like most graduate students, just kept sinking further and further into debt. Although

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you can’t always prevent things from happening (as I am an obvious example!), I really didn’t want to die without having gotten something accomplished! Samm also called the Body Farm to make sure I had gotten there. It seems I had. Policy didn’t allow them to tell her what study my body would be used in but they could confirm my body’s arrival. She spent the rest of the day taking care of all those other annoying little life things: bank accounts, credit cards, last utility bills, apartment business, insurance, vehicle titles, etc. I don’t think you realize how many of those annoying little things there are and how tedious they can be until you have to take care of them for someone else. But Samm kept her head up and decided that she would be able to leave the next morning. “Rhonda? … Hi, it’s Samm. … Oh, hanging in there. … Yeah, but actually as long as I’m busy, I don’t have time to miss her. … Yeah. … But I just wanted to thank you again for all your help and taking care of the rest of this stuff. I think I’ve taken care of most of the little stuff. There’s probably something I missed but I can’t think of it right now. … Yeah, I’ve called the airline and booked a flight for me, Max and Matilda. We’re leaving early tomorrow morning. … I picked up some tranquilizers for them today. I just hope they make out okay. It’ll be interesting once we get to New York and they get to their new home but I’m hoping for the best! … No, I’m giving them the tranquilizers just before we leave. … Oh no, Jenn’s paying for me to take a limo to the airport! … {laughing} Hey, I figured it was the least she could do after the mess she’s put me through! Did I tell you Mom almost prevented her from going to the Body Farm? … Oh yeah, she let Grandma convince her it was a bad idea. Then she called the morgue, the morgue called me, I lied that I had legal documentation, the morgue promised to get Jenn to the Body Farm, and I called Mom to yell! … I know, so I thought the least Jenn could do was send me to the airport in a limo! …I know, I know. … And really, please don’t feel like you have to come to New York for that service. You’ve done so much already, it’s awful expensive, and you’re going to be having a service here in a few weeks. … Alright, you can think about it but I really don’t want you to feel obligated. I will definitely be out for the graduation service and I’ll be bringing the kids. I don’t know about the rest of them but we’ll see… I will. I should get into the airport around seven am or so your time but I’ll wait to call until I actually get to my house. … You take care too. I’m sure I’ll be talking to you soon. And thanks again Rhonda. … I know but I have to say it anyway. … Talk to you later. … Bye.” Samm turned on the tv and waited to fall asleep on the couch. Tomorrow she would be flying back to New York with my kitties and I in tow. I didn’t think there was much for me to do here and I was concerned about my parents. I needed to see them and know they were okay. I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to make things better but I guess I couldn’t help wanting to try.

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Besides, I figured I’d ride in the belly of the plane with my kitties to make sure nothing bad happened to them. After hearing about all of the horror stories about pets and planes, I figured I’d just feel better riding with them. Yes, for some spirits it’s hard to let go of the living world…Why do you think so many places are haunted! It was still dark when the cats woke Samm up the next morning. Even though she still had a few hours before the limo arrived, she still had to pack her own things and the few things of mine that she would be able to take on the plane. Most of the stuff she would gather when they drove out for the second service. Samm didn’t really trust anyone with my treasured cuckoo clock or her pictures I had framed. Besides, she figured there may be other things that Rhonda wouldn’t be able to get rid of that she would have to take. So she grabbed a few books from my book shelf, my digital camera, a couple of CDs and DVDs, and my hidden chocolate stash. As she took the Ziploc bag out of the freezer she said, smiling, “If you can hear me, I hope you can see the irony of all this!” Little did she know I had just replenished my chocolate stash the day before my sweet tooth got me killed (literally!). I wanted to tell her that no one appreciated the irony more than I did! I don’t remember much of what happened next. I remember laughing as Samm had to force Max and Matilda to take their medication for the plane flight. Max is 13-15 pounds (depending on the time of year) of solid muscle and Matilda is a wiry 11 pounds that can escape from any hold! It was never easy to give either one of them medication of any kind and I lived with them! Samm had a little more trouble than I usually did but she still won in the end. We (Samm, the cats, and I) arrived at my Mom’s house in a short amount of time. My nieces ran to my sister for hugs. Samm hugged them back and tried to hang on for a few extra minutes. But my nieces had other things to do and had already wasted enough time with Mama! After all, there were driveways that needed to be written on with chalk, dirt that needed to be played in, and sisters that needed to be tormented! Samm looked at my Mom and they hugged for a long time. I wished so badly I could tell them it was okay and that I was fine. Instead, I just stood there. Despite my attachment to the living world, there was nothing I could do to affect it. There were two days until the service here in New York and I must not have done much in those two days because I don’t remember anything until the service. I’m sure I hung out with my mother and sister. I probably checked in on my father but I don’t remember. New York was the place where my family lived but not where I lived. It no longer had a hold on me and I found my thoughts drifting to my “family” in Indiana. If it wasn’t for my curiosity about the service, I probably would have headed back to Indiana once I saw my family was okay and my cats had survived the plane ride.

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I don’t know if I’d recommend going to your own service or funeral, should the opportunity present itself. The New York service is nothing I would have wanted. It was held in a church, and although I liked the building, I could have done without the somber mass and all the sadness. Anyone who knew me would have known I would have preferred a little laughter and sarcasm but instead, everything was very serious and solemn with no room for small sarcastic grins. I think my sister knew it was “wrong” but she had carried out my most important wish and that was all that mattered. My mother and father had been in charge of this part of goodbye and if this is what they needed, I was okay with it. I suddenly found myself back at IU. I was in the Folklore Office, standing behind Rhonda. She was talking to Susan but I noticed the whole office seemed to be getting ready to leave. When Rhonda turned around, I noticed she had a thin black book in her hands. Then I noticed the cover. “Now it’s all about ME rather than the ink” with “Jenn Horn” embossed underneath it. My thesis. That stinkin’ thesis that took me too long to write and lingered over my head for too many semesters. A bound copy of my thesis. Rhonda must have been taking it to the College. Not only did this mean I would graduate, but it also meant I had lost nearly two weeks of living time. Today would be the second service. Today was my graduation. I had to follow that thesis. I walked with Rhonda across campus, into an office, where we got directed to another office, and then she handed it to the woman behind the desk. I don’t know who felt prouder that the stupid thing was turned in – Rhonda, who spent too many semesters “babysitting” me so I would get it done, or me, for actually getting it done. I do know we both took a deep breath and smiled very broad smiles as the woman said “thank you.” We walked out the door towards Beck Chapel. It was a beautiful warm Indiana day so this service was held outside in the yard around the Chapel. I was truly impressed with the people attending this second service. There were fellow graduate students from the Folklore department as well as few students from the Anthropology and Gender Studies departments where I was working on my minors. The ladies I worked with in the Folklore office were in attendance as well as several Folklore and Ethnomusicology professors I managed to make an impression on! I spotted my favorite Anthropology professor talking to my friend Cathy and her mother. My mom was talking to Pam while Missy was fussing over my nieces. Samm and Rhonda looked like they were talking business. I also noticed several former students, some of my favorites and a few I never thought I’d see again. Samm suddenly started waving and when I noticed who she was waving at, I wanted to cry. The girls I had graduated with in my undergraduate days had made the trip in from Colorado, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Long Island! I nearly wanted to

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scream with laughter - we had never been able to get the five of us together once we graduated but now….! Rhonda’s husband Mike was talking to my father, who was without his second wife. He said she stayed behind because of her own girls but I’d like to believe it had something to do with respect for my Mom. My friend Carolynn from Binghamton arrived with my ex (also from Binghamton) and his parents. My ex started talking to my new boyfriend and they did a lot of laughing until they realized who the other was. The irony was not wasted on me! Suddenly there was a loud whistle and everyone turned in Rhonda’s direction. “Hello Everyone. We would like to thank you for coming. We know some of you have traveled a long way to be here today and we hope you know how much Jenn would have appreciated it. “Today is a celebration. A little over a half hour ago, I delivered a bound copy of Jenn’s completed thesis to the college. She will officially graduate from Indiana University with a Masters in Folklore. Woo-Hoo!” My father started clapping and others joined in until the whole group was clapping. Oh, if spirits can puff with pride, I puffed! “We know that Jenn would have thrown herself a ‘Congratulations to Me’ party. So, after a few short speeches are made, we will be heading over to the Folklore Offices where a picnic has been set up. Everyone is welcome to join us. There is plenty of food and I’m sure you’ve all got some good stories to share about Jenn – I know I do!” There was laughter and knowing nods from those in attendance. A few people stood in front and gave little speeches but the most fun was certainly on the walk over to the Folklore Office and at the picnic. I couldn’t hear every conversation on the walk over but I did hear a lot of snickering and laughter. Each story had people laughing harder and although they were not necessarily having a “good time,” this was definitely more my speed. I had always known my family (blood or otherwise) would survive without me but I was glad to know they would think of me and smile. I may have never made a huge splash in the world of academics but that wasn’t what was important to me. I made a splash in these lives and, by appearances, a good splash. I had done something right for these people and in the end, that’s all that matters. What am I trying to say by writing all this down? That’s for you to decide. I’ve given you a glimpse of my death from my perspective. Consider it just another narrative – find it useless and awful, look for some deep meaning, see it as a comment to live each day like it’s your last, see it as a commentary on our culture’s reaction to death – the things we want for our loved ones after they depart verses what our loved ones may have really wanted, who does battle for that loved one and is that person the right warrior, …I don’t care.

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I’ve seen that bright white light so I must have accomplished whatever I stayed behind to do. My sister, my mom, my father, my friends, my cats are all going to be okay and so will I. The business of death may be no fun but it’s unavoidable and honestly, I’m not finding it to be too bad now that everything has been taken care of “properly.” I chose the right warrior for my battle. Can you say the same thing?

SECTION III: AND BECAUSE MOM SAID WE HAD TO PLAY NICE TOGETHER…

CHAPTER THIRTEEN INTRODUCTION J. MERYL KRIEGER

Mainstream culture has transformed dramatically through the technological changes of the past century. Given the changing concepts of what it means to be a part of contemporary life, how we interact within and between cultures, and how we represent both ourselves within a culture and those cultural construction that are viewed as “outside” are under constant negotiation. Some of the issues dominating ethnographic research as we begin the 21st century revolve around ideas about perception, mediation, and representation. The articles in this section of this book address different aspects of these through research into performance and technology, African American toast traditions, children’s folksongs, and phenomenological interviewing approaches. What underlies these various concerns is the evolving interest of folklore and ethnomusicology into the relationships ethnographers have to the individuals with whom we research and the ways in which we present our data to different audiences. What concerns must we bear in mind? How do we protect the interests of our research communities? What are the different processes that are engaged during the course of such inquiries? How do we engage in metacommunication, or communication about the social interactions we observe in a way that serves our analytical needs without compromising the needs of our interlocutors? The concerns of the various authors in this section are with the ways in which subcultural groups are mediated and represented through the questions I have outlined above. All the authors in this section take on different aspects of these questions. To put it most succinctly, each of the authors in this section are constructing a history out of which mediation and representation in ethnographic research can be addressed. Constructing a history for an object of study is something that happens frequently when scholars are crossing or stretching disciplinary boundaries, which is why we felt these particular papers so aptly fit the theme of our conference, and currently, our book. At the same time, it raises a thought for further investigation along these lines: why do we need to justify a new arena in which to exercise our disciplinary curiosity?

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One of the concerns underlying current inquiries into mediation is the concept of imagined communities, which has applications in fields throughout the humanities and social sciences. Benedict Anderson’s writings, for example, take on these ideas in the arenas of politics and economics, while Appadurai’s research has also been applied in the social sciences in arenas ranging from festival studies and material culture, to organizational communication, as well as the study of chat groups and other communication forums on the internet. Roland Barthes’ influential writings on the idea of voice and agency underlie the relationship between mediation and a concern for epistemology and performativity grounded in the writings of Bateson, Bakhtin, Goffman, and Bauman. Cross-cultural and sub-cultural communication sited in the context of a field interview, along with Bakhtinian dialogues, and epistemological modes of communication. Influential scholars have been taking on meta-communicative modes have been influenced by Gregory Bateson’s research which dates back to the 1940s. Bateson, in his turn, was trained in the British social anthropology influenced by the research and ethnographic approach of Franz Boas, one of the two dominant schools of anthropological research in Euro-American anthropology that continues to dominate anthropological research today. What seems most interesting about the ways in which metacommunications are framed can be connected with Goffman’s distinctions on the performance of social interaction. The issue of representation in a different way has other implications. Communities without active agency in representation can be looked at from a number of perspectives, such as White’s discussion lying at the nexus of ethnomusicology, folklore and music education. Grounded in folklore, White reviews arenas of research focusing on children’s folklore, folkmusic, and learning and transmission strategies relevant to these traditions. Theoretical implications of the field research process in current research approaches are frequently concerned with phenomenological frameworks. Focusing on the lived and transmitted experiences of emotion in the interview setting, for example, Schauert looks closely at implications for phenomenological approaches to study a difficult arena of communication, that of emotions. He bases his use of phenomenology in ethnomusicological research in the work of Harris Berger, whose 1999 book focuses on the importance of lived experience as it is understood through ethnomusicological and folkloric research practices. What I would like to highlight of these articles is the role that metacommunication and representation play across social science disciplines as objects of study and as research tools for analysis. These extend on trends that have been evolving in social science research ever since research into power

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dynamics, hegemony, and gender relations became themes explored by scholars in the 1970s. A tradition, from this perspective, already exists to take on issues of metacommunication, framing, representation, and phenomenological approaches. What is new about these articles, then? This was a question we addressed at the conference itself. The conclusion we came to, in some respects, was that what we were doing was not new, did not truly cross any boundaries. What we did accomplish, and present here, is ways in which a new generation of scholars, raised on these traditions of scholarly research, envision them for future generations. The articles in this section articulate new levels at which old theories can be explored and stretched, and new ways of understanding the histories of folklore and ethnomusicology.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN EMOTIONAL ETHNOMUSICOLOGY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES FOR THE STUDY OF MUSIC AND AFFECT PAUL SCHAUERT

Introduction Phenomenological notions have increasingly worked their way into the ethnomusicological discourse to change scholars’ approaches to this discipline. The pervasiveness of this philosophy has led to closer analytic attention to the lived experience of individuals. Ethnomusicologists who have used this approach (Stone 1982, Rice 1994, Friedson 1996, Berger 1999, et. al.) have augmented the study of macro-level social and musical structures with details of the lived experiences of their research participants. Harris Berger recognizes that, “the concept of [lived] experience is central to phenomenology… [and] experience can be understood as the contents of the consciousness” (1999:19). These contents include ideas, thought, emotion, and perception-sensory data; it encompasses both knowledge and a thing known. Thus, the contents of individuals’ consciousness have become a viable, and ever more important, study object for the ethnomusicologist. One essential, and often overlooked, component of human consciousness is emotion. It is vitally important to explore emotion because as Jean-Paul Sartre, a noted existentialist, has stated, “emotion…is a mode of existence of consciousness, one of which it understands its being-in-the-world.” (1948: 91). In other words, emotions always filter perception of the world. Additionally, as Martin Heidegger states in Being and Time, “[T]he possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods in which Dasein is brought before its being as the there” (1962:127). Thus, feelings reveal a way of being-in-the-world that other modes of consciousness cannot. In order to understand musical lived experience and the meanings people hold about music, ethnomusicologists must attempt to explore the

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connections between emotions, music, and culture, because the emotions can provide unparalleled insight into individual experience. However, even though ethnomusicological research in recent years has concentrated more on the lived experiences of individuals, rarely has a scholar’s primary concern been with the relationship between emotions, culture and music. This lack of effort and insight may be due to the difficulty in approaching this subject. Carolyn Ellis, a noted sociologist and symbolic interactions, acknowledges that there is a, “lack of methodological techniques to handle feeling in all its richness and depth” (1991: 44). Furthermore, emotions are not easily expressed in words; therefore, they often become marginalized in the logocentric academic discourse. However difficult the task may be, I believe an attempt should be made to understand the relationship between emotions, culture and music. Ellis goes on to state that, “the arts and humanities with their more intuitive and less rigid scientific approaches to human experience might be the best arena in which to study emotions” (1991:44). Ethnomusicology is uniquely positioned within the academy, with its cross-disciplinary approach, to handle such issues as emotional musical experience across cultures. In all, this article intends to build a way towards an increased attention to emotional lived experience within ethnomusicology by first, briefly analyzing the major discussions of emotion within this discipline, and, second, offering suggestions for approaches to the study of emotion specifically informed by phenomenology and symbolic interactionism.

Retrospect of Emotion in Ethnomusicology Although the human emotions in ethnomusicology have remained a relatively marginalized analytical topic, they have sparked a number of debates that have caused radical shifts in thinking throughout the last century. Music scholars at the turn of the 20th century (Baker 1882, Densmore 1936, Fillmore 1888, 1895, 1899; Fletcher 1893, Gilman 1891, 1908) primarily relied on an evolutionist framework and were largely unaware of its implicit ethnocentrism and racism. Additionally, as Harry Berger notes, “Evolutionism is problematic because it assumes the existence of an underlying system and locates new data within it” (1999:10). In all, these scholars asserted that emotion was the primary motivation for “primitive” music, and analyzed emotions along with tonality, melodic structures and the perception of music in general as universals, with data conforming to systematic etic schemes. Scholars of this era also believed in the autonomous power of music to produce affect, and thus marginalized music’s social context. Alice Fletcher (1893), however, was opposed to some of her colleagues’ ideas. She had a functionalist approach to her work, and began to explore how music and emotion connect to the social world.

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Fletcher sparked the use of a functionalist theoretical perspective throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s, and her ideas are reflected in the works of Edwin Burrows (1936a, 1936b, 1945) and Helen Roberts (1933). These scholars attempted to combine detailed musical analysis with an explanation of the social and cultural contexts that surrounded the music. However, the realms of musical affect and social context were kept noticeably separate, and there was little discussion of individual lived experience and emic perspectives. This separation of text and context was subsequently reified by Leonard Meyers’ work (1956) which almost exclusively focused on the sound alone. Drawing primarily on the work of Gestalt psychologists, Meyers argued that music achieves affect largely by setting up expectations; music sets up tensions largely within itself and then either fulfills, delays or denies the resolution of these tensions. Moreover, this analysis of musical affect continued to further the academic notion that emotions were universally experienced. However, Meyers alluded to the link between emotions and the cultural conditioning of memories and expectations, which encouraged further study of this convergence. Ethnomusicologists such as Alan Merriam (1964) and David McCallester (1954) eventually problematized the universality of emotions and began to more explicitly associate musical affect with the social world. However, their reliance on structural-functionalist theories led them to overemphasize macro-level systems rather than locating affect in individual lived experience. This paradigm was soon radically altered, however, when Charles Seeger (1968) began to explore subjectivist perspectives in ethnomusicology by locating the source of emotions in the experience of the individual. Yet, his ideas still had to combat the pervasive universalistic tendencies at the time in works by Alan Lomax (1968) and John Blacking (1973 et. al.) - although Blacking did show some equivocal signs of breaking with universalist ideas stating that, “the same piece of music may [emotionally] move different people in the same sort of way, but for different reasons” (1973: 52). Subsequently, by the late 1970s and early 1980s ethnomusicologists began to increase their attention to the social construction of emotional musical experience, and integrate the macro/micro dichotomy. Charles Keil (1979), through a series of interconnected binary oppositions such individual/society and male/female, used the notion of embodiment to argue that emotion emerges from the dynamic interaction between individuals and the social world. Additionally, although not as explicit as Keil, Paul Berliner (1978) also connected emotions to the social world by emphasizing the individual nexus of past lived experience (i.e. death of ancestors) with the ontological present (i.e. mourning). Nevertheless, Berliner’s overall analyses of music and emotion within Shona culture seem to contradict this view - reifying notions of musical

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autonomy - when he asserts that emotions can be produced merely by, “the power of the abstract sound” (Berliner 1978: 134). In 1982, Steven Feld published a groundbreaking work that explicitly linked emotions to the social and natural environments. His work connects the weeping that occurs during musical performance with bird sounds in the forest, feelings of longing and lament for lost loved ones, and the sadness produced by the detachment from the natural environment. Feld explains that loneliness, abandonment and despair are the greatest fears for the Kaluli and music acts as a way to reconnect Kaluli with the world around them. In other words, music is a result of, and an essential part of experiencing being-in-the-world. Feld additionally puts to rest the notions of autonomous and universal musical affect by locating emotions in the individual subjective interpretation of the pervasive social world. Thus, Feld illustrates the confluence of the micro and macro-levels of experience in his work.4 His ideas have influenced a variety of scholars, but are most noticeably reflected in the work of Marina Roseman (1991), who argues that, “During ceremonial performances, sentiments are modulated by sounds that have been imbued with networks of associations. Sounds, meaningfully situated, activate emotions…” (1991: 168). In addition to integrating emotional affect with the social world, both Feld and Roseman considered the perspective of participants to be of great importance, and derived their theories primarily from emic views rather than attempt to fit the lived experience of participants into etic frameworks. By the late 1980s and 1990s the ideas of phenomenology were becoming pervasive in ethnomusicology and scholars were regularly integrating this philosophy with other theoretical perspectives to explore how both the social context of music and individual lived experiences produced emotional affect. By adopting theoretical perspectives from phenomenology, and a number of related areas, scholarship in this time period served to problematize notions of universal and autonomous musical affect. For example, Timothy Rice (1994) examined the ways in which music “fills the soul” by recognizing that the social world, individual memory, subjectivity and the visceral qualities of music all play an important role in emotional lived experience. Similarly, Anthony Seeger (1987) explored this conflation through an innovative application of performance theory. Moreover, Paul Stoller (1989) implicitly used phenomenology to allude to the multiplicity of elements that informed individual’s various perspectives and experiences of musical affect. Steven Friedson (1996) and Harris Berger (1999), on the other hand, overtly used phenomenology in their works. While Friedson’s nuanced examination of emotions is analyzed through the euphemistic lens of “ontological energy,” Berger explicitly illustrates how the

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emotional lived experiences of individuals involved in the production of rock, metal and jazz music are informed by a socio-historical context.5 In sum, with hindsight, paradigmatic movements in ethnomusicology clearly emerge. In general, when examining musical affect, scholars have moved from autonomous, universalistic notions, to theoretical perspectives that have problematized these positions and allow for the integration of sociohistorical elements into their analysis. Scholars at times have located affect too far to one side of the individual/social, or text/context continuums. Phenomenology has had a crucial impact on ethnomusicological scholarship in roughly the past twenty years, encouraging a move towards an integration of these binary structures and an increased valuing of the emic perspective. The most productive analyses of emotion and music have found a way to integrate its physiological, psychological, social and subjective elements. However, theories on the emotions as such have been sorely under explored and applied to ethnomusicology. The next section of this discussion intends to build a way towards an increased analytical attention to musical affect by exploring ideas from phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, and their application to ethnomusicology.

Phenomenological Possibilities and Emotion “Higher than actuality stands possibility.” —Martin Heidegger

Being and Time The reader may notice that I stated I would be discussing both phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, but I titled this section with only the former. This is because symbolic interactionism can easily fall under the rubric of phenomenology. Both schools of thought share many of the same basic principles, because symbolic interactionists rely heavily upon philosophical ideas borrowed from phenomenology. Before moving to a discussion of the application of these theoretical perspectives, I would like to point out a few fundamental congruencies between the two, which are instrumental for the study of emotion. Edmund Husserl, considered the “father” of phenomenology, contradicted many thinkers of his day by demanding that in order to understand any given phenomena one must first “bracket” – or suspend - all previously held assumptions and prejudices about the world. This allows for a closer engagement with the things-themselves as they are presented to the consciousness within the realm of direct lived experience. Additionally, Husserl

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desperately wanted to break with the Cartesian subject/object distinction.6 Instead of adopting the Cartesian idealist view that, “man is essentially an immaterial entity lodged within the boundaries of the skin,” (Kruger 1983: 18), Husserl asserted that consciousness is always a consciousness of something, and that the mind is always directed towards things and could not exist without them. This notion is echoed by the seminal symbolic interactionist George Herbert Mead who similarly argued that there is always an intersubjecitve interaction between mind and nature (1963). Subsequently, others such as Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl’s, expanded his mentor’s ideas by explaining that being is always a being-in-the-world, and being-in-the-world is always a being-with-others. Symbolic interactionism draws explicitly on phenomenology by studying this being-with-others and the meanings that result from human lived experience. Moreover, the world of lived experience is essential to both symbolic interactionists and phenomenologists. Norman Denzin points out that, “Lived experience is the unit of analysis for Mead and Blumer [symbolic interactionists] as it is for Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Scheler [Phenomenologists]” (1985: 224). The world of lived experience, Denzin goes on to state, “…is a world of passion, feeling and engagement” (1985: 233). Subsequently, he argues that, “All [phenomenologists and symbolic interactionists] place emotions in the realm of lived experience, which takes place within a subjectively interpreted social world” (1985: 224). This view leaves no room for the notions of autonomous or universal musical affect, because subjectivity, or more precisely intersubjectivity, is the starting point for both theoretical perspectives. In other words, emotions are thought to arise from an individually subjective interaction with the social world. These ideas will be the foundation on which to build a way to analyze the emotions within ethnomusicology. In approaching the emotions from a phenomenological perspective one must first follow Husserl’s suggestion and apply epochè, or bracketing, to previously held assumptions about this subject. By suspending one’s own perspective one immediately realizes that there are a multiplicity of perspectives simultaneously being experienced at any given moment in time. Phenomenology allows one to conduct research that accounts for these disparate viewpoints. Thus, unlike some of the previous work in ethnomusicology mentioned above, the researcher’s perspective is “deprivileged,” and the emic perspective becomes the focus of the study. Ethnomusicologists then must attempt to discover what is relevant to the people in question. Additionally, in order to bracket previously held assumptions, one must know what they are bracketing. The ethnomusicologist is forced, then, to reflect on the contents of

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his own consciousness, and search for ideas that may prove problematic to the situation at hand. In addition to this concept of bracketing, Husserl and his followers asserted that the consciousness is always a consciousness of something; the mind is always intended towards objects. Consequently, emotions do not merely exist “on their own” but are always in relation to the Lifeworld. As phenomenological psychologist Dreyer Kruger states, “Man never just simply thinks, loves, or feels joyful – he always thinks about something or other, loves someone, or feels joyful about something…” (1983: 19). This counters previously held notions in ethnomusicology that emotions and music are somehow isolated from their social context. In short, an individual’s emotions are always connected to the Lifeworld through physical and reflective acts. Therefore, if scholars bracket previously held assumptions about emotions and realize that consciousness is always situated within, and in constant relation to, the individually interpreted social world, then the notions of universality and autonomy of emotions become unacceptable.7 One must then understand emotions as uniquely interpreted, constructed social phenomena. In addition to the experiencing of emotions, the expression of emotions is socially constructed and must be dealt with as such. Emotional expression is informed by social norms of behavior, which symbolic interactionist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotion rules” (1983). These rules are, of course, constructed through a process of social interaction to serve a variety of social roles. Hochschild argues that people try to display the expected behavior that has been historically associated with a particular emotion within a certain social situation. People attempt to comply with the emotion rules by inducing or suppressing reactions through deep acting or “emotion work.” Failing in that emotion work, individuals try to manage expression of feeling through surface acting. By constantly engaging in this emotion work people can become alienated from their actual feelings (Hochschild 1983). In other words, individuals often “mask” their experienced feelings. Hence, ethnomusicologists should be aware that an impression of emotion gathered from informants does not necessarily mean that a participant actually has experienced, or is experiencing, that emotion. And, if in taking a phenomenological approach ethnomusicologists are concerned with the lived experience, then they must first realize that the expression of emotional experience may differ greatly from the experience itself. However, this is not to say that all emotional displays are “false,” but there is always a potential for a misinterpretation of emotion by the observer, and even the observed. How then are ethnomusicologists to know when a “true” emotion is being displayed or a “false” one? In order for ethnomusicologists to “see through the masks” of informants it is necessary to be acutely aware of the emotional rules and their construction

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within the culture in question. In other words, by taking a phenomenological approach and bracketing assumptions, researchers ideally become tabula rasas,8 and build an understanding of music and emotion through a process of (re)socialization. Referring to Mead’s five stages of socialization Cathryn Johnson created seven stages of emotional development, starting from infancy to adult life, which attempt to codify the construction of emotion rules. Her theory explains emotional display as a process of associating feelings with acts and words. Appropriate emotional responses, she asserts, are validated through social interaction, primarily with the caregiver in the formative stages of life. A child eventually becomes aware of other’s feelings and develops a sense of empathy for others, and in turn learns “emotional role-taking” (Johnson 1992). An incorporation of these ideas into ethnographic work may encourage ethnomusicologists to examine the process of emotional socialization of others starting at birth. While examining each stage of this process would be important in order for researchers to become (re)socialized into a given culture group, it is the last stage that is most relevant to this discussion. The final stage in Johnson’s emotional development theory is the management of the emotions. In other words, individuals learn how to “mask” their experienced feelings and display only those that are appropriate in a particular social situation. Johnson’s theories could serve as a framework in which to study the construction process of Hochschild’s emotional rules. By starting a study of emotion with the examination of the construction thereof, researchers may be able to more accurately assess which emotional displays are genuinely indicative of lived experience during musical performances, interviews, or other daily activities. One way that emotions are displayed is through facial expressions. Paul Ekman, has worked extensively with this subject and has concluded, similar to Hochschild’s “emotion rules”, that facial expressions adhere to “cultural display rules.” However, although, Ekman believes that the rules of emotional display are socially constructed he believes that the emotions themselves are universal. This notion is radically opposed to phenomenologists who believe that the emotions themselves are also a social construct. Regardless of this debate, it is important to point out that it would behoove ethnomusicologists to take facial expression into account when studying musical performance, because as Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White note, “One question that has been neglected is how patterns of facial expression are incorporated into larger cultural and linguistic signaling systems” (1986: 41). Music would no doubt be included in these cultural signaling systems. However, remembering Hochschild and Johnson’s ideas, research in the future must not only be attentive to the appearance of facial expressions, but also the phenomenological understanding of their constructed meaning within specific cultural situations.

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Embodiment and Meaningful Emotions In addition to facial expressions, emotional displays are also part of the lived body. Norman Denzin, a symbolic interactionist, describes the lived body as a combination of Merleau-Ponty’s concept “body-for-the-person,” Sartre’s “body-for others,” and William James’ “psychic body” (1985). In other words, individuals experience their own body, while others in the social world can simultaneously experience, and affect, that individual’s body. Additionally, the body is lived on the inside as a psychic phenomenon and expressed outside through a variety of means, adhering to social conventions. Therefore, studying lived experience is not just a matter of studying things as presented to the consciousness, but must also consider psychic, physical and social experiences of the body. Thus, the Cartesian mind/body, and structuralist macro/micro split is overcome by recognizing that feelings about society and the environment are embodied in the individual. Embodying experience is a process of creating meaning. The previous statement assumes the phenomenological-existentialist principle that meaning is not given a priori In short, “experience precedes essence,”9 (Sartre 1957: 13) or emotion precedes meaning. George Herbert Mead argues that an individual creates meaning by joining mind, body and lived sensation in an emotional experience; this experience is later interpreted and given meaning. Denzin refers to this process as “emotional sociality” and explains that through this process, individuals “…make facticity, or lived event, out of the emotionality [one] interprets and defines” (1985: 226). Additionally, Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us that this process of interpretation is “…woven through the biographical structures of the subjects in question” (Sartre [1960] 1981). Therefore, if ethnomusicologists seek to explore the meaning of an emotional lived experience they must study individuals’ histories as well as the partially shared socio-cultural history. Consequently, in order to understand emotional affect, ethnomusicologists must attempt to study individual memories because, “[while] events themselves may fall into an unrecountable past, they still remain affectively present in embodied memories” (Henderson 1996: 464). The present lived experience of individuals must then be understood as always informed by a horizon of historical experiences and the meanings associated with them. Moreover, memory is not a static bundle of factitious flashes, but is a dynamic set of recallable experiences which can be reinterpreted in light of recent events. The previous discussions of Johnson and Hochschild’s theories supports these notions and recognize that the construction of emotion is an ongoing process started at birth, and continually modified by a variety of socio-historical experiences throughout one’s life. Yet, an exploration of the process of creating meaning from emotional experiences is missing from these discussions.

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However, some symbolic interactionists have worked on the problem of constructing meaning through emotional experiences. Norman Denzin lays out a framework of four modes of lived emotion, which constitute a process of how emotional experiences are rendered meaningful. His model could possibly be of use to ethnomusicologists working with emotional experiences and is worth exploring in some detail. Initially, Denzin asserts, individuals experience Sensible feelings, which are the physical sensations felt by the subject himself. They can never be experienced by another and only occur once, because exact experience can never be duplicated. The sensible feelings are later fused into Feelings of the lived body, and are characterized as happiness, sadness, despair, etc. In order to characterize these feelings one must make an “impression-meaning” that may be either unconscious or conscious involving a synthesis of sensible feelings into an act that can be entered into by others through expression and interaction. In Alfred’s Schutz’ terms, this category of emotion can be “partially shared.”10 Individuals may recall feelings of the lived body as embodied memories. The feelings of the lived body are then reflected upon to form Intentional value feelings. These are feelings about feelings or meta-feelings. Intentional value feelings are made meaningful when individuals reflectively filter them through past experience in the social world. Lastly, Self-feelings are feelings about the meaning made by intentional value feelings, and in this process provide a “glimpse of the self.” These feelings are drawn into the self and modify the deep self. Self-feelings are a valuation of feelings for the individual self, which produce a moral code as they interact with the embodied social world (Denzin 1985: 228-232). In sum, Denzin’s model asserts that emotion is grounded in physical sensations, which subsequently become embodied through a reflexive process informed by sociohistorical experience. His scheme successfully conflates physiological, psychological and phenomenological perspectives of emotional affect. Denzin’s model has potential advantages for breaking down the process of emotional meaning formation, but leaves many questions unanswered. For instance, how is this process experienced temporally for individuals? In other words, do some people go through this process quicker than others? How fluid is this scheme? Are individuals able to jump to and from non-adjacent categories? What would be appropriate methods to explore this theory? Furthermore, this scheme may not be widely applicable and may in fact reify notions of emotional universals. Answers to these questions will only be found through extensive fieldwork experience and cannot be elaborated upon at present. While the phenomenological possibilities outlined above may be of use to ethnomusicologists, they have an equal chance of being completely irrelevant to individuals in question when out in the field. If scholars truly take a

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phenomenological approach to ethnographic work they will no doubt bracket the aforementioned theories to achieve a more intimate relation with the peoplethemselves. These theoretical notions cannot be objectively posited on communities by the researcher, but nonetheless have potential for emerging in the process of fieldwork. In other words, these theories are only helpful if they are relevant to the individuals in question and grow from emic perspectives.

Summary and Conclusions Emotions, despite being vital to human experience, have been relatively overlooked in the social sciences. This discussion has attempted to build a way to an increased analytical attention to this subject in, at least, ethnomusicology. By examining the past approaches to emotion in ethnomusicology we have seen both problematic theories and those with potential for future application. In particular, those authors that have focused on emic perspectives and integrated analyses of physiological, psychological, micro and macro aspects of social interaction have come closest to the emotional lived experiences of individuals vis-à-vis music. However, the attention to emotion in ethnomusicology has remained marginalized, leaving much analytical space yet to be filled. Certain ideas from phenomenology (including symbolic interactionism) could help develop a more nuanced understanding of emotions, music and culture by providing a framework for an approach to future research. By adopting phenomenological principles, scholars may be able to more closely engage with the people-themselves. Phenomenology recognizes that emotions are worthy of analytic attention because they are essential to gaining access to the lived experience of others. Scholars adopting phenomenology must start by bracketing assumptions about emotions and work from the “ground up,” focusing on the multiplicity of emic perspectives which construct emotional response. Additionally, research must question the relation between the expression of emotion and the actual experience thereof, by including an increased attention to facial and bodily ways of being-in-the-world along with the analysis of everyday musical and verbal praxis. In this regard, emotional displays of the lived body, and the dynamic processes of remembering and embodying these emotions must be taken into account when approaching other’s experiences, because the stages of meaning formation may affect the expression of one’s feelings. Only when a researcher is able to understand the various rules for social conduct (i.e. the appropriate expression of emotion in a particular situation) and the process of embodying emotions, which make feelings meaningful, can he begin to interpret the lived experience of another with any degree of confidence.

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Notes 1

For a more detailed analysis of the above authors mentioned in this subsection see Berger 1991, pp. 8-54. 2 For further discussion of recent (1991-present) authors and their analyses of music and emotion see Schauert, unpublished paper. 3 While the “Cartesian split” has become an acceptable trope in much academic literature, this subject/object, mind/body split has actually been prevalent in Western thought since at least the time of Plato. See More, Paul Elmer. 1926. Platonism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 4 See discussion of Baker, Fillmore and Gilman pages 4-5 of this paper. 5 This Latin phrase literally meaning “clean slate,” connoting that there are no a priori concepts within the consciousness. 6 This point could easily be elaborated upon, as the history of philosophy has spent a great deal of energy debating “meaning” as such. However, this type of discussion would not serve this paper’s goals of concentrating on phenomenological views of emotion. 7 See Schutz, Alfred. 1971. Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Ed. Arvid Broderson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. With Contributions by the Catometrics Staff and Editorial Assistance of Edwin E. Erickson. American Association for the Advancement of Science Publication Number 98. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lutz, Catherine and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. “The Anthropology of Emotions.” Annual Revue of Anthropology 15: 405-36. McAllester, David P. 1954. “Enemy Way Music.” Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnography 41(3), Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnography. Mead, George Herbert. [1934] 1963. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyers, Leornard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Myers, Helen. 1992. “Ethnomusicology.” In Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. New York: W.W. Norton. Pp. 3-38. Nehring, Neil. 1997. Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger is an Energy. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc. Rice, Timothy. 1994. May it Fill Your Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, Helen. 1933. Form in Primitive Music. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Roseman, Marina. 1991. Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Teminar Music and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rouget, Gilbert. 1985. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relationship Between Music and Trance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1768. Dictionaire de Musique. Paris. Ryan, John, Legare H., Calhoun III, and William M. Wentworth. 1996. “Gender or Genre? Emotion Models in Commercial Rap and Country Music.” Popular Music and Society 20 (2): 121-154. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library. —. 1957. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: The Wisdom Library.

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Schauert, Paul. “Emotion in Ethnomusicology: Building a Way Towards Phenomenological Possibilities through Critical History.” Unpublished Paper. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suya Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seeger, Charles. 1968. “Factorial Analysis of the Song as Approach to the Formation of a Unitary Field Theory.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 20: 33-39. Stoller, Paul. 1989. Fusion of the Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Ruth. 1982. Let the Inside be Sweet. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN MEDIATING PERFORMANCE: METADIALOGUES 1 AND REPRESENTATION J. MERYL KRIEGER

Performance can no longer be viewed only through the eyes of audience members – we can and must consider it also from the perspective of the principal enactor. Are avenues of mediation necessarily technological? The obvious answer is no. Technology has simply brought new possibilities to modes of mediation that allow levels of nuance simply not available before multi-track and digital recording strategies transformed the music recording world in the 1960s and 1970s. A quintessential issue underlying this article is the need to articulate a definition of performance that reflects the impact of technocultures. It seems intuitively obvious that a performance is something that people do to elicit a particular response from an audience. I define performance here in a general sense as anyone who observes – either literally or in a mediated form – the actor(s)’ actions.2 Metadialogues, in the tradition of Gregory Bateson, allow us to consider the epistemological framing through which we understand, mediate, and negotiate our way through our worlds. The process is deceptively complex, layered in as it is with all the various social ends that every encounter between two functioning humans must contain on an individual level, but also our larger, cultural and social norms that shadow and color our performance as individuals within a cultural framework. We find it difficult to assimilate a concept of performance that does not include a connection to contextualize, and we are regularly prepared to imagine – if such information is not provided for us through the performance vehicle – these items. I suggest that a rethinking of some of our definitions of performance is necessary given these changes in mediating strategies, and the shrinking of the communicative world, particularly in the last decade.

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Setting the Stage – In the Green Room: I May 5, 2003. The room is set. Microphones are placed, cables prepared for electronic instruments and music stands are set to the heights of their anticipated users. My camera is on the tripod in the control booth, backup recorder on the side of the engineer’s console, just above the 1970’s era electric organ, going just in case something’s wrong with the videotape or the microphone fails. This is not my first recording project here – now I can compensate for equipment problems before they happen. I focus on activity in the isolation booth inside the recording studio proper to see drummer and recording engineer setting up gear. On my side, a conversation continues from many other recording sessions between musicians who have known each other for many years that ranged from band membership and identity to improvisation and the Grateful Dead. I have to pick one thing to point the camera at, so my zoom focuses in on deft hands setting up drum stands, and the faint sounds of friendly bantering coming from the other room. I’m in the control booth, waiting for a recording session to begin and this is the first session I’m not trying to just be an ethnographer, looking with my own eyes and ears. Today is the first day I’m looking almost exclusively through the lens of my video camera. I’m hyperconscious, as I am every time I bring a camera into this space, of having to choose what I’m paying attention to – there are so many layers of activity here that I know I won’t notice everything important. I’m still early enough in the data-collecting stage that I’m not sure what is important but I decided months ago to follow my instincts and let the details fall where they will.

On Mediation in the Field Ethnomusicologists have been appropriating new technologies and applying them to our discipline ever since the invention of portable recording equipment made fieldwork feasible more than a century ago. As each invention that could be applied to recording musical performances has become available, we have found new ways to apply these technologies as much to analysis and presentation as to recording data. Accordingly, the increasing availability and affordability of video cameras and editing equipment makes the issues of mediation and technology of increasing importance to our consideration of audience-performer engagement and of performance itself. The answers seem obvious at the surface levels and incredibly complex as we unpack the layers. An example of mediation and the meta-discourse of mediated technologies in particular can be easily shown in the steps that occur in the process of shooting any documentary film. First, the filmmaker focuses

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on her subject. Usually there is some sense of story or issue that will be at the center of the film, although the footage itself will usually dictate the exact shape that this will take. The filmmaker must, after all, be able to explain enough of the project to get it funded. There is, therefore, a fundamental point of view underlying the making of any documentary, that of its maker. It is filtered, I must note, through the interests and concerns of the film’s funders – they also therefore serve as mediators of the ideas, experiences, and agendas of the film’s content. Next comes the camera persons – sometimes the director will also serve this function, sometimes he or she will be but one of a few people dictating the actual events to be recorded onto film or video. Perspective, training, experience with the subject matter, and familiarity with the subjects of the filming here play critical feeders in this process, since the presence of strangers has a different impact on the performers and participants in the project than do people who are to at least some degree insiders to that community. Next must be acknowledged what I consider to be the most critical and often overlooked mediator, the film/video editor. In my own work the editing room is the one place I refuse to give up control. It became very clear to me during my first video project the degree to which the film editor shapes the mediated object of the documentary into the form in which it will be consumed by its audience. The layers of personality, experience, and personal agenda which must be accounted for in that finished project of a documentary film, then, cannot truly be said to reflect the vision of any one person, unless that person alone carries out all the above functions. Unless it is a very small-scale project, this does not happen. Even in my own fieldwork, whenever possible I have also employed the efforts of a second camera person. This cannot be said to be necessarily a negative thing. There are, for example, far better (in the sense of more highly trained) camera persons than myself. I also find it instructive to see an event through someone else’s eyes in addition to my own take – they usually will attend to things I miss. Where my perspective comes into play is in the editing room. I decide what is important, I decide what goes on the cutting room floor much in the way that when I am researching an issue for an article or a chapter I choose what issues I will talk about and articulate when I write. In short, unless I am giving direct authorship to one of my subjects, they remain subjects and not interlocutors or collaborators. They will lack agency and voice. Why, then, do we persist in attributing the perspectives of our films to any one person?

Interlude I: The Musicians During the period 2002 through 2006 I conducted fieldwork in two professional audio recording studios in Bloomington, Indiana. During this

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period I interviewed many musicians, but the majority of my research focused on the recording strategies of two women singer-songwriters, Krista Detor and Jenn Cristy, both of whom are also residents of Bloomington. Krista is currently a signed recording artist, with the Dutch label Corazong, whose career has taken off quickly in the past two years. Her music is generally categorized as Americana with rock, blues, and country flavors, depending on the track, and is generally recognized for her strong lyric-writing. She has two recorded CDs out and is in the process of recording her third; her first as a signed artist. She is about to begin her second European tour in September, 2006, her songs are in demand for film soundtracks, and also regularly performs across the United States. Jenn is a regional artist with two released CDs to her credit. Jenn’s career began when she was hired directly out of college to sing backup for John Mellencamp, with whom she toured and recorded for a year and a half before leaving to start her own band. While she is not at this writing signed to a label, she has a strong following and performs steadily around the Midwest, notably in Chicago, Indianapolis, and most recently, Kansas City, MO, and Milwaukee. Jenn’s music is most commonly identified as rock. Her music is most noted for its high energy and themes that focus on universal social problems.

Mediation in the Studio Midway through my fieldwork, I happened to catch Krista’s reaction at the end of a take of recording bass and drum tracks to the music and groove that two of her backup musicians had committed to the digital memory of the engineer’s recording equipment. I was using a video camera that day and it seemed a lucky chance that I was pointing it her way at the end of the take. Her comment was telling: “Groovy. Totally, totally different than I wrote it, but still… [hahahaha]” (50503-DV1) What did she mean here? Was this a criticism of their lack of adherence to her musical vision? I think not. Krista focused instead on the ways in which ideas that must have been inherent in the music she wrote could be teased out by musicians with different perspectives on her songs than she had. She found their interpretation, while not necessarily matching her own initial ideas, valid and compelling, and fitting with what she had both written and performed. Video cameras, like the audio recording process, are obvious mediators. They can catch acts of performance in action and in situ. The eye of the videographer and her subsequent choices will make in filming such events constitute a choice of perspective and analysis much the same as transcribing critical moments of a musical text or the directorial choices the recording engineer makes between one take and the next. But this becomes only one of

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many mediating layers existing between the performer and her audience. The very fact of mediation forces us as scholars to reconsider what being a performer means, beyond the definitions we have used in the past. Consider the scenario I’ve laid out above: the principal actors and mediators are there in the studio, articulating their spaces and creating that place where a recording will be made. Underlying all the activity is the presence of the engineer’s console. This elaborate desk has transformed the ways in which audiences interact with performers since the early 20th century in more and more subtle ways as the technology itself has evolved. Our meta-discourse surrounding that technology has begun to reevaluate the relationship of what actually takes place in the recording studio and what the audience for that recording will then take as their own and use towards their own purposes. The overlay of gender as a marker on top of this shapes our understanding of both the performance and the performance object, creating a public understand of that performer and her identity for her audience.

Performers and Performance: Creating Public Identities Social identities are relational; groups typically define themselves in relation to others. This is because identity has little meaning without the “other.” So, by defining itself a group defines others. Identity is rarely claimed or assigned for its own sake. (Okolie 2003: 2). Okolie’s statement can readily be contextualized in terms of gender and recording studio practices. What is most relevant for our purposes is that public identity is performed in the same way that musicians perform their instruments: as an expression of self in relation to others. In 1959, Erving Goffman defined performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants (Goffman 1959, 15). Goffman assumed that the interactions between performers would be face-to-face, and indeed consistently discussed performance in a dramaturgical sense. Co-presence, then, was a fundamental assumption of any performative interaction. Goffman further defined the spaces related to performance in binary terms (fRt and back regions) with any other areas of space being relegated to what he called ‘outside regions’. (Goffman 134) While the work of Dell Hymes has relevance here,3 I would focus attention on how it was applied in the 1970s by Richard Bauman in his Verbal Art as Performance, which took both Hymes’ ideas of narrative structure, and referencing Goffman’s concern for a bounded nature of interaction, redefined performance as “situated behavior, situated within and rendered meaningful with reference to relevant contexts…We use the term “event” to designate a

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culturally defined, bounded segment of the flow and experience constituting a meaningful context for action (cf. Frake 1964, Hymes 1967, 1972).” (Bauman 1977/1984, 27) Furthermore, Bauman concerns himself with the epistemology of the performance frame, considering how the performance is “keyed” (from Goffman 1974, cited in Bauman, 15) to account for non-verbal components of the interaction. Very familiar to English-speaking audiences are formulae such as, “once upon a time,” opening a fairy tale, or “did you hear the one about…,” to introduce a joke (cf. Reaver 1972). Such formulae are, in effect, markers of specific genres, and insofar as these genres are conventionally performed in a community, the formulae may serve as keys to performance. (Bauman 1977/1984: 21) As an extension of Bauman’s point, we can understand the use of formulae by Krista and Jenn to associate themselves with specific genres of popular music and compare themselves with other performers. This also includes what they choose to use and what they assent to that is chosen by their male coperformers in the studio. One of the other singer-songwriters I worked with at a different studio, Jenn Cristy, spoke to this point even more directly during the recording sessions for her initial demo at Castle Creek and as the sound gelled in her new band during fall 2005 and winter 2006. It began as a reaction to a review written by Indianapolismusic.net writer Steve Hayes, who, while giving her high marks for her performance during the 2005 Indianapolis Battle of the Bands entered his own classification of Jenn’s music: My only comments beyond that praise is her songs don’t feel like the type of tunes that are meant for a solo artist. They have a feel like songs from a modern Broadway musical. In fact, based on her singing and performance, I’d peg Cristy as a natural for the Broadway stage. (Hayes, September 29, 2005, “SHOW REVIEW: Sellout crowd fills Vogue for Battle finals,” Indianapolismusic.net, http://www.indianapolismusic.net/content_detail.php?current_id=1096 accessed 3/27/2006.) Jenn immediately reacted to this classification, violating as it did her own construction of her public image as a rock and roll performer. She herself classifies her own music as rock rather than pop, and along with her band uses musical signifiers that tie her music to a distinctly 1970s conception of rock – wahwah pedal for her lead guitar, flashy performing outfits reflecting a 2000s conception of glitter rock dress, and a drummer who, aside from being a highly talented player, also sports a very 1970s-influenced hairstyle. (interviews, January through March, 2006) In her listing for her band on this same website, Jenn lists her influences as “Peter Gabriel, Tori Amos, Billie Holiday, Bruce

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Hornsby, Motown, and much more.” Such listings are one of the many ways musicians establish lineage for themselves in any musical tradition, and are find their respective audiences. Separating herself from her own history, it is notable that she does not list her first professional band leader, John Mellancamp, as an influence, though she indicated in many interviews that early incarnations of her backup band were strongly influenced by his ideas about creating musical sound. (February 12, 2004; April 4, 2004) There is a fine line between creating a musical product and creating a performance image. What is most intriguing about a recording session is not necessarily the CD track under construction, but the degree to which the collaboration between songwriter and co-producer refine her musical ideas, creating a public interpretation of that musical idea which becomes the recording itself.

In the Green Room: II 5/05/2003 continued. I am aware of some of this as I sit in the control booth with my camera. I’ve just completed my first formal course in filmmaking, have been reading Rouch’s writings and interviews about filmmaking, and recently viewed the documentary Reassemblage for the first time. It infuriated me, but made me think – I think the filmmaker would approve. I make a mental list of my choices. Do I keep my collaborators on film as they joke with me, sometimes about this very camera? What do I leave out? What do I owe these people who have let me intrude on their lives? I’m just a student researcher, and know that I’m taking risks here both due to my lack of experience as a field worker, and because my errors will be so clearly apparent to those, including myself, who view this footage at some later date. April 2004. A year later, I sit reflecting in a video editing room, sifting through what I shot, deciding how to tell the story of the musicians I have been talking to, joking with, listening to and watching perform. I have helped set up performances for K, the songwriter and lead singer of those sessions, I have helped refine her website, and have had the pleasure of reading the credit she gives me on her first two CD liner notes. I rediscover the choices I made with my camera, and realize yet again what I saw when I first shot that footage: that there are layers of interactions, spaces, and negotiated relationships that are so easy to show, so hard to explain in writing. I have begun to articulate what I’ve known since the first day I walked into that studio with a classmate’s Hi8 camera three years ago; that merely describing the thing, unpacking my assertions and assumptions in written form is as acontextual when one gets down to it as walking into a story that has been halfway told and expecting to understand the moral at the end. Without the

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context of seeing the event for ourselves, hundreds of pages and thousands of words must be framed to try to verbally show an audience what ten minutes of filmed footage can say. An interview, with commentary and critique by the principals can say all the things we as scholars want to explain with twice the credibility that we have. It’s their lives and their music. And their performances.

Interlude II: Introducing the Role of Negotiation As ethnomusicologists we know the importance of context to the understanding of musical behavior. Multi-track recording and other mediated modes of presentation then, become difficult for us to place in a framework that we can situate. In a sense, we require a new vocabulary from which to interpret the highly mediated forms in which we experience performance, whether we are the audience or the performers ourselves.

In the Green Room: III October 14, 2005. It’s a mixdown session this evening – Jenn and her band are here while Russ puts together the takes from the last two weeks’ sessions. I perch on a bar stool next to the couch behind the board while Jenn passes the time with her bandmates all around me. It’s a low-key group tonight – just the band and a couple close friends and spouses, and I’m feeling really part of the group for the moment. Jenn keeps looking over my shoulder at my notebook as I scribble in purple ink, occasionally taking it from me to see what I’ve written. She’s making a lot of jokes tonight about her first band, where she was a backup singer for Mellancamp. We all migrate in and out of the control room into the Green Porch, where cigarette breaks, water bottles, and conversations collide as we all pass the time until Russ needs someone, or has a track ready for us all to hear. I find myself noticing how people are joking around – Jenn’s dancing around a lot and making fun of herself while Dave D is doing the Robot. Marv’s joking about other people, but Dave D. references his drumming a lot. It’s all pretty gentle – everyone’s about creating community tonight, not settling scores or airing grievances – this group’s good at creating positive energy. Brian’s staying off to the side mostly, perhaps I just don’t know him as well as the others, that seems likely. This seems a big coping mechanism, I shouldn’t be surprised. This looks surprisingly similar to mixdown sessions at Airtime, though Russ is working with an analog console as opposed to Dave’s digital setup at Airtime. Both men seem very focused on the balance between different instruments, and between the instruments and the singer’s voice. But Russ isn’t

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asking Jenn questions, he’s asking the guys – is he looking for opinions or agreement? I can’t tell.

The Metadialogue of Performance Spaces Turner (1988) grounds his understanding of performance spaces in the work of Van Gennep, who argues for transformation in ritual space through the phases of separation, transition, and incorporation. Van Gennep’s phases of rites of passage involve demarcating sacred space and time from secular space and time, where sacredness conveys some element of transformation from one state of being to another. (Turner 24-5) Within this space, Turner defines a liminal state of being, where the participants are “beyond the normative social structure’ that eliminates their rights over others but allows liberates them from social obligations (Turner 27). Liminality implies a degree of transitionality, a presence in a sort of neutral space and time for this transformation to take place. I would step back at this point to speak from my own experience as a performer, particularly as a performing musician. All performers, regardless of the performing medium, recognize a distinction between rehearsal space and performance space. To a performer the performing space has a sacred quality to it. It need not be specifically delineated as a physical location, in the sense of a sacred, religious space in contrast with secular space, but rather an approach to the use of a space that is eminently comparable to a sacred/secular binarism. This relates in a number of fairly obvious ways to Goffman’s distinction between front and back regions for performing as well as the general theatrical comparison. Hence, Turner’s concern for a ritual space where performance occurs is equally appropriate. Actors use the performance spaces for their rehearsal and the gradual construction of the performance “front” region, with a liminal period during “tech” week, concluding with “final dress rehearsal”; a performance minus a formalized audience. This framing alone is worthy of further investigation, since it adds credence to the notion that performance in and of itself does not require a defined, public audience, though it contrasts with both Turner and Schechner’s articulated delineation of performances as genred activities. The seriousness with which actors (and their accompanying musicians) take final dress is accepted in common theater parlance to have an impact on how well the opening night performance goes. The implications of this “imagined” audience, and the analogy to a theatrical final dress rehearsal is made perhaps more apparent, and relevant, to the recording studio setting in Tom Porcello’s 1996 dissertation “Sonic Artistry: Music, Discourse, and Technology in the Sound Recording Studio.” In framing his study, Porcello comments that, among other concerns that recording engineers must have in the studio, “perhaps the ultimate

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goal of such technical listening, is the necessity of projecting oneself into the listening space of the eventual consumer, making judgments about what is or is not an aesthetically (and commercially, depending on the session) viable sound.” (Porcello 1996, 4-5) Similarly, the focus and professionalism with which performers make the shift between rehearsal and performance space can be clearly distinguished in the performance ‘text’ should be an obvious comparison. To begin to make the analogy to the physical space of the recording studio, it must first be asserted that I am delineating conceptions of space and time that are relevant in the Western European popular music world. Conversations with scholars working in other parts of the world have made it clear to me that an awareness and consideration for post-colonial issues, relations, and agency add yet another dimension to the ethnographic research, which do not apply in my own research, and I am not willing to speculate about it at this point in time.4 An awareness of the specialness of performance space by all participants in musical performance is one that is generally understood and accepted in popular music settings, such as live performing. In his 1999 book Metal, Rock and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Harris Berger notes that …we can understand the physical environment as a kind of highly mediated communication among the architects, decorators, management, musicians and nightclub goers. From this perspective, musical performances, bodily stylistics, fashion, interior decors, and architecture can all be understood as genres of expressive interaction, differentiated only by the durability of their mediators. (Berger 1999, 37) Emphasizing the importance of this in recording studios, Judy Latta’s 1999 dissertation on the production of the NPR radio documentary series Wade in the Water articulates the importance of the studio spaces, tying them to Turner’s concept of sacredness. Though she does not invoke the academic tradition of sacred spaces directly, Latta’s definition of sacred has “a meaning associated with that which is clean and hallowed and has an internal silence.” The recording studio carried sacred connotations to Latta’s informants because it was “vested with its own rules of ritual … the studio assumed sacred proportions because of its restrictions on the actions of those in it” (Latta 1999, 71). Latta’s recognition of the different nature of the recording studio gave rise to the necessity of developing ways for performers to approximate, with varying degrees of success, the spontaneity and improvisational quality that came from performing gospel music with the immediate call-response engagement of an active audience in an artificial setting. The added degrees of mediation added whole new levels of complexity to the creation of recordings that would

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accurately portray both the music and culture of the community for each episode of the documentary. In a western setting at the least, a collaborative approach to study is essential to understanding the layers of negotiation that occur within this mediating environment to produce what we can describe with some degree of accuracy as a performance as earlier scholars might recognize it. I return to Porcello’s dissertation, as he makes a very similar case: My suggestion of a parallel between music and ethnography, then, is not simply by way of remarking that both similarly unfold and emerge through time. …For the musician, such coded interaction might consist, for example, of knowing appropriate and inappropriate performance techniques for a given musical style…For the anthropologist…learning those codes [from an anthropological perspective of appropriateness] not only occurs during public interactional processes, but also in moments of private introspection…In such moments, both engage in individual analytic interpretive processes, complementing social, dialogic, ensemble-centered interpretation, to aid in developing communication and improvisational skills appropriate to the performance/research context. (Porcello 6-7) If performance and practice can’t necessarily be distinguished from one another, then such an analogy would be very fitting to the mediated process in the studio. Indeed, the practice-like, improvisatory quality of recording sessions, which are always “fixable” in the sense that one can record that fragment again, reflect the practice quality of these sessions. The analogy to stage performance can be made, then, that recording sessions are analogous to staged rehearsals, with the distinction that these are being integrated into the final performance much as individual items are collected for later integration into a collage. One could not say that the individual components are not part of the artwork, but that the creativity in the work is marked by the aesthetics used in its assembly and artistic choices. The final “performance” as it were, in the recording studio setting, would be delineated by the mastering and final mix sessions where the parameters and aesthetic framing are done with an implied audience, to return to Porcello’s comments on the role of the recording engineer. The engineer, in this case, becomes the listening ears of the potential audience, with the addition of “authority” implied from his formal role. Issues of power and agency are implicit in the use of recording technology. This dominates my argument for a distinct lack of neutrality, though the real contradiction exists that the recording studio setting is also an environment where performers of any background can raise their level of agency and gain more control over the representation of their public ‘voice’. This is a negotiated issue – the degree of performer agency within the studio depends greatly on

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what one of my collaborators calls the level of “sympathy” demonstrated by the recording engineer and producer.5 Porcello makes this same point as part of his basic premise regarding the importance of discourse in the recording studio space is closely related to the study of discourse among any group of performing musicians. As an example, he points to the entrenched nature of musician’s perceptions of gender: Just as Bobby’s agency is ultimately constrained by a larger industry structure, Vessie’s agency operates within a set of expectations about the role of women both in the music industry and more broadly in Western society. In the studio (and throughout the popular music industry), historical ideologies of women’s technical incompetence are deeply entrenched…my larger point is to suggest that all musical performances, and all music production, are implicated in a social arena beyond the musical event per se. (Porcello 15) Likewise, Ingrid Monson’s 1996 Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction concentrates on what implications musician’s observations about musical processes may have for the rethinking of musical analysis and cultural interpretation from an interactive point of view, with particular attention to the problems of race and culture. (Monson 1996, 5) The issue of agency in the studio becomes a critical issue of concern in the study of the recording studio setting. The use of performance theory must address both subjective and culturally imposed views of both the performer and the studio space to effectively study recording studio interactions.

Issues: Applying Performance Theory to Recording Studios The issue of defined boundaries is a distinct problem implicit in the definitions of both performance and of performance spaces for the study of highly mediated settings. As I discussed above, some type of boundary distinction, whether it is in physical or social space, is fundamental to the concept of “performance” as defined by Goffman, Bauman, Turner and Schechner. The solution, I believe, lies in the emphasis Porcello places on studio discourse.6 He points to the importance of external processing, and I would add outside feedback, on music making and production decisions. This is clearly a result of the layered process by which both recording production and postproduction decisions are made. One could make an analogy to staged theater performance at this point. Here, too, no two performances of a single production occur in isolation. Experience and outside input have a large impact on the ‘editing’ of performances. To summarize the dilemma of the recording studio setting: rather than a linear process that can be viewed and understood in sequence, music making activities and discourse – which I argue are two levels of the same thing – interactions within a recording studio interweave and do not

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operate in a linear fashion (see also Meintjes 2003 for a discussion of this). The solution this article addresses takes negotiation as the one constant process underlying all the interweaving layers of activities from decision making through musical performance and into the many stages of editing. All activities focus on the production of the final product, but even this is not necessarily a completed expression of the events in a studio. Performers rerecord songs at different points in their careers, or release different versions, such as live performances. These last might initially seem less mediated and worthy of study using traditional ideas of performance theory, but the element of audience feedback, which is not indicated on this chart, though implied outside the main sphere of activity, is an implicit component to the study of this context. Audience-performer dynamics can be the ‘mediating’ influence, if you will, between performance theory as it has been developing over the past fortyplus years and the mediation of the recording studio. In one sense or another, the impact of different audiences responding to the stages of recording transforms and negotiates the final form of the recording itself. The emergent qualities of the recording studio process as I have modeled it above refer back to Bauman’s conception of the boundaries of performance – here necessarily more flexible and permeable: The emergent quality of performance resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goals of the participants, within the context of particular situations. We consider as resources all those aspects of the communication system available to the members of a community for the conduct of performance. Relevant here are the keys to performance, genres, acts, events, and ground rules for the conduct of performance that make up the structured system of conventionalized performance for the community [my emphasis]. (Bauman 1977 (1984), 38)

A productive use of performance theory to study the highly mediated product of the recording studio space requires an understanding of the layered relationships that are demonstrated within the studio space itself. A sense for the participants’ understanding of that space, in connection with Turner and Schechner’s ideas of the importance of performance spaces needs to be kept in perspective with subjective perceptions of that process. My role in this process as the observer cannot by the nature of this setting completely be viewed an outsider as a subjectively defined participant in this process. It needs to be understood in relation to the social and political dynamics at play in symbolic ways, incorporating concerns for agency and hegemonic social/political structures. Within a western context, the dominant considerations become race,

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age, and gender (not necessarily in any order), combined with the experience each performer has in the recording process. Understanding the implied discourses within this context inform an understanding of the recording process, and thus the process of creating the final product, the recorded performance. Phenomenologically informed understandings of subjective identity formation, and the process of negotiating the expression of that identity within the studio setting, are certainly a performative process from both Goffman’s conception of unconscious performances and Schechner and Turner’s perspectives on articulating performance spaces. As a final point I would return to Bauman. Performance is emergent when one considers the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence with them, the goals of the participants, all within the context of the performance situation. (Bauman, 38) Performance theory is thus one of the few modes of analysis that allows room for the interconnection between the different elements that integrate to create music recording in the mediated environment of the recording studio. The addition of imagined community at the level of metadialogue cements the position from which performance as a component of mediated music making can be profitably studied. There are many ways to study and analyze mediation as a component of the recording studio process. Only with a definition of performance that embraces the complexities introduced by technology, in this case digital audio recording technology, do we as scholars of performance have the scope to address the myriad social and cultural processes that come together at this most fascinating nexus.

Notes 1

This article is a revised version of chapter 3 from my dissertation, tentatively titled “Women Singer Songwriters in Midwestern American Recording Studios: Strategies of Negotiation, Mediation and Representation,” due to be completed winter 2007. 2 I contrast this working definition with the one used by Fikentscher (2003) who, despite his focus on the study of musical technoculture in the form of deejaying, defines musical performance intrinsically in terms of co-presence: “I define musical performance as any event in which the sound-creating musician(s) and his/her/their audience share the acoustic space due to their physical presence in one location, at one time [my emphasis].” (Fikentscher 2003: 310, footnote 1) This fundamental assumption about performance has been implicit in ethnographic research on this subject, whether we reference Erving Goffman’s work in the 1960s, Richard Schechner and Victor Turner’s work in the 1970s and 80s, or Richard Bauman’s work from the 1970s to the present. 3 particularly from Hymes’ 1962 article “The Ethnography of Speaking” 4 This comment comes from informal conversations I had during the 2004 Society for Ethnomusicology meeting, November 4-6, 2004 with Paul Greene, regarding his research in Nepalese recording studios, as documented in his 1999 article, “Sound Engineering in

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a Tamil Village: Playing Audio Cassettes as Devotional Practice” and with John Fenn, regarding his summer, 2004 research in a Malawi recording studio. 5

Informal conversation with Carrie Newcomer, August 20, 2004. See especially Porcello’s article “Tails Out!,” published in both Ethnomusicology and in the 2003 anthology Music and Technoculture edited by Gay and Lysloff.

6

References Bauman, Richard, et al. 1984/1977. Verbal art as performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, rock, and jazz : perception and the phenomenology of musical experience. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Fikentscher, Kai. 2003. “"There's not a problem I can't fix, 'cause I can do it in the mix": on the performative technology of 12-inch vinyl,” in Music and Technoculture, edited by René T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay, Jr. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Lysloff, René T. A., and Leslie C. Gay, Jr. eds. 2003. Music and technoculture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Latta, Judi M. 1999. “"Wade in the Water", the public radio series: The effects of the politics of production on sacred music representations” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland College Park. Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa!: making music Zulu in a South African studio. Durham: Duke University Press. Monson, Ingrid T. 1996. Saying something: jazz improvisation and interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porcello, Thomas Gregory. 1996. “Sonic artistry: Music, discourse, and technology in the sound recording studio,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. Schechner, Richard and Willa Appel, eds. 1990. By means of performance: intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor Witter. 1988. The anthropology of performance, preface by Richard Schechner. New York: PAJ Publications. Performance studies series, v.4

CHAPTER SIXTEEN WHEN THE TAPE COMES ON: THE FRAME OF FIELDWORK BLAINE WAIDE

Several years ago, I went to the house of R. L. Burnside, a blues singer, in hopes of recording him recite examples from a special genre within AfricanAmerican verbal performance, the “toast.” A toast is a “narrative poem,” often obscene in content and of considerable duration, whose “basic structural unit” is frequently a rhymed couplet (Abrahams 1964: 99-102). I had already interviewed a fair number of blues musicians in the eastern and northeastern regions of Mississippi, and though I was eager to hear what he had to say about his experiences playing the blues, I was much more excited to hear Mr. Burnside tell me some toasts. When I was led into his bedroom, R. L. was laying on his bed with several of his grandchildren watching family programming on ABC. After his grandchildren were hurried into another room and the door was shut, I turned on my tape recorder, eager to hear R. L. narrate some of these bawdy narratives, feeling one final piece of my fieldwork puzzle was about to be put in place. I shall return to this toast telling session (if that is what it really was) later in my discussion. For now, it establishes the relationship essential to this study. In an effort to conduct fieldwork, I had gone to R. L. Burnside’s house. Once I was in his bedroom, I turned on my tape recorder so that I could document his narratives in this particular context: an Anglo-American college student recording an African-American blues singer reciting toasts in the privacy of the latter’s home. My fieldwork was conducted in the form of an interview and, as I set up my tape recorder, his grandchildren were quickly ushered from the room where they had been watching television. I quickly realized my presence was actually an unfortunate and agitating force since his family had to leave the room, and yet, even after intrusion, were we the only individuals speaking in this context? Were we alone, so to speak? This discussion will rely on the study of African-American oral traditions in the field. It will examine the tradition, which I will call the blues interview for

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the purposes of this paper, of an Anglo-American fieldworker interviewing an African-American blues singer, to show that the interview is an inadequate speech genre, in the words of Bakhtin, for understanding expressive forms. The tradition of a blues fieldwork interview is especially illustrative because it thoroughly demonstrates the ways in which issues of power, authority, interpretation and subversion are at play in this context. They are so central, in fact, that the moment a white fieldworker and black performer come together in the same room, they are also putting distance between themselves while engaging in a Bakthian dialogue with their social peers in their own cultural contexts. The blues interview, as the frame of fieldwork, superimposes itself on cultural frames of the consultant, frequently re-framing them in such a way as to present a reified representation of an internally emergent experience. Though country blues had been recorded and sold as “race records” in the earliest years of the recording industry in the 1920s, it was in the fieldwork conducted by John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s that the music style received its greatest initial attention. Country blues singers like Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, prior to his post World War II status as an urban musician, were recorded by the Lomaxes and interviewed about their music. Regrettably, conceptually speaking, the framework of a field interview conducted under these circumstances is problematic because the ethnographer determines what questions to ask and what questions the consultant answers and the degrees of social empowerment inherent in such situations become an inevitable factor. Gregory Bateson, building on Erving Goffman’s concept of frame analysis, defines “metacommunicative” messages in which “the subject of discourse is the relationship between the two speakers: (1955:178). These sorts of metamessages establish the frame within which two speakers are to interpret and evaluate actions. Bateson’s example, “This is play,” is helpful here as he discusses how the signals in that message “do not denote what would be denoted by those actions normally” (Bateson 1955:180). In the case of a fieldwork interview, the metamessage that establishes the frame is “This is an interview,” usually signaled by the presence of a recording device. As with Bateson’s example, included in the message “This is an interview,” are signals that do not denote what they normally do. The initial actions in the time immediately preceding an interview, possibly an introduction, handshake or greeting, typically signal a conversation, an unscripted unfolding of information. This is not the case in a fieldwork interview. The folklorist, anthropologist or fieldworker is conducting the fieldwork with a definite purpose, as scholar or preservationist, in mind. As such, the cultural broker has an agenda, an approach and a plan of attack with which s/he hopes either to guide the interview or use to interpret the meeting later, a frame within the frame. In a certain sense, the

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consultant is scripted and limited in what sorts of information they are able to offer when the interview starts and the tape is turned on. The Lomaxes definitely had a certain purpose in mind in the fieldwork they conducted in the 1930s, fieldwork that included country blues singers like Leadbelly. According to Benjamin Filene, John and Alan Lomax, as well as other “revivalists” in the 1930s, were seeking to find in American folk culture a uniquely American culture, and the locus of this individuality was “the local, the rural, the long ago” (Filene 2003). The folk revivalists were also responding to the perceived failure of modern culture in the wake of the Great Depression, a time when “outsiders appeared to Americans as symbols of how they wanted to see themselves during the Depression: independent, proud in the face of hardship, straightforward, beholden to no special interest” (Filene 2003). They wanted to document “folk culture” and, in so doing, illustrate that authentic, non-commercial and anti-modern cultural practices still existed (Filene 2003). These romantic yearnings should remind the folklore student of the ideology Johann Herder and the Romantic Nationalists with only a few changes necessary in time and place. Situated in the late eighteenth century, Herder lamented the intrusive influence of French culture and the Enlightenment and felt there was no unique German culture and identity. Seeking this, he sought a national identity in the cultural works of those outside mainstream society who had not been touched by foreign influences and who still practiced German traditions. For Herder, and later with the American folk revivalists, in the culture works of the peasants lay the path to a national and cultural identity (Wilson 1974: 826). In the case of the African-American oral tradition of country blues, seeking a broad American cultural identity from the expressive culture of the people on the periphery of American society, the people on the outside looking in, amounted to constructing identity from the cultural “other.” It very well could add up to appropriating essential cultural practices to be consumed by mainstream society, practices that were actually one of the means by which the dominated class was “resistant to, or co-opting, the ideology of the central or dominant class” (Titon 1995: 441). Turning to Lawrence Levine, we see that in fact country blues in part served as a mechanism by which Negroes could be relatively candid in a society that rarely accorded them that privilege, could communicate this candor to others whom they would in no other way be able to reach, and, in the face of the sanctions of the white majority, could assert their own individuality, aspirations, and sense of being (1977: 240). Furthermore, the episodic and cryptic structure of a blues song along with the frequent use of “innuendo, repetition, hints and allusions” made blues songs a powerful and appropriate vehicle for expressing dissent as well as a form of communication whose meaning was hard to discern. One example is the number

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of country blues songs about the damage boll weevils inflicted on the socioeconomic structure that controlled their lives, the plantation (Levine 1977: 240-241). Since the revivalists were seeking, in their fieldwork to find the culture of America in folk culture, they would have had much to lose by reading this material as articulating a sense of protest and extreme dissatisfaction in that same American society. There is at least one instance in which John Lomax, acting in accordance with the goals of his approach to the interview incorrectly interpreted a verse criticizing middle class African-Americans for trying to act “white.” Rather, he published this same verse and presented it as an example of encouraging social advancement (Levine 1977: 245). Guided by his desire to discover American culture in the culture of what he saw as the folk, John Lomax recorded an expression of ridicule and complaint. He removed this song from its African-American cultural context and recontextualized it in the whole of what he saw as American culture, re-presenting it as both proof that AfricanAmericans were finding their place in American society and that American culture was distinct. From its outset, the blues interview performed an act of reinterpretation based on the interests of authorities in mainstream society. In arguing for the uniqueness of the American cultural experience, the revivalists were responding to and reacting against the belief that American culture was an impoverished version of British culture (Filene 2003). Bakhtin’s notion that any “utterance is filled with dialogic overtones” is appropriate to this discussion (1986: 131). Bakhtin argued that any utterance, or manifestation of language, “is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances” that were previously stated (1986: 130). Such was clearly the case with the revivalists as they were engaging in a Bakhtinian dialogue with detractors of American culture, uttering a multivalent response to claims that American culture was an incomplete version of British culture. Further, Bakhtin explains that any utterance is made in anticipation of a response (1986: 132). This expected response could come in numerous forms that include, but are not limited to, disagreement, agreement or understanding. In the case of the revivalists lie the Lomaxes, a group trying to redirect current thinking on the American expressive forms, trying even to assume the position that Bakhtin considers “authoritative utterances,” they would want to present their findings in such a way that would minimize disagreement and maximize agreement and understanding (Bakhtin 1986: 130). John Lomax’s rereading of protest material as a statement reflective of a more inclusive America and of American culture was an attempt to control what kinds of responses his social peers would have to his fieldwork. Another aspect of Bakhtin’s work is also relevant to this discussion, specifically as it relates to the context of an interview as a “speech genre”

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(1986: 121). Bakhtin demonstrates that specific utterances exist in the full range of human speech genres and the rules of each genre in turn shape those speech acts. In terms of an interview, social norms particular to that frame determine how the sharing of information unfolds in the communicative act (Bakhtin 1986: 121). Of course, the structure of an interview unfolds in a question and answer session. Acting within this frame, the fieldworker and informant are governed by rules of behavior where the former asks the questions while the latter answers them. As we have seen, this develops largely according to the agenda of the fieldworker. In a sense, the fieldworker is an aggressor, actively seeking the sorts of information that would support his or her argument or assumptions and possibly neglecting, misreading or rereading that which might contradict those same ideas. Answers given do result in new and unexpected questions, but these rarely fall too far a field of the original interests. Simply put, the content of a fieldwork interview reflects the goals of the fieldworker. Still, the informant is not a passive fountain of information, so to speak. S/he is actually very active as well, choosing exactly what materials the interviewer is privy to. Within the frame, “This is an interview,” when the information exchanged is guided by the motives of fieldworker, what is of great significance is the information that is not exchanged, that is withheld by the informant. Conducting his fieldwork in the Delta, William Ferris had difficulty gaining access to certain materials. Only after the local black community in Leland, Mississippi, accepted him he had been accepted by the local black community would they play songs that had voiced racial dissent (1978: 12-14). However, almost as a rule, African-American blues singers in the Delta did not play songs that were vulgar or racially divisive in the presence of whites (Ferris 1978: 91). Their reluctance to give voice to these important themes of identity and dissatisfaction to an Anglo-American fieldworker, or white audience in general, was a result, in part, of their concern regarding anticipated responses of punishment from heir white superiors. Ferris explains that many of his consultants limited their discussions to more innocuous issues because they felt he would play these recordings before white farmers in the sharecropping community (Ferris 1978: 11). The performers might also have been responding to, articulating a lesson learned from, previous incidents in which white bosses heard these sorts of performances and either a sense of power was lost or punishment was handed out. This fear proved very real as on several occasions Ferris had to play his recording for his suspicious white connections (1978: 11). For these reasons, black musicians in the Delta would only articulate their dissatisfaction through their music before those from who they anticipated an empathetic response (Ferris 1978: 12).

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More importantly, African-American blues singers would be engaging in a more complicated and nuanced dialogic process that was simply not a function of their most basic physical well being. There is a more complex and important reason such a performer would be reluctant to play protest material to an unsympathetic audience, even a fieldworker, than personal safety because to play this sort of material in the presence of whites would also have let them in on the secret of what they were doing with their music. Future responses would reveal this new understanding, minimizing the empowering effectiveness of these moments of insubordination. The powers that be in the Jim crow South, might also have renewed restrictions on African-American musical practices. The goal of the blues singer, therefore, was almost to conceal these sorts of expressions. To illustrate the point, early in his fieldwork, Ferris would approach blues singers through their white employers on a farm. On one occasion, the boss stayed to listen and the blues singer reluctantly played only a few songs (Ferris 1978: 11-15). For the consultant, as much as the fieldworker, the interview is very much a dialogic process that is formed by responses to previous utterances and those expected at some point in the future from members of their respective communities. The idea that the African-American consultant would possibly edit such important content out of the blues tradition in the presence of a fieldworker is important. The specific social conditions of this sort of fieldwork interview lie at the heart of this decision. To borrow the title from a recent controversial article in The New Yorker, for the white fieldworker and black folk musician, the image of the “White Man at the Door: with a tape recorder denoted two entirely different ideas based on their particular positions on the continuum of social power (McIrney 2002). For the Anglo fieldworker, s/he probably felt the situation was perfectly normal, that it was not different from any other fieldwork interview. For the African-American, it did denote the frame of an interview. Yet, the presence of a white person there to ask questions may have added a feeling of interrogation to the frame. As with any sort of interrogation, there very well could have been a sense that there were things that should not be told or offered up as information. If the fieldworker was seeking, the informant may have been misleading or concealing, dipping and dodging the verbal jabs like a boxer. While the fieldworker was listening for those snippets that would create hoped for future responses of understanding and agreement, maybe even imagining them in the course of the interview, the informant was acknowledging previous responses and hoping to prevent certain future ones, possibly even envisioning a dialogue with the members of his community about what not to discuss. Though present to one another in a face-to-face interview, the Anglo-American fieldworker and

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African-American informant, through their internalized dialogic discourse, “breach that presence” (Mannheim and Tedlock 1995:8). If the blues musician played material voicing protest and identity were played, the power of the expression would have been diminished in the act of performing it for an individual that symbolized the very institutions that suppressed African-Americans and denied them expressions of identity. In a way, the song, played in the context of a recorded interview between racially and socially polarized individuals, removed it from its original cultural context and made it the property and marker of cultural identity, as a record, of the dominant class. When the revivalists of the 1930s archived and released their many compilations of the music of the American folk, a vital cultural expression for the dominated class became a commodity for circulation and consumption in hegemonic society and was further subsumed under the aegis of “national” culture even thought hey were still denied status as full citizens. Returning to the scene in R. L. Burnside’s bedroom that began this discussion, in choosing to go there, I was fully aware of the tradition of an Anglo-American fieldworker interviewing an African-American blues singer. Whether I liked it or not, I was engaging in a dialogic process with all of these previous fieldwork interviews. In some form or fashion, I was responding to and adding to their utterances. I, too, was establishing the frame “This is an interview”’ one between people occupying opposite poles in the social power structure of north Mississippi as well as the South and the entire country. As an interview, I was also there with an argument in mind, anticipating future utterances and trying to control them. Together, we were now part of, and in dialogue with the tradition of blues interviews. The argument I was there to support concerned the didactic social functions of toasts. Bruce Jackson discusses the didactic role of toasts in the AfricanAmerican community. The central character, usually Monkey, is a lesson for how not to act as his conceit frequently gets him into trouble (Jackson 1974: 1215). Others stress that, through his “trickster personality,” Monkey is a valuable teaching tool as “a model of behavior to cope with oppression” (Spencer 1993: xxvi). Mr. Burnside presented Monkey from the trickster perspective when he said people do not understand the character when they assume that Monkey is stupid and fail to recognize the veil he has pulled over through eyes through his performance (Personal Interview, 22 March 2000). Toasts are another form of empowerment and subversion, of tricking the white authority. For example, in one of the most common toasts, “The Titanic,” Monkey’s “power is total…and so he alone gets home free” from the famous sinking ship (Jackson 1974: 38). Another defining characteristic of toasts is that they are to be performed, not simply recited (Jackson 1974: 5). Mr. Burnside did perform the toasts he told in some ways that are typical, such as changing the intonation of his voice

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to signify changes in the character speaking. Yet, toasts are also a social form of expression (Jackson 1974: 13). They are told amongst a group of peers and their telling is predicated upon an immediate future response in the form of another toast from another speaker. Toasts are exchanged in toast-telling sessions, and the next toast narrated in a session is the result of an internal response in the listener who assumes the role of performer (Jackson 1974: 4-13). I was not there to exchange toasts; I was there with the eventual goal of having transcribed toasts. By placing R. L. Burnside’s toast telling in the frame of an interview, I was influencing his narratives in several ways that resulted in removing these performances from their cultural context. My informed presence, the fact that I was both in on the joke and a symbol of white authority, curbed the effective subversive power of the toast. By recording them, I was also removing them from their performance context so they could exist as recontextualized and idle examples of an African-American verbal genre along with the rest of my fieldwork. Most importantly, I was unnaturally re-framing a selection of toasts, lifting them out of their cultural frame signified by the metamessage “This is a toast-telling session.” I decontextualized them in the frame of “this is an interview” so I could place them in a frame of scholarly research as documented by the means of my recording device. In this movement, much of the cultural relevance of a performance that emerges out of internal experiences was lost and an insufficient image of the cultural context of toasts was created. Interestingly, the most significant moment on my tape from that night only recently occurred to me. These narrations, decontextualized from their cultural frame, do offer one telling insight about toasts. On several occasions, two of R. L.’s grandchildren ran into the bedroom. Each time he immediately stopped his story and hurried them out of the room with a harsh warning. What do these moments of interruption tell us about toast telling sessions? They are for adults only and are not to be heard by children. My interview had actually increased the possibility that the cultural context of a toast telling session would be violated even by members of the African-American community. As Jeff Todd Titon explains, folklorists became “more aware of authority, power, reciprocity and representation,” issues that were very much at hand in the blues interview, they began to see “folklore as a living process,” as “performance” (Titon 1995: 436). To extend the implications of this turn in thinking further, folklore is emergent as it is created in a specific performance and context (Titon 1995: 436-439). This theory can be applied to blues as performed in its cultural context: the “house party,” or juke joint, performance. Unlike the blues interview, juke joint, performances are not a continuous succession of self-contained texts. Rather, they are a dynamic, multivocal in which audience members insert obscene jokes, personal stories, proverbs, the

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dozens and even toasts (Ferris 1978: 103). Likewise, blues musicians interrupt and layer their own performances with these verbal genres. The songs are not only intermittently suspended by the inclusion of these other forms of expression, their actual duration is uncertain. Depending upon the response of the audience to a particular song, it is either played for several minutes or improvised upon for a long duration (Ferris 1978: 58). To extend the length of a song in such a situation, a blues singer relies on his knowledge of verses that he knows from both oral tradition and songs on records. Such indeterminate song length and moments of interruption are not detrimental to the juke joint performance of the blues. They are, in fact, an essential aspect of understanding the performance of blues songs as an act emerging from the internal desires, experiences and responses of the audience and performer in a juke joint (Ferris 1978: 57-75, 101-108). The metamessage, “This is a blues performance,” made in the African-American cultural context of a juke joint, establishes the frame in which the experience, as with toasts, is a responsive, dialogic process. These sorts of responses were extremely evident in my own experiences at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Chalaholma, Mississippi. At Junior’s, the space immediately in front of the band was the dance floor, but the space to the right of the band was filled with tables and chairs. The people who sat at these tables frequently interjected comments and jokes during and between songs. Early in a Sunday night at Junior’s, the audience members seated in this area would frequently request, in the form of comments, that David Kimbrough play a house favorite, “I Got the Dog in Me,” a particular song the regulars at Junior’s expected to hear every Sunday based on their expectations as formed by previous performances, or previous utterances. David Kimbrough would not play this song until the audience had reached a certain level of energy, and he would then work them to a point at which he knew they would interject responses into gaps in his singing and playing (Kinney Kimbrough, Personal Interview, 22 March 2000). The performance of this song could continue indefinitely, filled in large portions by the interjections, both verbal and nonverbal, of the audience. In blues interviews, the dialogue is quite different. Sociocultural power and authority fall within the purview of the fieldworker who, intentionally or not, struggles with a member of the dominated class over interpretations of materials. Occasionally, especially if this material is subversive in nature, the context extends well beyond the immediate context. As such, the interviewee and fieldworker engage in a dialogue with members of their community because a great deal is at stake for each. By superimposing “This is an interview” onto “This is a blues performance,” by limiting the content of an interview according to a social or political agenda, something that was an emergent and internal experience became a static and insufficient object. The juke joint experience

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became the blues genre, a genre that has been circulated and consumed as a commodity by mainstream society. Fieldworkers, as cultural brokers, are thus complicit in expanding hegemony’s identity to include those peripheral expressive forms that contend with it. In the case of something as socially charged as a blues interview, the frame, “This is an interview,” is not flexible enough to capture expressive forms. The structure of an interview as a speech genre lends itself too easily to the agendas of those in power, those who have the authority to appropriate and reinterpret, to make into commodities those dynamic subversive expressions of the dominated class. Another frame is needed to better appreciate these forms, to keep from reframing, recontextualizing, and reifying internally emergent expressive activities. Rather than simply ask questions about an expressive form, we need to experience it in its cultural context. We need to push the boundaries of our fieldwork and let our consultants define the frame when we turn on the tape recorder. We need to let them finish the sentence, “This is….”

References Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1964. Bakhtin, M. M. Excerpts from “The Problem of Speech Genres.” The Discourse Reader. Ed. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland. London and New York: Routledge, 1999 [1986]. 121-132. Bateson, Gregory. “A Theory of Fantasy and Play.” Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972 [1955]. 177-193. Burnside, R. L. Personal Interview. 22 March 2000. Ferris, William. Blues from the Delta. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978. Filene, Benjamin. “Keynote Address for Hillbilly Music and Symbols: Country Music, Cultural Brokerage, and O Brother, Where Art Thou” presented at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, April 5, 2003. Jackson, Bruce. Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Kimbrough, David. Various Concerts. Junior’s Juke Joint, Chulaholma. January-March 2000. Kimbrough, Kinney. Personal Interview. 22 March 2000. Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Mannheim, Bruce and Dennis Tedlock. Introduction. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. 1-32.

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McIrney, Jay. “White Man at the Door: One Man’s Mission to Record the ‘Dirty Blues’-Before Everyone Dies.” The New Yorker (February 4, 2002). 54-63. Spencer, Jon Michael. Blues and Evil. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Titon, Jeff Todd. “Text.” Journal of American Folklore 108, no.430 (Autumn, 1995): 432-448. Wilson, William. “Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism.” Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 4 (1973): 819-835.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ETHNO- MUSO- EDU- WHAT? SONYA WHITE

Introduction Based on my essay, Ethno-Musiceducation: Scholarship at the Nexus of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Ethno- Muso- Edu- What? is a small-scale theatrical production that pushes the boundaries of traditional scholarly conference lectures and typical music education research topics. In this introduction I will locate my puppet-play within the contexts of the literary genre creative nonfiction, interdisciplinary education, and my experience as a music educator. Additionally, I will suggest a view of this puppet-play as research, discuss my motivations for ‘speaking’ through puppet characters, and conclude with a brief synopsis of the play.

Creative Nonfiction1, Interdisciplinary Education, and My Experiences As A Music Educator Creative nonfiction, or literary journalism, is a genre of literature that exploits and fuses writing techniques, elements, and forms of fiction and nonfiction (Dobler 2006; Druker 2006). For example, a creative nonfiction essay may report researched facts using the techniques of storytellers. Elements manipulated for effect in traditional fiction such as setting, sequence, characterization, voice, perspective, etc., often contribute to a cinematic or opinionated element in creative nonfiction publications. Conversely, elements and techniques that gird traditional journalism, scholarly publications, and similar prose – including well research presentation of facts, empirical documentation, and triangulation of data – remain central. Creative nonfiction’s ability to engage the reader on a personal level and in the context of the ‘real world’ is a defining characteristic of this genre. These works may take the form of essays, memoirs, journal articles, short stories and books2. While definitions of creative nonfiction literature are inconsistent and, at times contradictory, they

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rarely extend the genre to theatrical playwriting. Nevertheless, my goals in presenting my research as a play are harmonious with those of creative nonfiction writers. Specifically, I use setting – evening in the nursery at the Pushing Boundaries conference3, characterization - …children … [whose] parents attend this evenings’ keynote address…4, and the perspective and voice of children’s culture to convey a theatrical approach to scholarly research. Significantly, this play sidesteps one central tenet of creative nonfiction writing. While the content presented is thoroughly researched and factual, the characters and setting (children in the nursery of the Pushing Boundaries conference) are completely my creation. With the goal of pushing boundaries to create rich opportunities for students to learn multiple layers of seemingly unrelated content, interdisciplinary education often finds a place in music education curricula (Adler and Flihan 1997). Interdisciplinary education may take the form of parallel instruction, cross disciplinary instruction, or infusion (Joseph Juliano, Jones et al. 2002). Parallel instruction generally involves teachers from two or more disciplines who focus on the same concept with a particular group of students. For example, a music and a science teacher might simultaneously concentrate on the concept of variation in music and variation in science. Cross disciplinary instruction requires collaboration between two or more teachers. An example of this approach might include a music teacher and an English language arts teacher team-teaching a unit on poetry and art song. Infusion, the most complex approach to interdisciplinary education necessitates an educator with expertise in two or more fields. For example, a history teacher with an extensive music background might explore topics related to political revolutions and topics related to orchestration through study of the Beethoven 3rd symphony and the Shostakovich11th symphony. While I never viewed the Pushing Boundaries conference attendees as my students, I did wish to infuse the academic conference culture with the creative, unpredictable, and often-playful culture of the arts education classroom. Finally, as a veteran music educator, I know that I am most successful when my students claim ownership of their learning. Additionally, cultivating opportunities for the students to participate in creating aspects of course material generally improves student interest and comprehension. By extension, I envisioned presenting my paper as a puppet-play starring conference attendees would stimulate interest among both the performers and the audience. I anticipated that the familiar, child-like voice of the characters would ease conference attendees’ comprehension of potentially jargon-laden discourse.

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From the Mouths of Babes: The Puppet-Play As Research Embedded with meaning, the term ‘research’ evokes a constellation of boundary-pushing notions. As a static noun, the term generally suggests a topic that is considered multiple times and/or from multiple perspectives, something that is ‘searched again’. Used as a verb, the term denotes the act of considering a notion multiple times and/or from multiple perspectives. The term can refer to an evolving and possibly unpredictable process (“conducting research”). Finally, the continuum of research contexts or locations is ever-changing: research ‘labs’ incorporate ‘controls’ while ‘field research’ may be subjected to dynamic elements beyond the researcher’s ‘control’. So how can a puppet-play be research? With regard to research as a noun, many scholars have examined children’s musical culture. However, this paper is unique on account of locating ethno-music education research at the nexus of music education, ethnomusicology, and folklore scholarship. In the context of research as an activity, presenting my paper in the boundary-pushing format of a puppet-play is an experiment with limited controls. Typical of experimental research, I sought to find a solution to a nagging question: how can I read my paper in a manner that is captivating and that demonstrates ethno-music education’s playful and collective elements? Saddled with a research question that would doubtlessly yield an unconventional lecture, I reverted to a problem-solving style honed from years of my classroom experience. I decided that my speaking voice was anything but captivating and that someone else should read my paper. But one person reading would not convey the fun at the center of children’s culture in the moments when the adults are absent. Finally I arrived at an experiment design: create a play. Still, several considerations needed to be addressed – who would play the characters, what could I do to make the actors feel empowered, and how might I invoke the experience of the theatre while demonstrating scholarly research? At last I settled on a few controls for my experiment, I decided that conference attendees who volunteered would read the script. I gave each reader a puppet in an effort to assuage potential stage fright or nerves associated with the obligation of ‘acting’. Additionally, I chose gender-neutral character names in an effort to avoid unnecessary confusion. Finally, I created a playbill whose cover featured a photograph of girls playing a clapping game from my ethnomusic education research while the inner pages listed my bibliography. While I don’t imagine I will be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize on account of my playwriting finesse, I do believe the experiment was successful. The performance received both thunderous applause as well as extended scholarly discussion. Unconventional as it may be, this study did ‘search again’ the topic

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of children’s musical culture. Additionally, this performance/research process pushes the boundaries of the research continuum.

Notes 1

For a comprehensive approach to creative nonfiction as a genre, see Lee Gutkin’s The Art of Creative Nonfiction and the journal Creative Nonfiction edited by Lee Gutkin. 2 Book-length examples of creative nonfiction include Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and J. Anthony Lucas’ Common Ground. 3 Ethno- Muso- Edu- What?: Setting 4 Ethno- Muso- Edu- What?: Sonya White’s opening lines

References Adler, A. and S. Flihan (1997). The interdisciplinary continuum: Reconciling theory, research and practice. Albany, NY, Center on English Learning and Achievement: 1-40. Dobler, B. (2006). Bruce Dobler's Creative Nonfiction Compendium. Pittsburg. 2006: Website describing Creative Nonfiction and offering a rich variety of resources on the genre. Druker, P. (2006). What is creative nonfiction???, University of Idaho, Department of English. 2006: Professor Druker has created this website to introduce students to aspects of creative nonfiction. Joseph Juliano, J., C. T. Jones, et al. (2002). Authentic connections: Interdisciplinary work in the arts, Consortium of National Arts Education Associations: AATE, MENC, NAEA, NDEO: 1-10.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ETHNO- MUSO- EDU- WHAT? A ONE-ACT PLAY SONYA WHITE

Based on Sonya White’s Ethno-music education: Scholarship at the Nexus of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore Starring Attendees Pushing Boundaries: Extreme Folklore and Ethnomusicology Conference Indiana University, April 1 & 2, 2005

Cast (in order of appearance): Sonya White Lee Chris Terri Pat, the pet

Setting: Evening at the Pushing Boundaries Conference Nursery Ethno- Muso- Edu- What? Sonya White: Look at their angelic faces! I’m glad I could watch the children while their parents attend this evening’s keynote address and jam session. Now that they’re asleep I think I’ll finish transcribing these tapes. Look! Even the pet is napping! (sigh)

Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (exit Sonya White) Lee: Okay, the coast is clear! Chris: Is she gone? Terri: Yup! Pat: It feels nice to talk again! Lee: So Chris, what’d you find out about this woman who’s supposed to be watching us? Chris: Here’s the scoop – her name’s Sonya White and she claims to be an ethnomusic education researcher. Pat: An ethno-muso-edu what???!!! Terri: Hey, I bet Sonya White developed the term ‘ethno-music education research’ to describe scholarship at the nexus of music education, ethnomusicology, and folklore! Chris: I think she’s also trying to allude to research interests in music education that occurs outside of typical institutional settings constructed for learning. Pat: You mean public school classrooms, conservatory classes, and that sort of thing? Chris: Bingo! Lee: Yeah, she’s probably trying to highlight the traditional ways people, especially children, learn and teach their folk music. Pat: Oh… Say, if Sonya White is trying to make a case for this idea of ethno-music education research, do any of you suppose ethnomusicologists, folklorists, or music educators have set a precedent for this study through scholarly or practical writings? Terri: I’m sure they have! In fact, I’ll bet that each of those three disciplines offers a convenient and focused lens for viewing children’s folk music. Lee: Wait up one minute – children’s folk music? Pat: Yes, of course! Ms. White’s paper is certain to address scholarship on the music of, by and for children – Terri: (interrupting) children’s folk music, you see?

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Lee: Okay, children’s folk music. Hm… Do you mean clapping game songs, jump rope songs, and other kids’ music? Pat & Terri: That’s the ticket! Chris: This is starting to sound fun – imagine the field research! Pat, what were you saying about scholars who have already done work in this area? Pat: Well, a few months ago the family I live with attended an ethnomusicology conference. I heard a lot of talk about transmission but not too much about teaching and learning. I seem to remember one fellow whose name kept coming up, though… Bla-, Blac-, BlickTerri: Blacking! John Blacking! Lee: Yes, Blacking and his ground-breaking research, Venda Children’s Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis published back in ‘67. That study was HUGE! Chris: Well what about other ethnomusicologists? children’s folk songs in the last decade or two?

Who’s been doing work on

Terri: It seems that, although there have been quite a few missed opportunities, some forward-thinking ethnomusicologists are taking this bull by the horns. Chris: Yeah, like who? Pat:

Terri, didn’t we hear someone saying something about Gaunt’s ethnomusicological research on children’s folk song, Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls’ Play and Minks’ article, From Children’s Song to Expressive Practices: Old and New Directions in the Ethnomusicological Study of Children?

Chris: Man, I wish my pet had a memory like Pat’s! Terri: Pat is no ordinary pet! In fact, my furry friend found a flyer proclaiming the coming of Musiké, an upcoming Society for Ethnomusicology publication that promises to focus on transmission, traditional musics, and music education throughout the world. (turning towards Lee) Lee, didn’t your parents drag you to some folklore conference recently? What sort of talk did they have about children’s folk music? Lee: Terri, you have got a terrific memory! And goodness, folklore scholars seem to live for child lore research! As a group, they aren’t always so obsessed with music notation, the way the music educators and ethnomusicologists are, but

Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology they sure can give vivid accounts of all aspects of the music of, by, and for children! Chris: Folklore researchers have produced enough literature that I bet somebody must have compiled a useful bibliography… Lee: Hm, let’s see… Well, Grider and Halpert each published one. Those are helpful starting places. If you’re interested in longitudinal studies you’ve got to check out Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children and Yoffie’s Three Generations of Children’s Singing Games in St. Louis. Pat: What about folklore literature that considers philosophical aspects of children’s folk music research? Lee: Thanks for reminding me! I remember hearing about an article with a name that was tricky for me to pronounce. Eastman’s Nyimbo za Watoto: The Swahili Child’s World View and Cliff’s On Relationships Between Folk Music and Folk Games both deal with pressing philosophical considerations for folklorists studying the music of, by, and for children. Also, a Language Arts teacher wrote a nifty dissertation. Soileau’s African American Children’s Folklore: A Study in Games and Play gives an articulate account of various children’s folk songs, games, taunts, and so forth. Terri: Chris, aren’t your parents music educators? Certainly they must be concerned with children’s folk music? Chris: It seems like it should be that way, eh? Well, in all honesty, whenever my parents trot me out to music educators’ conferences I am surprised at how much I don’t hear about children’s folk music, but there do seem to be a few feisty scholars exploring this topic. Pat: Now wait one minute! It seems music educators have been talking endlessly about multiculturalism for the last generation or so. Chris: True. But Sonya White’s research is about something different. She’s concerned with the music children make for and with each other rather than music teachers’ attempts to appear culturally inclusive. Lee: Hm, now I understand. So, Chris, what were you saying about the ferocious scholars? Chris: “Feisty” scholars, not ferocious ones! Where was I… Oh yes, you must remember, music education is both a research field and a practical field. Pat: Fine, tell us about the research first.

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Chris: Hm…Well, my parents were discussing recent dissertations that have explored children’s folk music in the States and abroad. Those scholars have both challenged and supported traditional research methods and models, involved children in a variety of aspects of the research process, and even attempted to coordinate children’s physical movements in the notation of the kids’ folk songs. Other scholarly publications have considered the music of, by, and for young children, nearly-adult youth, and historical contexts of previous research on children’s folk songs. Terri: What about music educators’ practical texts? Chris: Well, there are the pre-service texts, but they don’t usually have much about children’s folk songs in them. Then there are the cute picture books for classroom teachers who don’t read music; they aren’t terribly useful either. But the practical books based on research, like Hawes and Jones’ Step It Down, Fulton and Smith’s Let’s Slice the Ice, and Revels’ Celebrate the Winter, are quite another story! Pat: Okay, it seems that there is plenty of precedent for scholarly – Terri: (interrupting) – and practical – Pat: - and practical literature on children’s folk music. But I seem to remember Sonya White muttering something about emic and etic research perspectives just before she left. Lee, what do you suppose that was about? Lee: Well, an insider’s research perspective is an emic perspective while an etic research perspective describes an outsider’s view. Get it? Chris: Maybe. Give us a musical example. Lee: Let’s see… Okay, how about this: Sonya White asked two individuals to describe the African American Spiritual. One self-identified as having an emic, or insider’s relationship with this musical genre; the second self-identified as having an etic, or outsider’s relationship with the same music. Chris: I’m with you so far… Pat: (eagerly) Let me guess – the first individual used intimate terms, like “our churches” and “available to us” while the second spoke with distance toward this genre of music. Lee: You must have been a fly on the wall!

Over the Edge: Pushing the Boundaries of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Chris: Now I get it. In fact, I can see advantages and disadvantages to incorporating or avoiding emic and etic research perspectives at various stages of children’s folk music scholarship. Lee: You betcha! Terri: But doesn’t all this emic - etic stuff present a confounding question? Lee & Chris: Confounding question? Terri: Yes. How can adults study children’s folk music using an insider’s perspective? Lee: Oh, that confounding question… Well, what if adults collect their data from the childhood memories of other adults, the way Fulton and Jones did in Let’s Slice the Ice? Chris: Or, what if a child produces the data, as Bernstein did in Hand Clap!? Terri: Okay, those suggestions work for me. So, do you think Sonya White will suggest any future directions for ethno-music education research? Pat: Researchers love to end their papers with new questions; what makes you think Sonya White would be any different? (others nod in agreement while muttering “yep”, “right-o”, and so forth.) Chris: You know, if I could conduct an ethno-music education research study, I would love to gather a comprehensive catalogue of children’s folk music from one geographic location and within one short period of time. Lee: That sounds cool! I’d love to do some comparative research! I might consider children’s folk music in diverse urban or rural communities. Terri: I’d love to develop theory grounded in Chris’s data! Pat: What about a study exploring children’s perceptions of themselves in the context of their music? Or an examination of the “nonsense” words in children’s folk music – don’t you think some of those nonsense words are really words whose meaning we have simply lost? Chris: Now that I think about it, I bet Ms. White could think of future research that studies children’s instrumental folk music and that explores creativity research, too. Lee: (urgently) HUSH!!! I think I hear the adults returning!

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Pat: Yes, I hear them, too! We’ll have to continue this conversation at another time…

The End References Addo, A. (1995). Ghanaian children's music cultures: A video ethnography of selected singing games, University of British Columbia. Bernstein, S. (1994). Hand clap! "Miss Mary Mack" and 42 other handclapping games for kids. Avon, MA, Adams Media Corp. Blacking, J. (1995). Venda children's songs: A study in ethnomusicological analysis. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Campbell, P. S. (1991). "The child-song genre: A comparison of songs by and for children." International Journal of Music Education 1991(17): 14-23. —. (1998). Songs in their heads: Music and its meaning in children's lives. New York, Oxford University Press, Inc. —. (1999). "The many-splendored worlds of our musical children." Update: Applications of Research in Music Education 18(1): 7-14. —. (2000). "How musical we are: John Blacking on music, education, and cultural understanding." Journal of Research in Music Education 48(4): 336359. —. (2000). "What music really means to children." Music Educators Journal 86(5): 32-36. Choksy, L. (1988). The Kodaly method: Comprehensive music education from infant to adult. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall. Clayton, M., T. Herbert, et al., Eds. (2003). The cultural study of music: A critical introduction. New York, Routledge. Cliff, J. M. (1992). "On relationships between folk music and folk games." Western Folklore 51: 129-151. Dawe, K. (2003). The cultural study of musical instruments. The cultural study of music: A critical introduction. M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton. New York, Routledge: 368 pages. Dominic, G. and C. Reasoner (2001). Song of the hermit thrush: An Iroquois legend, Troll Communications L. L. C. Eastman, C. M. (1986). "Nyimbo za Watoto: The Swahili child's world view." Ethos 14(2): 144-173. Ellingson, T. (1992). Transcription. Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. H. Myers. New York, The Macmillan Press. I: 153 - 164. Frazee, J. and K. Kreuter (1987). Discovering Orff: A curriculum for music teachers. New York, Schott.

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Fulton, E. and P. Smith (1978). Let's slice the ice. St. Louis, MO, MMB Music, Inc. Gaunt, K. D. (1997). Translating double-dutch to hip-hop: The musical vernacular of black girls' play. Language, rhythm, and sound: Black popular cultures into the twenty-first century. J. K. Adjaye and A. R. Andrews. Pittsburgh, U. of Pittsburgh: 146-173. Goodwin, M. H. (1997). "Children's linguistic and social worlds." Anthropology Newsletter 38(4). Green, L. (2001). How popular musicians learn: A way ahead for music education. Aldershot, Ashgate. Grider, S. A. (1980). "A select bibliography of childlore." Western Folklore 39(3): 248-265. Halpert, H. (1982). "Childlore bibliography: A supplement." Western Folklore 41(3): 205-228. Hawes, B. L., E. Young, et al. (2003). The films of Bess Lomax Hawes. West Hills, CA, Media Generation. Hoberman, M. A. and N. B. Westcott (1998). Miss Mary Mack. New York, Little Brown and Co. Jones, B. and B. L. Hawes (1987). Step it down: Games, plays, songs, and stories from the Afro-American heritage. Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press. Kreutzer, N. J. (2001). "Music in rural Zimbabwe: The Chaminuka effect." General Music Today 15(1): 16-20. —. (2001). "Song acquisition among rural Shona-speaking Zimbabwean children from birth to 7 years." Journal of Research in Music Education 49(3): 198-211. Langstaff, J., G. Emlen, et al., Eds. (2001). Celebrate the winter: Winter solstice celebrations for schools & communities. Watertown, MA, Revels, Inc. Lett, J. (2004). Emic/etic distinctions. Indian River, FL, Indian River Community College. 2004: Webpage for James Lett, Ph. D. Minks, A. (2002). "From children's song to expressive practices: Old and new directions in the ethnomusicological study of children." Ethnomusicology 46(3): 379-408. Newell, W. W. (1963). Games and songs of American children. New York, Dover Publications, Inc. Nye, R. E. and V. T. Nye (1985). Music in the elementary school. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Riddell, C. (1990). Traditional singing games of elementary school children in Los Angeles. University of California, Los Angeles. L. A., University of California, Los Angeles: 526 pages.

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Soileau, J. P. (2002). African American children's folklore: A study in games and play. University of Louisiana at LaFayette. LaFayette, University of Louisiana: 231 pp. Toepke, A. and A. Serrano (1998). The language you cry in: The story of a Mende song. California, Newsreel. Winter, J. (1992). Follow the drinking gourd. New York, Dragonfly Books of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Yoffie, L. R. C. (1947). "Three generations of children's singing games in St. Louis." Journal of American Folklore 60(235): p. 1-51. Young, S. (1995). "Listening to the music of early childhood." British Journal of Music Education 12(1): 51-58.