April 18, 2006
please support
http://www.streetsoccer.org/
April 07, 2006
ganbe brass band, un whiskicito y a editar-noche del viernes
March 20, 2006
the panda cam gives meaning to my life
March 13, 2006
And once more i entirely missed the NY Underground film festival...
http://www.nyuff.com/2006/
sad...so sad
http://www.nyuff.com/2006/
sad...so sad
i am a product of the media.
May 26, 2005
Notes on
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Judgement
Well, this as many Kantian text proves to be very rich as well as very complex. According to Kant, there is no empirical basis of proof that could compel anyone to make some judgement of taste. A judgment of state is not the same as a judgment of reason. Judgements of taste are synthetic since they go beyond the concept of the object and even beyond the intuition of the object and add a predicate (pleasant feeling). How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Mechanical art versus aesthetic art which arises feelings of pleasure/. Art canbe called fine art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature. Antimony concerning the principle of taste: Thesis: not based in concepts. Antithesis: based on concepts. An audience approaches a work disinterested, not meaning with no interest at all, but there is not a real rational engagement with the work to consider an aesthetic value.
* If art merely performs the acts that are required to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object, then it is mechanical art: but if what it intends directly is [to arouse] the feeling of pleasure, then it is called aesthetic art. The latter is wither agreeable or fine art.
Nature, we say, is beautiful if it also looks like art: and art can be called fine art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature.
Notes on
RG Collingwood
The Principles of art
Collingwood presents a view of art and artistic expression. His view is based on expressionism. He emphasizes that art is arrived at by using ones emotions and becoming conscious of these emotions. For him the work of art is not the expression of the emotions but the effort taken in order to express that emotion which is being felt. Collingwood also explains how art is not only based on taste or aesthetics, but that is intimately connected with oneself in many aspects, such as the intellectual, social, imaginative and affective. The creation of a work is an act of imaginative creation and the appreciation of any work supposedly recreates those emotions and thoughts that were used in order to create it.
* What we get out of a work of art is always divisible in two parts. There is specialized sensous experieence, an experience of seeing or hearing as the case may be. There is also a non-specialized imaginative experience, involving not only elements homogeneous, after their imaginary fashion, but others heterogeneous with them.
Notes on
GWF Hegel
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
Emphasizes the spirit of a culture developed in their art. The spirit of art has first a universal sense. and afterwards acquires a partivular sense and the final part is when it acquires an individualization of artistic beauty. Three relations of the idea to its configuration. Symbolic art:a mere search for portrayal. Classical: affords the production and vision of the completed Ideal and presents it as actualized in fact. The third one is the romantic form. good conclusion: “Now, therefore, what the particular arts realize in individual works of art is, according to the Concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding Idea of Beauty. It is as the external actualization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising. Its architect and builder is the self-comprehending spirit of beauty, but to complete it will need the history of the world in its development thorought thousands of years.
* Artistic configuration and its differences are on the one hand, as spiritual, of a more universal kind and not bound to one material, and sensous existence is itself differentiated in numerous ways, but since this existence, like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner soul, a pecific sensous material does thereby, on the other hand, acquire a closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms of artistic configuration.
three parts of this science universal-particular-final.
What the particular arts realize in individual works of art is, according to the concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. It is as the external actualization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising.
Notes on
Franz Boas
Primitive Art
He asserts that all human activities may assume forms that give them esthetic values. By appealing to the senses, activities may acquire esthetic values. This is very interesting for it is a broad explanation for acquiring esthetic appeal, and he will extend his thought into the realm of how broad art may be. Moreover, he says that art is a process or processes by which certain typical forms are produced (after having acquired a technical virtuosity). Thus, fixity of forms are closely connected to the idea of beauty, according to Boas; since this fixity is only acquired by having acquired a highly developed technique or virtuosity. This stability of forms would lead to style, otherwise non-existent. Furthermore, he separates ideas and objects. And when an idea is presented in an object, it adds meaning by acting as a symbol. He studies the Eskimo throwing sticks which have the same function but are designed differently in each tribe. Boas also shows the conservativism of forms both in industrialized societies as in pre-industrial groups. Also of interest is Boas’ consideration of the artisan. He tries to explain how in some tribes it is hard to extract any knowledge of the object produced from the maker (because of a lack of intimate knowledge both personal and cultural), whereas in others it is not so difficult to engage thru the maker into the overall meaning of the work. Artisans and artists are terms that we always keep trying to define with my friends beyond the usual criteria of repetition and social purposes of the objects made, so Boas discussion shed some light on that subject for me.
*The woven bags of the Ojibwa are gorgeous.
Another interesting aspect found in Boas’ essay was the similarity found between ‘western’ art as well as other people’s art, in the collaborations and influences that develop in art.
*The bulk of the makers of objects of everyday use are, therefore, imitators, not originators, and the mass of uniform material that is in use and constantly seen will restrict the free play of imagination of the original minds. There is probably not a single region in existence in which the style may be understood entirely as an inner growth and an expression of cultural life of a single tribe.
Notes on
Raymond Firth
Art and Anthropology
Firth raises interesting points on art. He shows how the Western view of art is not a completely correct definition in that it has to be extended for it to encompass ‘exotic’ art. He also gives a remarkable argument to break the differentiation between art and craft, given historical artistic expressions such as the Bauhaus utilitarian works. Also fascinating is the connection found in nature and its aesthetic appeal. Thus, artistic beauty is not only man-made, since natural beauty is not opposed to artificial beauty. Hehe, the acid test of aesthetic value-high auction prices (remember to quote often). A fascinating aspect of anthropology of art is the arduous search for the implicit and explicit meanings of art in that, as Firth explained, there may be meanings that cannot be put into words but are very important to the maintenance of their art. Firth also demonstrates how ‘exotic art’ continuously develops and is not stagnant or unalterable in style.
*Tension or ambiguity in a work of art, from our own or an alien culture, there probably must be. But it can be of a very diffuse kind, concerned with the effort to grasp novel patterns of colour, line, mass, or sound, and relate them to our existing experience.
The concept ‘art’ as such is alien to the practice and presumably the thought of many of the peoples studied by anthropologists, who try to present the people’s own iconic classification as a whole. Then, many simple iconic forms can bear a strong semantic charge, which puts them alongside more elaborate ritual forms to which the designation of art would be given-for example, the cross in much Christian sculpture.
Modern studies have revealed that the alleged ‘traditional’ has often been a product of an early contact with Western industrial influences, including steel tools.
Notes on
Clifford Geertz
Art as a Cultural System
Geertz correctly says that art is hard to talk about, and people may become very simplistic or give many different meanings to different works, which may be unnecessary.
*Understanding the song of a bird must be nice. Would birds appreciate it as much as we do (from a sound perspective)? How does this appreciation apply in humans and the artistic expressions in different cultures?
-Nice quote: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
Geertz also presents the view that social environments define much of a person’s perception of beauty. Which I believe is very true, sometimes it may be harmful when people are very close minded and are not able to appreciate other people’s aesthetic values. So, it becomes a system of cultural symbols. And these symbols are easily read by the people belonging to a certain culture but may also be learnt by a ‘foreign’ person into that culture. Many of those symbols may overlap in cultures. By analyzing XV century italian painting, he shows the symbols, meanings, and ideas applied to the works of the time. As well as by analyzing Morrocan poetry. He asserts that the most popular meaning of a work stays with it. Sometimes undermining that work or applying individual morale to indoctrinate it into others. Objectivity is also a cause of cultural indoctrination through art. He believes that what seems important is not the works per se but the factors that caused these statues, painting or poems.
*The capacity, variable among peoples as it is among individuals to perceive meaning in pictures (or poems, melodies, buildings, pots, dramas, statues) is, like all other fully human capacities, a product of collective experience which far transcends it, as is the far rarer capacity to put it there in the first place. It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. And if it is a semiotic theory of art it must trace the life of signs in society, not in an invented world of dualities, transformations, parallels and equivalences.
Notes on
H. Morphy
From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among the Yolngu
To study the aesthetic of Yolngu paintings, Morphy denies the relationist perspective of aesthetic value that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Since artists try to send certain signals but the audience’s response is unpredictable. So, works transcend the control of their creators. Morphy explains how Yolngu paintings are not made with the same purpose as in Western cultures. These painting tend to represent Ancesral beings through the use of Ancestral designs which may contain spiritual power and differ among clans. Interesting how paintings are not a contemplative experience for Yolngu. Due to the significance of what may be depicted on the painting. So Yolngu painters try to produce a correct design, to produce an Ancestrally powerful design, and to produce a painting which enhances or beautifies the object it is painted on. These painting are judged on 3 criteria: the correctness of the design, the brightness and the clarity of its cross-hatched lines (as we may recall, this perfection of technique theory can be applied from Boas’ essay). The importance of light for Yolngu can be seen in this quote: ‘the light that makes the heart go happy, makes it smile’ These paintings and the connection with the brightness are said to represent how powerful those Ancestral beings are represented. Thus, some paintings are destroyed before being displayed in public and why they avoid to look directly at these paintings. Morphy also arguments in resemblance to Radcliffe-Brown: the mental state of the [ritual Andamanese] dancers is closely related to the mental state that we call aesthetic enjoyment. But Morphy extends his argument to say that the Yolngu’s selection of ritual components for a ceremony is centrally concerned wit matters of content as well as form.
*Long, contemplative viewing is not the only way to appreciate a painting. The brief glimpse from the corner of the eye may indeed be an aesthetic experience in harmony with the way in which Yolngu art is intended to be experienced and understood.
Notes on
Jeremy Coote
Marvels of Everyday Vision
This is a most interesting essay that diverts from the concentration of studying art objects and focuses on the visual aesthetic that governs the cattle keeping Nilotes of the Southern Sudan. Thus, Coote is more comfortable when talking about art as the ‘aesthetic aspect of a society’s activities and products. For this group, cattle is a highly valued possession and plays an important tole in their life. From the physical characteristics of the cattle, the Nilotic cattle-keepers derive their visual aesthetics. E.g. shape of the horns, color configuration, fatness of the body, sheen of the hide.They apply metaphorically the terminology used for cattle characteristics to people’s characteristics. As in the case of the Dinkas, if their cattle-colour vocabulary were taken away, they would have scarcely any way of describing visual experience in terms of colour, light and darkness. They discuss about cattle in a highly developed manner based on the physical characteristics. For them ‘cattle are primarily a feast for the eyes and only secondarily a feaast for the stomach. Coote concludes that people act in the world to maximize their aesthetic satisfaction just as the Nilotes take pleasure in the lives they lead, as well as into some of the marvels of their everyday vision.
*The philosophy of art tends towards analyzing the relation between art and such matters as the True and the Good, matters which are beyond the formal qualities of works of art. It is perhaps worth emphasizing that practices similar to those of Western art criticism and philosophy are to be found in other cultures. These practices are worthy of study in their own right.
Notes on
Anthony Shelton
Predicates of Aesthetic Judgement
Shelton analyzes the ‘aesthetics’ of the Huichol and how it is different from the Western conception of aesthetic. He will use Wittgenstein’s analogy which says that the meaning of aesthetics can only be derived from an examination of the different language games in which it features. Also, decorated or ritual objects are not restricted to exchange relations between huuman and supernatural beings. They are also used in exchange of goods between wife-givers and wife-takers (marriage ceremonies). So objects are not only religious offerings but also social symbols. A worry for Shelton is that the more elaborate the crafts for external (commercial) use become, the more impoverished become the Huichol deities. Thus, the impoverishment of the gods means a decline in their power and influence over the Huichol world. Emphasis in the difference between craft production disintegrative since it is controoled by an external value system; while the production of ritual objects and offerings serves an integrative function within the society. Huichol aesthetics has no existence independent of the religious and ritual contexts. There is no discourse of aesthetics, but it is used as an ethical codification.
Notes on
Ross Bowden
Art, Architecture, and Collective Representations in a New Guinea Society
Bowden studies the Kwoma. of Papua New Guinea. Male virilitude represented on the decorations inside the house. These houses are ceremonial centers. They are said to represent men’s cultural ability to reproduce (create) and kill, giving them the distinction of being creators and the powers of also being able to end life. Interesting to see the sense of ownership of a certain totemic species by different clans. Sculptures are vivified by the spirits they depict. Sizes of the houses depend on the size of the clan. Bark paintings are incorporated in the ceilings of these ceremonial houses and contributions by other clans are welcome. Of course ‘renowned artists’ get a privilege position in the ceiling of the house. These houses are mainly at the center of the settlement and women are excluded from these houses. In these houses men also debate clan matters in a orderly way since, any act of violence may be punished by the spirits within the house. Kwoma houses are also an exceptional architetural construction. Themes: maculine creativity, homicidal aggression, and exchange.
Notes on
Susanne Küchler
Making Skins; Malangan and the Idiom of Kinship in Northern New Ireland
The essay discusses the art objects produced as gifts for final mortuary exchanges in the northern part of New Ireland (art from this region is named ‘malangan’). Kuchler argues that malanagan art is inseparable from the colonial situation in which relations of land, labour, and loyalty became institutionalized in the mortuary context. As funerary monuments, malangan sculptures evoke memories of the past, of the deceased one, and of events associated with their lives.So, the sculpture must enclose the ‘passage of time’.But these sculptures are confined to the few hours between public display and disposal in the forest.
*Beautiful expression of passing time, and a metaphor of life.
The malangan present a seemingly unlimited inventiveness in the different ways of composing motifs (about twenty seven) into new different combinations. Carving wooden malngan is referred to as (tetak) ‘the making of skin’. Malngan images come from dreaming, which are set in motion after having eaten a magical potion. Malangan carvers may usually be of an advanced age. But carving is not only done with the purpose of re-presenting a forgotten image so that it can become shaared memory. The image is the way to to represent the seat of thought and creativity during life, and that becomes raw energy after death----> ‘Vital substance’. So the images are to recapture this energy and present its infinite renewal, since death is not the collapse of this substance but its the start of a long process of renewal. Of course, social processes have interfered and consequently developed in various ways the malangan sculptures.
Notes on
Jarich Oosten
Representing the Spirits: The masks of the Alaskan Inuit
Masks represent an animal as prototype of its genus (with its ‘inua’ or human being and its appearance). For Inuit the unityof men and animals is emphasized in diachronic as well as in synchronic perspective.They believed that in the early days all animate beings had a dual existence, and they could become either animals or men. Probably, that is why animals and humans are merged in this masks but physically and thematically. It seems as a cycle of personifications and animal imitations. Inuit culture has an intricate theory of souls (soul dualism, essence of being, names connected namesakes as part of a soul development). Everyone could have encounters with spirits but shamans perceive the true nature of animate and inanimate beings. Masks were not instrumental in establishing relations with spirits, rather theyserve to represent meetings with spirits and expressed the human nature of animals and spirits (inua). Not a clear distinction between secular and religious masks. Early mask collectors did not acquire much information. Masks used in some feasts but not in others.
Notes on
Robert Layton
Traditional and Contemporary Art of Aboriginal Australia: Two Case Studies
Layton is concerned with Graburn’s assertion that communities of the “fourth world” rarely produce arts for their own consumption, but that they produce arts primarily for sale to another culture. Layton asks two questions: 1)why is it that art provides an appropriate vehicle for the participation of hunter-gatherer communities in the market economy of the dominant society within which they find themselves encapsulated? 2) How is is that such communities can preserve a viable culture out of which distinctive art-forms emerge? “By means of the cash income, artists and their communities secure a degree of independence from state aid and the limited opportunities for employment offered by the dominant society.” He will study two Australian groups: Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara. These communities are very similar to the Pintupi presented in Myers’ book. The style of the art in these communities is based on the representation of the marks left by people and animals as they move across the landscape. Multivalency/polysemy: meanings represented in a single motif. Ambiguity: meanings which potentially may be attributed to a single motif in different contexts. As in the Pintupi, each clan has rights over their designs and dreams. Colonialism bringscatastrophic change to hunter-gatherers communities. Become dependent on the government, foreign illnesses, massacres, marginal environments to live in...As in Myers, this essay questions the transition from aboriginal to fine art. How a work becomes fine art?
Notes on
Jeremy MacClancy
The Bilbao Guggenheim
This article was very interesting to me, for I am trying to learn about the Basque country artistic and economic development. MacClancy presents the many sides in the conflict of opening a Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Since it will bring economical, artistic, social and even political consequences to the region. Arts and music had been flourishing in the Basque country recently. So the leaders of the project argued this would give a better place to showcase the work to many artists. Also, the economy is goind down in the area from its major production materials. Moreover, the government wanted to make of Bilbao a European centre for service industries, modem technologies, and upmarket tourism. Besides from these arguments, artists were separated also in those for and those against the proposal. For some the commodification of art goes against their ideals and their artistic vision, also the museum would bring the culture (artistic) of spectacle and entertainment, ‘the business of leisure’, Coca-colonization (very nice terminology). Others argued that just because an object is being treated as a commodity does not mean that it is only being treated as a commodity nor that it will, in consequence, be only ever treated as a commodity.
*…commodization is not a singular, irrevocable process, that objects may be said to have social lives, and that their being treated as commodities may only be stages within their social lives…just because an object is being treated as a commodity does not mean that it is only being treated as a commodity no that it will, in consequence, be only ever be treated as a commodity.
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Judgement
Well, this as many Kantian text proves to be very rich as well as very complex. According to Kant, there is no empirical basis of proof that could compel anyone to make some judgement of taste. A judgment of state is not the same as a judgment of reason. Judgements of taste are synthetic since they go beyond the concept of the object and even beyond the intuition of the object and add a predicate (pleasant feeling). How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Mechanical art versus aesthetic art which arises feelings of pleasure/. Art canbe called fine art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature. Antimony concerning the principle of taste: Thesis: not based in concepts. Antithesis: based on concepts. An audience approaches a work disinterested, not meaning with no interest at all, but there is not a real rational engagement with the work to consider an aesthetic value.
* If art merely performs the acts that are required to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object, then it is mechanical art: but if what it intends directly is [to arouse] the feeling of pleasure, then it is called aesthetic art. The latter is wither agreeable or fine art.
Nature, we say, is beautiful if it also looks like art: and art can be called fine art only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature.
Notes on
RG Collingwood
The Principles of art
Collingwood presents a view of art and artistic expression. His view is based on expressionism. He emphasizes that art is arrived at by using ones emotions and becoming conscious of these emotions. For him the work of art is not the expression of the emotions but the effort taken in order to express that emotion which is being felt. Collingwood also explains how art is not only based on taste or aesthetics, but that is intimately connected with oneself in many aspects, such as the intellectual, social, imaginative and affective. The creation of a work is an act of imaginative creation and the appreciation of any work supposedly recreates those emotions and thoughts that were used in order to create it.
* What we get out of a work of art is always divisible in two parts. There is specialized sensous experieence, an experience of seeing or hearing as the case may be. There is also a non-specialized imaginative experience, involving not only elements homogeneous, after their imaginary fashion, but others heterogeneous with them.
Notes on
GWF Hegel
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
Emphasizes the spirit of a culture developed in their art. The spirit of art has first a universal sense. and afterwards acquires a partivular sense and the final part is when it acquires an individualization of artistic beauty. Three relations of the idea to its configuration. Symbolic art:a mere search for portrayal. Classical: affords the production and vision of the completed Ideal and presents it as actualized in fact. The third one is the romantic form. good conclusion: “Now, therefore, what the particular arts realize in individual works of art is, according to the Concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding Idea of Beauty. It is as the external actualization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising. Its architect and builder is the self-comprehending spirit of beauty, but to complete it will need the history of the world in its development thorought thousands of years.
* Artistic configuration and its differences are on the one hand, as spiritual, of a more universal kind and not bound to one material, and sensous existence is itself differentiated in numerous ways, but since this existence, like spirit, has the Concept implicitly for its inner soul, a pecific sensous material does thereby, on the other hand, acquire a closer relation and a secret harmony with the spiritual differences and forms of artistic configuration.
three parts of this science universal-particular-final.
What the particular arts realize in individual works of art is, according to the concept of art, only the universal forms of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. It is as the external actualization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is rising.
Notes on
Franz Boas
Primitive Art
He asserts that all human activities may assume forms that give them esthetic values. By appealing to the senses, activities may acquire esthetic values. This is very interesting for it is a broad explanation for acquiring esthetic appeal, and he will extend his thought into the realm of how broad art may be. Moreover, he says that art is a process or processes by which certain typical forms are produced (after having acquired a technical virtuosity). Thus, fixity of forms are closely connected to the idea of beauty, according to Boas; since this fixity is only acquired by having acquired a highly developed technique or virtuosity. This stability of forms would lead to style, otherwise non-existent. Furthermore, he separates ideas and objects. And when an idea is presented in an object, it adds meaning by acting as a symbol. He studies the Eskimo throwing sticks which have the same function but are designed differently in each tribe. Boas also shows the conservativism of forms both in industrialized societies as in pre-industrial groups. Also of interest is Boas’ consideration of the artisan. He tries to explain how in some tribes it is hard to extract any knowledge of the object produced from the maker (because of a lack of intimate knowledge both personal and cultural), whereas in others it is not so difficult to engage thru the maker into the overall meaning of the work. Artisans and artists are terms that we always keep trying to define with my friends beyond the usual criteria of repetition and social purposes of the objects made, so Boas discussion shed some light on that subject for me.
*The woven bags of the Ojibwa are gorgeous.
Another interesting aspect found in Boas’ essay was the similarity found between ‘western’ art as well as other people’s art, in the collaborations and influences that develop in art.
*The bulk of the makers of objects of everyday use are, therefore, imitators, not originators, and the mass of uniform material that is in use and constantly seen will restrict the free play of imagination of the original minds. There is probably not a single region in existence in which the style may be understood entirely as an inner growth and an expression of cultural life of a single tribe.
Notes on
Raymond Firth
Art and Anthropology
Firth raises interesting points on art. He shows how the Western view of art is not a completely correct definition in that it has to be extended for it to encompass ‘exotic’ art. He also gives a remarkable argument to break the differentiation between art and craft, given historical artistic expressions such as the Bauhaus utilitarian works. Also fascinating is the connection found in nature and its aesthetic appeal. Thus, artistic beauty is not only man-made, since natural beauty is not opposed to artificial beauty. Hehe, the acid test of aesthetic value-high auction prices (remember to quote often). A fascinating aspect of anthropology of art is the arduous search for the implicit and explicit meanings of art in that, as Firth explained, there may be meanings that cannot be put into words but are very important to the maintenance of their art. Firth also demonstrates how ‘exotic art’ continuously develops and is not stagnant or unalterable in style.
*Tension or ambiguity in a work of art, from our own or an alien culture, there probably must be. But it can be of a very diffuse kind, concerned with the effort to grasp novel patterns of colour, line, mass, or sound, and relate them to our existing experience.
The concept ‘art’ as such is alien to the practice and presumably the thought of many of the peoples studied by anthropologists, who try to present the people’s own iconic classification as a whole. Then, many simple iconic forms can bear a strong semantic charge, which puts them alongside more elaborate ritual forms to which the designation of art would be given-for example, the cross in much Christian sculpture.
Modern studies have revealed that the alleged ‘traditional’ has often been a product of an early contact with Western industrial influences, including steel tools.
Notes on
Clifford Geertz
Art as a Cultural System
Geertz correctly says that art is hard to talk about, and people may become very simplistic or give many different meanings to different works, which may be unnecessary.
*Understanding the song of a bird must be nice. Would birds appreciate it as much as we do (from a sound perspective)? How does this appreciation apply in humans and the artistic expressions in different cultures?
-Nice quote: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
Geertz also presents the view that social environments define much of a person’s perception of beauty. Which I believe is very true, sometimes it may be harmful when people are very close minded and are not able to appreciate other people’s aesthetic values. So, it becomes a system of cultural symbols. And these symbols are easily read by the people belonging to a certain culture but may also be learnt by a ‘foreign’ person into that culture. Many of those symbols may overlap in cultures. By analyzing XV century italian painting, he shows the symbols, meanings, and ideas applied to the works of the time. As well as by analyzing Morrocan poetry. He asserts that the most popular meaning of a work stays with it. Sometimes undermining that work or applying individual morale to indoctrinate it into others. Objectivity is also a cause of cultural indoctrination through art. He believes that what seems important is not the works per se but the factors that caused these statues, painting or poems.
*The capacity, variable among peoples as it is among individuals to perceive meaning in pictures (or poems, melodies, buildings, pots, dramas, statues) is, like all other fully human capacities, a product of collective experience which far transcends it, as is the far rarer capacity to put it there in the first place. It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise. And if it is a semiotic theory of art it must trace the life of signs in society, not in an invented world of dualities, transformations, parallels and equivalences.
Notes on
H. Morphy
From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among the Yolngu
To study the aesthetic of Yolngu paintings, Morphy denies the relationist perspective of aesthetic value that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Since artists try to send certain signals but the audience’s response is unpredictable. So, works transcend the control of their creators. Morphy explains how Yolngu paintings are not made with the same purpose as in Western cultures. These painting tend to represent Ancesral beings through the use of Ancestral designs which may contain spiritual power and differ among clans. Interesting how paintings are not a contemplative experience for Yolngu. Due to the significance of what may be depicted on the painting. So Yolngu painters try to produce a correct design, to produce an Ancestrally powerful design, and to produce a painting which enhances or beautifies the object it is painted on. These painting are judged on 3 criteria: the correctness of the design, the brightness and the clarity of its cross-hatched lines (as we may recall, this perfection of technique theory can be applied from Boas’ essay). The importance of light for Yolngu can be seen in this quote: ‘the light that makes the heart go happy, makes it smile’ These paintings and the connection with the brightness are said to represent how powerful those Ancestral beings are represented. Thus, some paintings are destroyed before being displayed in public and why they avoid to look directly at these paintings. Morphy also arguments in resemblance to Radcliffe-Brown: the mental state of the [ritual Andamanese] dancers is closely related to the mental state that we call aesthetic enjoyment. But Morphy extends his argument to say that the Yolngu’s selection of ritual components for a ceremony is centrally concerned wit matters of content as well as form.
*Long, contemplative viewing is not the only way to appreciate a painting. The brief glimpse from the corner of the eye may indeed be an aesthetic experience in harmony with the way in which Yolngu art is intended to be experienced and understood.
Notes on
Jeremy Coote
Marvels of Everyday Vision
This is a most interesting essay that diverts from the concentration of studying art objects and focuses on the visual aesthetic that governs the cattle keeping Nilotes of the Southern Sudan. Thus, Coote is more comfortable when talking about art as the ‘aesthetic aspect of a society’s activities and products. For this group, cattle is a highly valued possession and plays an important tole in their life. From the physical characteristics of the cattle, the Nilotic cattle-keepers derive their visual aesthetics. E.g. shape of the horns, color configuration, fatness of the body, sheen of the hide.They apply metaphorically the terminology used for cattle characteristics to people’s characteristics. As in the case of the Dinkas, if their cattle-colour vocabulary were taken away, they would have scarcely any way of describing visual experience in terms of colour, light and darkness. They discuss about cattle in a highly developed manner based on the physical characteristics. For them ‘cattle are primarily a feast for the eyes and only secondarily a feaast for the stomach. Coote concludes that people act in the world to maximize their aesthetic satisfaction just as the Nilotes take pleasure in the lives they lead, as well as into some of the marvels of their everyday vision.
*The philosophy of art tends towards analyzing the relation between art and such matters as the True and the Good, matters which are beyond the formal qualities of works of art. It is perhaps worth emphasizing that practices similar to those of Western art criticism and philosophy are to be found in other cultures. These practices are worthy of study in their own right.
Notes on
Anthony Shelton
Predicates of Aesthetic Judgement
Shelton analyzes the ‘aesthetics’ of the Huichol and how it is different from the Western conception of aesthetic. He will use Wittgenstein’s analogy which says that the meaning of aesthetics can only be derived from an examination of the different language games in which it features. Also, decorated or ritual objects are not restricted to exchange relations between huuman and supernatural beings. They are also used in exchange of goods between wife-givers and wife-takers (marriage ceremonies). So objects are not only religious offerings but also social symbols. A worry for Shelton is that the more elaborate the crafts for external (commercial) use become, the more impoverished become the Huichol deities. Thus, the impoverishment of the gods means a decline in their power and influence over the Huichol world. Emphasis in the difference between craft production disintegrative since it is controoled by an external value system; while the production of ritual objects and offerings serves an integrative function within the society. Huichol aesthetics has no existence independent of the religious and ritual contexts. There is no discourse of aesthetics, but it is used as an ethical codification.
Notes on
Ross Bowden
Art, Architecture, and Collective Representations in a New Guinea Society
Bowden studies the Kwoma. of Papua New Guinea. Male virilitude represented on the decorations inside the house. These houses are ceremonial centers. They are said to represent men’s cultural ability to reproduce (create) and kill, giving them the distinction of being creators and the powers of also being able to end life. Interesting to see the sense of ownership of a certain totemic species by different clans. Sculptures are vivified by the spirits they depict. Sizes of the houses depend on the size of the clan. Bark paintings are incorporated in the ceilings of these ceremonial houses and contributions by other clans are welcome. Of course ‘renowned artists’ get a privilege position in the ceiling of the house. These houses are mainly at the center of the settlement and women are excluded from these houses. In these houses men also debate clan matters in a orderly way since, any act of violence may be punished by the spirits within the house. Kwoma houses are also an exceptional architetural construction. Themes: maculine creativity, homicidal aggression, and exchange.
Notes on
Susanne Küchler
Making Skins; Malangan and the Idiom of Kinship in Northern New Ireland
The essay discusses the art objects produced as gifts for final mortuary exchanges in the northern part of New Ireland (art from this region is named ‘malangan’). Kuchler argues that malanagan art is inseparable from the colonial situation in which relations of land, labour, and loyalty became institutionalized in the mortuary context. As funerary monuments, malangan sculptures evoke memories of the past, of the deceased one, and of events associated with their lives.So, the sculpture must enclose the ‘passage of time’.But these sculptures are confined to the few hours between public display and disposal in the forest.
*Beautiful expression of passing time, and a metaphor of life.
The malangan present a seemingly unlimited inventiveness in the different ways of composing motifs (about twenty seven) into new different combinations. Carving wooden malngan is referred to as (tetak) ‘the making of skin’. Malngan images come from dreaming, which are set in motion after having eaten a magical potion. Malangan carvers may usually be of an advanced age. But carving is not only done with the purpose of re-presenting a forgotten image so that it can become shaared memory. The image is the way to to represent the seat of thought and creativity during life, and that becomes raw energy after death----> ‘Vital substance’. So the images are to recapture this energy and present its infinite renewal, since death is not the collapse of this substance but its the start of a long process of renewal. Of course, social processes have interfered and consequently developed in various ways the malangan sculptures.
Notes on
Jarich Oosten
Representing the Spirits: The masks of the Alaskan Inuit
Masks represent an animal as prototype of its genus (with its ‘inua’ or human being and its appearance). For Inuit the unityof men and animals is emphasized in diachronic as well as in synchronic perspective.They believed that in the early days all animate beings had a dual existence, and they could become either animals or men. Probably, that is why animals and humans are merged in this masks but physically and thematically. It seems as a cycle of personifications and animal imitations. Inuit culture has an intricate theory of souls (soul dualism, essence of being, names connected namesakes as part of a soul development). Everyone could have encounters with spirits but shamans perceive the true nature of animate and inanimate beings. Masks were not instrumental in establishing relations with spirits, rather theyserve to represent meetings with spirits and expressed the human nature of animals and spirits (inua). Not a clear distinction between secular and religious masks. Early mask collectors did not acquire much information. Masks used in some feasts but not in others.
Notes on
Robert Layton
Traditional and Contemporary Art of Aboriginal Australia: Two Case Studies
Layton is concerned with Graburn’s assertion that communities of the “fourth world” rarely produce arts for their own consumption, but that they produce arts primarily for sale to another culture. Layton asks two questions: 1)why is it that art provides an appropriate vehicle for the participation of hunter-gatherer communities in the market economy of the dominant society within which they find themselves encapsulated? 2) How is is that such communities can preserve a viable culture out of which distinctive art-forms emerge? “By means of the cash income, artists and their communities secure a degree of independence from state aid and the limited opportunities for employment offered by the dominant society.” He will study two Australian groups: Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara. These communities are very similar to the Pintupi presented in Myers’ book. The style of the art in these communities is based on the representation of the marks left by people and animals as they move across the landscape. Multivalency/polysemy: meanings represented in a single motif. Ambiguity: meanings which potentially may be attributed to a single motif in different contexts. As in the Pintupi, each clan has rights over their designs and dreams. Colonialism bringscatastrophic change to hunter-gatherers communities. Become dependent on the government, foreign illnesses, massacres, marginal environments to live in...As in Myers, this essay questions the transition from aboriginal to fine art. How a work becomes fine art?
Notes on
Jeremy MacClancy
The Bilbao Guggenheim
This article was very interesting to me, for I am trying to learn about the Basque country artistic and economic development. MacClancy presents the many sides in the conflict of opening a Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Since it will bring economical, artistic, social and even political consequences to the region. Arts and music had been flourishing in the Basque country recently. So the leaders of the project argued this would give a better place to showcase the work to many artists. Also, the economy is goind down in the area from its major production materials. Moreover, the government wanted to make of Bilbao a European centre for service industries, modem technologies, and upmarket tourism. Besides from these arguments, artists were separated also in those for and those against the proposal. For some the commodification of art goes against their ideals and their artistic vision, also the museum would bring the culture (artistic) of spectacle and entertainment, ‘the business of leisure’, Coca-colonization (very nice terminology). Others argued that just because an object is being treated as a commodity does not mean that it is only being treated as a commodity nor that it will, in consequence, be only ever treated as a commodity.
*…commodization is not a singular, irrevocable process, that objects may be said to have social lives, and that their being treated as commodities may only be stages within their social lives…just because an object is being treated as a commodity does not mean that it is only being treated as a commodity no that it will, in consequence, be only ever be treated as a commodity.
Notes on
Fred Myers
Painting Culture
This magnificent text is not only full of precise information and descriptions of Pintupi beliefs, customs, artistic representation, social interactions, et al but it is an incredible artistic and philosophical evaluation of art. The commodification of the paintings of these aboriginal tribes (besides the Pintupi) is a very intriguing process. Good to clarify that ‘objectivations by emphasizing iconography tend to be “intellectualist,” the product of a theoretical gaze or a contemplative eye.’ This is explained to not simplify or outright ignore the social context in which works are created. Pintupi paintings are not to be argued to be good or bad, but to be true. They are representations of Dreams, and whoever had certain dream is the owner of it. Others had to ask permission to paint an image that someone else ‘owned’. Myers agrees with Boas in the ‘technical experience’ concept, in trying to answer how almost every Pintupi man can take up painting and produce interesting images. That technical experience goes together with ‘an emerging social context that provides economic, social and political value for paintings of the Dreaming.
*Interesting how they feel so attached to their dreamings.
Again, in this text the commodification of art is raised as an important development for the Pintupi painters and the works per se. Myers is very detailed in economical aspects of the Pintupi paintings. The unvaluable owned dreams began to be sold by less than $A30 and their price began to raise as they were valued continuously more by the international community and as they gained exchange value.
Notes on
Alan Merriam
The study of Ethnomusicology
Alan Merriam discusses how the term of ethnomusicology developed to the present stage and she adds her own definition and arguments for it. She says that ehthnomusicology is: the study of music in culture. “Human behavior produces music, but the process is one of continuity; the behavior itself is shaped to produce music sound, and thus the study of one flows into the other.” The main aim of ethnomusicology would be to understand music, but it is not supposed to understand music sound alone, and this is probably what differentiates it from musicology. Ethnomusicologists follow three stages: collection of data, two kinds of analysis (collation of ethnographic and ethnologic materials into a coherent body of knowledge about music practice, behavior and concepts in the society being studied, and the technical lab analysis of the music sound materials collected), and the data analyzed and the results obtained are applied to relevant problems, in ethnomusicology, the social sciences and the humanities. She reminds the reader that there has always been a fear of losing the endangered musical cultures. But also, music is constantly changing just as humans do and evolve. Merriam also argues the music can be used as a means of understanding other things about other cultures since it may convey symbolic representations to use as a new vocabulary.
Notes on
Charles Keil
Motion and feeling through music
What is felt through music? How is something felt? Why is something felt? This is why Keil tries to answer in his essay. Keil says that all music has syntax or embodied meaning. From this he will use a syntactic analyisis together with the ‘engendered feeling’ felt. He reminds the reader that most of music traditions outside the West are almost exclusively based on performance. There is a comparison between classical music and jazz in 10 distinguishing points: Mode of construction, mode of presentation, mode of understanding, mode of response, guiding principles, tehnical emphases, basic unit, communication analogues, gratifications, and relevant criteria. There are also references to the flirtation between music of the engendered feeling type and dance. And also of the symbolic action that exists between dancers and musicians, which is relevant to a discussion on non-verbal communication. *nice quote: In our culture ( and perhaps in others where repression and oppression must be fought) it may be that music chose goal is engendered feeling, spontaneity, and the conquest of inhibition is of far greater value than music which aims to reflect our civilization and the repression-sublimation-Protestant-ethic syndrome upon which it is based simply because, like much great art, it offers an antidote, a strategy for dealing with our situation, rather than reinforcing it. He concludes by saying that by creating a theory based in one musical idiom it can have validity when applied to the musics of other cultures.
Notes on
Charles Keil
People’s music comparatively
Keil starts by defying the popular concept of ‘folk’ and presents how everyone participates to some degree in folk subcultures, as those centered on sports, hobbies, musical tastes and so forth. Since we all share values and consciousness with various groupings, even though they are not studied by scholars, we are all folk. Then rather than using the term folk music, he uses ‘people’s music’. Form here, he would analyze blues and polka and how they developed recently. And he will base his study in a dialectical ethnomusicology. *The presence of style indicates a strong community, an intense sociability that has been given shape through time, an assertion of control over collective feelings so powerful that any expressive innovator in the community will necessarily put his or her content into that shaping continuum ad no other. After this argument he presents the conflict of using the term style in a classless society. And we don’t know about style in classless societies because we can’t measure stylistic changes in people’s music before the impact of imperialism. Also, a style must first start to decay for people to be able to understand its growth and maturity. Still the word style, appears to be a lodestar for the dominant class, without really knowing what it represents. But in 20th century America, style is almost an entirely an ethnic working-class phenomena. Keil’s main hypotheses is that Style is a reflection of class forces. It has its basis in community recreation through ritual. In class society the media of the dominant class must be utilized for the style to be legitimated. For a working-class style to grow and prosper, the dominant culture’s stereotypes must be accepted and transcended. The first efforts of ethnic working-class communities to work through the dominant stereotypes using the dominant media borrow from both ‘high-culture’ and ‘popular’ culture,’ while second efforts toward the same goal tend to repudiate these borrowings. Style always has hegemonic thrust as it works out the implications of form in terms of inclusion and exclusion principles. A vital style always has Dionysian and Apollonian aspects competing for primacy. Both the thrust toward hegemony and the play of Dionysian and Apollonian processes are confused and confusing due to the pervasive influence of mass mediation on music in this century. He concludes by saying that styles of music from the working class arrived in the decade of ‘high culture’ fragmentation following World War I.
Notes on
John Chernoff
Ideas of Culture and the Challenge of Music
On how anthropologists view art: Culture is based on patterns of interaction with the material world and art is a reflection and affirmation of that level of culture, not even necessarily self-conscious. Therefore in anthropology music is the least considered art since it is the least material. On the term ethnomusicology: the [name] links it to an inherent and invalid negation that alienates anything non-western in many subtle ways. ‘New’ anthropology of music: music-making is a type of behavior, and people interested in music can study the institutionalization of music-making in that light: the recruitment and training of musicians, performance styles, performance venues like festivals and celebrations, religious and political roles of music, song texts, composition, patronage, ecological and instrumental resources and so on.
Before there were many concerns on tradition and authenticity: In mid-century… ethnomusicologists accepted a narrow Western definition of aesthetic values as judgments on matters of beauty and feelings about art objects.
Now, ‘although many scholars continue to address theoretical concerns about music as structured sound, the main influence of anthropologically informed studies of music has been to undermine the musicological approach.’ ‘Efforts to isolate or abstract so-called musical elements analytically have tended to yield not just one-sided or limited descriptions but have often led to actual mistakes in perception and analysis,’
*The insights that reward people who think of music primarily in musical terms are simply not available to those who think mainly in musicological terms; indeed, the latter are often victimized by a narrow conception of music that practically precludes their understanding the breadth of their artistic conception of many non-Western idioms.
Chernoff concludes with the impermanence of music: Our understanding of music has reached the point where we recognize that musical performances are momentary events and that music’s cultural meaning lies within its potential to transform the people who participate in, or attend, or are involved in musical events.
Notes on
Steven Feld
Waterfall of Song
Definition of Acoustemology: local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place resounding [in this case] in Bosavi. In this essay Feld will explore how the acoustic experience of waterfalls (more concisely the place in which they inhabit) acts in the life of the Kaluli people of Bosavi.
On Sense, embodiment and synesthesia: Because motion can draw upon the kinesthetic interplay of tactile, sonic, and visual senses, emplacement always implicates the intertwined nature of sensual bodily presence and perceptual engagement.
Experiencing and knowing place-the idea of place as sensed, place as sensation-can proceed through a complex interplay of the auditory and the visual, as well as through other intersensory perceptual processes.
Kaluli naming and storying are highly salient and sociable everyday practices, forms of social participation thoroughly related to other everyday practices such as traveling, working and visiting.
The aesthetic power and pleasure of Kaluli songs emerges in good part throught their textual poesis of placename paths.
Imagery of the Kaluli: Land, water, tree and place features are joined together with images of loss, indicated as family, bird sporits, places left, places to go toward. All of these are forcefully united through sound and the presence of a bird’s voice calling in a progression of verbs linking reported to quoted speech.
…the terminology of musical rhytm and meter are polysemic to the pulsing, splashing, and motional qualities of water.
Notes on
Steven Feld
World Beat
Very nice and short essay on the mixture of the fast music mixtures occurring all around the world: This complex traffic in sounds, money, and media is rooted in the nature of revitalization through appropriation.
*Extensive copyright controls in the hands of a few Western countries are having a riveting effect on the commodification of musical skills and styles, and the power of musical ownership.
Graceland, 1968…mix of world pop and African ‘folk’ music.
Definitions: Major Contract Artists are only granted the possibility of producing their own work and taking economic and artistic risks commensurate with their sales.
Muscians are laborers who sell their services for a direct fee and take the risk (with little expectation) that royalty percentages, spinoff jobs, tours, and recording contracts might follow from the exposure and success of records with enormous sales.
*Elite pop artists are in the strongest artistic and economic position in the world to appropriate what theylike of human musical diversity, with full support from record companies and often with the outright gratitude of the musicians whose work now appears under a new name.
Notes on
Steven Feld
From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis.
Chapter on struggle over musical propriety in the production of discourses on world music and world beat.
“In thh current global ecumene, where cultural interactions are characterized by increasingly complex exchenges of people, technology, money, media, and ideology, transcultural record productions tell specific stories about accountability, authorship, and agency, about the workings of capital, control, and compromise, and about the strategies and possibilities for valuing indigeneity as something more than essentialized otherness or generic opposition and resistance.”
schiz-:mediated music, commodified grooves, sounds split from sources, consumer products with few if any contextual linkages to the processes, practices, and forms of participation that could give them meaning with local communities.
Schizophonia needs to be imagined processually...as varied practices located in the situations, flows, phases, and circulation patterns that characterize particular cultural objects moving in and out of short and long commodity states, transforming with the experiential and material situation of producers, exchangers and consumers, located in historically specific national and global positions vis-a-vis late capitalism and development, cultural domination, modernity and postmodernity.
*Pop is a classic case of what Marx called alienation: Something human is taken from us and returned in the form of a commodity.
World vs pop vs pop world vs world pop: It is important to have a view of a world music industrialization that views power relations as shaping forces in the production of musical styles and icons of cultural identity.
93% world musical sales concentrated among six companies.
‘world music’: term refers to any commercially available music of non-western origin and circulation, as well as to musics of dominated ethnic minorities within the Western world: music of the world to be sold around the world.
-the invention of ‘world beat’ reproduces a western gaze toward the exotic and erotic, often darker-skinned, dancing body.
Music is the most highly stylized of social forms, iconically linked to the broader cultural production of local identiyty and indexically linked to contexts and occasions of community participation.
If schizophonia, the splitting of sounds from sources, is the antecedent to life in today’s global and transnational world of music, then schismogenesis is a way of describing the resultant state of progressive mutual differentiation that is playing out in at least four ways:
a) escalating dominance-submission pattern of ownership among the major independents, paralleled by a similar relationship between Western pop stars and non-Western musicians; b) an escalating succoring-dependence pattern between world beat and world music; c) an escalating exhibitionism-spectatorship pattern between third- and fourth-world creators and d) an escalating homogenization-heterogenization struggle in the realm of musical style.
authenticty vs the dynamics of appropriation. (and patronage)
-in popular culture subordinate formations are always the sources of fantasy and relaxation for the dominant class or societies.
Notes on
Veit Erlmann
Politics and aesthetics of transnational musics
The emergence of world beat in the early 1980s coincides with a growing uneasiness in the social sciences and humanitires about the institutional practice and the conventional modes and politics of representation in anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, comparative literature and other fields.
The magnitude and scope of the new global culture mark our century musically as a period of “unprescedented” diversity in the face of which the heuristic value of older conceptual models such as Westernizaation, syncretism, acculturation or urbanization has dwindled considerably.
*The production of difference...is inherent in the logic of capitalism itself.
*The eccentricity of the system is the symptom of an inner metastasis rather than a sign of his impending death.
-to “reatin a tension between what will remain an unsatisfactorily homogenizing term-postmodernism-and the heterogenous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic.
-this aesthetic of the pastiche manifests itself at a variable of levels....the reconfiguration of time and space and its consequences for subjective identity, and, as a related phenomenon, the role of nostalgia.
Notes on
Jocelyne Guilbault
Redefining the local through world music, and ZOUK
homogenization and differentiation not as mutually exclusive features of musical globalization but as integral constituents of late capitalism. The contradictory experience of the universal marketplace alongside proliferating new traditional codes and new ethnic schisms, is the key signature of the postmodern era.
*this new acces to the markets of industrialized countries, designating the connection traditionally referred to as center/peripherry, has constituted one of the venues although not the only venue by which world musics have developed commercial value and public recognition.
The musicians of world musics also show that they are cosmpoplitans who function in and out, at will, of what has been traditionally perceived as totalizing “system”, that is, the system controlled by the dominating cultures.
Musics such as zouk, rai, or soukos, when played on the main radio stations and even on periphery radios (in France) and illegal radios (in Holland) where they receive the greatest amount of airplay are still ghettoized in their confinements of specific programs.
World musics have contributed to some degree to the repositioning of the local cultures to which they are associated by being part of a world movement that advances the desire of every nation not only to be recognized but only to participate in the workings of global economics and power.
*Zouk is helping shape economic, political and social change worldwide associated as it is with endogenous development and a growing sense of national identity in countries whose culture has been largely defined and most certainly heavily influenced by a colonial past.
Music functions not merely as a passive reflection of broader sociocultural phenomena but also as an active contributor to the processes of cultural change. While the international market in many ways forces regional music genres to become more homogeneous,it does not prohibit unique innovation and development at home.
Much of zouk’s strength in the four islands is the result of its being sung in Creole (the language is understood by everyone and zouk touches a sensitive chord because it endorses a language that has been totally rejected or at best ignored for generations. The sccess of a performing group...depends on the extent to which these characteristics are reflected in a performance-an experience within which ‘people feel themselves at home’.
Musical genres have often played a crucial role in the expression and negotiation of identity, Guilbault suggest that what zouk has done is to make more visible, in ways that are particular to the music field, the dilemmas faced by Antilleans iin their quest to assert their difference in the modern world. World music seems far ahead of other fields of activity in its use of active social forces that are diverse and contradictory as agents of change and in its reliance on both local and international forces in the shaping of individual and social identities.
Fred Myers
Painting Culture
This magnificent text is not only full of precise information and descriptions of Pintupi beliefs, customs, artistic representation, social interactions, et al but it is an incredible artistic and philosophical evaluation of art. The commodification of the paintings of these aboriginal tribes (besides the Pintupi) is a very intriguing process. Good to clarify that ‘objectivations by emphasizing iconography tend to be “intellectualist,” the product of a theoretical gaze or a contemplative eye.’ This is explained to not simplify or outright ignore the social context in which works are created. Pintupi paintings are not to be argued to be good or bad, but to be true. They are representations of Dreams, and whoever had certain dream is the owner of it. Others had to ask permission to paint an image that someone else ‘owned’. Myers agrees with Boas in the ‘technical experience’ concept, in trying to answer how almost every Pintupi man can take up painting and produce interesting images. That technical experience goes together with ‘an emerging social context that provides economic, social and political value for paintings of the Dreaming.
*Interesting how they feel so attached to their dreamings.
Again, in this text the commodification of art is raised as an important development for the Pintupi painters and the works per se. Myers is very detailed in economical aspects of the Pintupi paintings. The unvaluable owned dreams began to be sold by less than $A30 and their price began to raise as they were valued continuously more by the international community and as they gained exchange value.
Notes on
Alan Merriam
The study of Ethnomusicology
Alan Merriam discusses how the term of ethnomusicology developed to the present stage and she adds her own definition and arguments for it. She says that ehthnomusicology is: the study of music in culture. “Human behavior produces music, but the process is one of continuity; the behavior itself is shaped to produce music sound, and thus the study of one flows into the other.” The main aim of ethnomusicology would be to understand music, but it is not supposed to understand music sound alone, and this is probably what differentiates it from musicology. Ethnomusicologists follow three stages: collection of data, two kinds of analysis (collation of ethnographic and ethnologic materials into a coherent body of knowledge about music practice, behavior and concepts in the society being studied, and the technical lab analysis of the music sound materials collected), and the data analyzed and the results obtained are applied to relevant problems, in ethnomusicology, the social sciences and the humanities. She reminds the reader that there has always been a fear of losing the endangered musical cultures. But also, music is constantly changing just as humans do and evolve. Merriam also argues the music can be used as a means of understanding other things about other cultures since it may convey symbolic representations to use as a new vocabulary.
Notes on
Charles Keil
Motion and feeling through music
What is felt through music? How is something felt? Why is something felt? This is why Keil tries to answer in his essay. Keil says that all music has syntax or embodied meaning. From this he will use a syntactic analyisis together with the ‘engendered feeling’ felt. He reminds the reader that most of music traditions outside the West are almost exclusively based on performance. There is a comparison between classical music and jazz in 10 distinguishing points: Mode of construction, mode of presentation, mode of understanding, mode of response, guiding principles, tehnical emphases, basic unit, communication analogues, gratifications, and relevant criteria. There are also references to the flirtation between music of the engendered feeling type and dance. And also of the symbolic action that exists between dancers and musicians, which is relevant to a discussion on non-verbal communication. *nice quote: In our culture ( and perhaps in others where repression and oppression must be fought) it may be that music chose goal is engendered feeling, spontaneity, and the conquest of inhibition is of far greater value than music which aims to reflect our civilization and the repression-sublimation-Protestant-ethic syndrome upon which it is based simply because, like much great art, it offers an antidote, a strategy for dealing with our situation, rather than reinforcing it. He concludes by saying that by creating a theory based in one musical idiom it can have validity when applied to the musics of other cultures.
Notes on
Charles Keil
People’s music comparatively
Keil starts by defying the popular concept of ‘folk’ and presents how everyone participates to some degree in folk subcultures, as those centered on sports, hobbies, musical tastes and so forth. Since we all share values and consciousness with various groupings, even though they are not studied by scholars, we are all folk. Then rather than using the term folk music, he uses ‘people’s music’. Form here, he would analyze blues and polka and how they developed recently. And he will base his study in a dialectical ethnomusicology. *The presence of style indicates a strong community, an intense sociability that has been given shape through time, an assertion of control over collective feelings so powerful that any expressive innovator in the community will necessarily put his or her content into that shaping continuum ad no other. After this argument he presents the conflict of using the term style in a classless society. And we don’t know about style in classless societies because we can’t measure stylistic changes in people’s music before the impact of imperialism. Also, a style must first start to decay for people to be able to understand its growth and maturity. Still the word style, appears to be a lodestar for the dominant class, without really knowing what it represents. But in 20th century America, style is almost an entirely an ethnic working-class phenomena. Keil’s main hypotheses is that Style is a reflection of class forces. It has its basis in community recreation through ritual. In class society the media of the dominant class must be utilized for the style to be legitimated. For a working-class style to grow and prosper, the dominant culture’s stereotypes must be accepted and transcended. The first efforts of ethnic working-class communities to work through the dominant stereotypes using the dominant media borrow from both ‘high-culture’ and ‘popular’ culture,’ while second efforts toward the same goal tend to repudiate these borrowings. Style always has hegemonic thrust as it works out the implications of form in terms of inclusion and exclusion principles. A vital style always has Dionysian and Apollonian aspects competing for primacy. Both the thrust toward hegemony and the play of Dionysian and Apollonian processes are confused and confusing due to the pervasive influence of mass mediation on music in this century. He concludes by saying that styles of music from the working class arrived in the decade of ‘high culture’ fragmentation following World War I.
Notes on
John Chernoff
Ideas of Culture and the Challenge of Music
On how anthropologists view art: Culture is based on patterns of interaction with the material world and art is a reflection and affirmation of that level of culture, not even necessarily self-conscious. Therefore in anthropology music is the least considered art since it is the least material. On the term ethnomusicology: the [name] links it to an inherent and invalid negation that alienates anything non-western in many subtle ways. ‘New’ anthropology of music: music-making is a type of behavior, and people interested in music can study the institutionalization of music-making in that light: the recruitment and training of musicians, performance styles, performance venues like festivals and celebrations, religious and political roles of music, song texts, composition, patronage, ecological and instrumental resources and so on.
Before there were many concerns on tradition and authenticity: In mid-century… ethnomusicologists accepted a narrow Western definition of aesthetic values as judgments on matters of beauty and feelings about art objects.
Now, ‘although many scholars continue to address theoretical concerns about music as structured sound, the main influence of anthropologically informed studies of music has been to undermine the musicological approach.’ ‘Efforts to isolate or abstract so-called musical elements analytically have tended to yield not just one-sided or limited descriptions but have often led to actual mistakes in perception and analysis,’
*The insights that reward people who think of music primarily in musical terms are simply not available to those who think mainly in musicological terms; indeed, the latter are often victimized by a narrow conception of music that practically precludes their understanding the breadth of their artistic conception of many non-Western idioms.
Chernoff concludes with the impermanence of music: Our understanding of music has reached the point where we recognize that musical performances are momentary events and that music’s cultural meaning lies within its potential to transform the people who participate in, or attend, or are involved in musical events.
Notes on
Steven Feld
Waterfall of Song
Definition of Acoustemology: local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place resounding [in this case] in Bosavi. In this essay Feld will explore how the acoustic experience of waterfalls (more concisely the place in which they inhabit) acts in the life of the Kaluli people of Bosavi.
On Sense, embodiment and synesthesia: Because motion can draw upon the kinesthetic interplay of tactile, sonic, and visual senses, emplacement always implicates the intertwined nature of sensual bodily presence and perceptual engagement.
Experiencing and knowing place-the idea of place as sensed, place as sensation-can proceed through a complex interplay of the auditory and the visual, as well as through other intersensory perceptual processes.
Kaluli naming and storying are highly salient and sociable everyday practices, forms of social participation thoroughly related to other everyday practices such as traveling, working and visiting.
The aesthetic power and pleasure of Kaluli songs emerges in good part throught their textual poesis of placename paths.
Imagery of the Kaluli: Land, water, tree and place features are joined together with images of loss, indicated as family, bird sporits, places left, places to go toward. All of these are forcefully united through sound and the presence of a bird’s voice calling in a progression of verbs linking reported to quoted speech.
…the terminology of musical rhytm and meter are polysemic to the pulsing, splashing, and motional qualities of water.
Notes on
Steven Feld
World Beat
Very nice and short essay on the mixture of the fast music mixtures occurring all around the world: This complex traffic in sounds, money, and media is rooted in the nature of revitalization through appropriation.
*Extensive copyright controls in the hands of a few Western countries are having a riveting effect on the commodification of musical skills and styles, and the power of musical ownership.
Graceland, 1968…mix of world pop and African ‘folk’ music.
Definitions: Major Contract Artists are only granted the possibility of producing their own work and taking economic and artistic risks commensurate with their sales.
Muscians are laborers who sell their services for a direct fee and take the risk (with little expectation) that royalty percentages, spinoff jobs, tours, and recording contracts might follow from the exposure and success of records with enormous sales.
*Elite pop artists are in the strongest artistic and economic position in the world to appropriate what theylike of human musical diversity, with full support from record companies and often with the outright gratitude of the musicians whose work now appears under a new name.
Notes on
Steven Feld
From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis.
Chapter on struggle over musical propriety in the production of discourses on world music and world beat.
“In thh current global ecumene, where cultural interactions are characterized by increasingly complex exchenges of people, technology, money, media, and ideology, transcultural record productions tell specific stories about accountability, authorship, and agency, about the workings of capital, control, and compromise, and about the strategies and possibilities for valuing indigeneity as something more than essentialized otherness or generic opposition and resistance.”
schiz-:mediated music, commodified grooves, sounds split from sources, consumer products with few if any contextual linkages to the processes, practices, and forms of participation that could give them meaning with local communities.
Schizophonia needs to be imagined processually...as varied practices located in the situations, flows, phases, and circulation patterns that characterize particular cultural objects moving in and out of short and long commodity states, transforming with the experiential and material situation of producers, exchangers and consumers, located in historically specific national and global positions vis-a-vis late capitalism and development, cultural domination, modernity and postmodernity.
*Pop is a classic case of what Marx called alienation: Something human is taken from us and returned in the form of a commodity.
World vs pop vs pop world vs world pop: It is important to have a view of a world music industrialization that views power relations as shaping forces in the production of musical styles and icons of cultural identity.
93% world musical sales concentrated among six companies.
‘world music’: term refers to any commercially available music of non-western origin and circulation, as well as to musics of dominated ethnic minorities within the Western world: music of the world to be sold around the world.
-the invention of ‘world beat’ reproduces a western gaze toward the exotic and erotic, often darker-skinned, dancing body.
Music is the most highly stylized of social forms, iconically linked to the broader cultural production of local identiyty and indexically linked to contexts and occasions of community participation.
If schizophonia, the splitting of sounds from sources, is the antecedent to life in today’s global and transnational world of music, then schismogenesis is a way of describing the resultant state of progressive mutual differentiation that is playing out in at least four ways:
a) escalating dominance-submission pattern of ownership among the major independents, paralleled by a similar relationship between Western pop stars and non-Western musicians; b) an escalating succoring-dependence pattern between world beat and world music; c) an escalating exhibitionism-spectatorship pattern between third- and fourth-world creators and d) an escalating homogenization-heterogenization struggle in the realm of musical style.
authenticty vs the dynamics of appropriation. (and patronage)
-in popular culture subordinate formations are always the sources of fantasy and relaxation for the dominant class or societies.
Notes on
Veit Erlmann
Politics and aesthetics of transnational musics
The emergence of world beat in the early 1980s coincides with a growing uneasiness in the social sciences and humanitires about the institutional practice and the conventional modes and politics of representation in anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, comparative literature and other fields.
The magnitude and scope of the new global culture mark our century musically as a period of “unprescedented” diversity in the face of which the heuristic value of older conceptual models such as Westernizaation, syncretism, acculturation or urbanization has dwindled considerably.
*The production of difference...is inherent in the logic of capitalism itself.
*The eccentricity of the system is the symptom of an inner metastasis rather than a sign of his impending death.
-to “reatin a tension between what will remain an unsatisfactorily homogenizing term-postmodernism-and the heterogenous local forms produced within and sometimes against its logic.
-this aesthetic of the pastiche manifests itself at a variable of levels....the reconfiguration of time and space and its consequences for subjective identity, and, as a related phenomenon, the role of nostalgia.
Notes on
Jocelyne Guilbault
Redefining the local through world music, and ZOUK
homogenization and differentiation not as mutually exclusive features of musical globalization but as integral constituents of late capitalism. The contradictory experience of the universal marketplace alongside proliferating new traditional codes and new ethnic schisms, is the key signature of the postmodern era.
*this new acces to the markets of industrialized countries, designating the connection traditionally referred to as center/peripherry, has constituted one of the venues although not the only venue by which world musics have developed commercial value and public recognition.
The musicians of world musics also show that they are cosmpoplitans who function in and out, at will, of what has been traditionally perceived as totalizing “system”, that is, the system controlled by the dominating cultures.
Musics such as zouk, rai, or soukos, when played on the main radio stations and even on periphery radios (in France) and illegal radios (in Holland) where they receive the greatest amount of airplay are still ghettoized in their confinements of specific programs.
World musics have contributed to some degree to the repositioning of the local cultures to which they are associated by being part of a world movement that advances the desire of every nation not only to be recognized but only to participate in the workings of global economics and power.
*Zouk is helping shape economic, political and social change worldwide associated as it is with endogenous development and a growing sense of national identity in countries whose culture has been largely defined and most certainly heavily influenced by a colonial past.
Music functions not merely as a passive reflection of broader sociocultural phenomena but also as an active contributor to the processes of cultural change. While the international market in many ways forces regional music genres to become more homogeneous,it does not prohibit unique innovation and development at home.
Much of zouk’s strength in the four islands is the result of its being sung in Creole (the language is understood by everyone and zouk touches a sensitive chord because it endorses a language that has been totally rejected or at best ignored for generations. The sccess of a performing group...depends on the extent to which these characteristics are reflected in a performance-an experience within which ‘people feel themselves at home’.
Musical genres have often played a crucial role in the expression and negotiation of identity, Guilbault suggest that what zouk has done is to make more visible, in ways that are particular to the music field, the dilemmas faced by Antilleans iin their quest to assert their difference in the modern world. World music seems far ahead of other fields of activity in its use of active social forces that are diverse and contradictory as agents of change and in its reliance on both local and international forces in the shaping of individual and social identities.
Notes on
Jonathan Shannon
Sultans of Spin
World stage, examining how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts.
The sites of performance and consumption of world music are ‘heterotopic’: fraught with disjunctures between the comepting authenticities and realities promoted and consumed by artists, audiences, and culture brokers operating within the shadows of the transnational music industry.
The result of succesful framing of a musical performance is the creation and promotion of a distinct understanding and experience of style. Meyer defined style as consisting of replicable patterns of formal musical elements such as melody, rhythm, texture, timbre, instrumentation and voice. There are new extra-musical associations such as: venue, costume, audience, audience-performer interactions, and appropriate co-occurrence or coperformance rules, among others.
...analysis of the supposed reality behind the representation reveals further layers of representations, the entire complex being built on a fundamental deferral of meaning, in derrida’s sense; thus, the referent of the real does not exist except as a series of representations.
The world stage is structured by the representation practices inherent to the ‘global imagination’of the (post)modern condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The complexes of signs, texts, and representations of the global imagination are themselves intimately involved in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of global cultural forms.
The performance of al-Kindi in New York City thus can be understood in part as an actualization of the world stage principle: a staging of a music-dance complex constructed, rehearsed, and performed for a transnational audience of consumers.
...the ‘local’ and the ‘authentic’ in world music circuits are often those cultural practices which can best be packaged and presented globally.
Often it is musical cultures that are marginal or forgotten within their sites of local origin that are most easily appropriated for this role in the world music market, as in the case of the ‘Master Musicians of Jajouka’.
Notes on
Susan Reed
The Politics and poetics of dance
Kealiinohomoku demonstrated how dance scholars’ blanket categorization of non-Western dances as ethnic, folk, or primitive was based on an evolutionary paradigm in which Western theatrical dance, especially ballet emerged as ‘…the one great divinely ordained apogee of the performing arts.’
Poole shows how, despite the transformations in costumes, props and gestures, Andean dance retained characteristic movement patterns that embedded concepts of social hierarchy and social time fundamentally distinct from those of Europeans. Matachines dance derives from Medieval European folk dramas and was brought to the new world by the Spanish, with the purpose of Christianizing the Indians.
Dance is a powerful tool in shaping nationalist ideology and in the creation of national subjects, often more so than are political rhetoric or intellectual debates.
Political ideologies play a critical role in the selection of national dances. E.g. China’s cultural Revolution adoption of ballet because of its narrative possibilitse, movement vocabularies that stressed strength and action, and its flexibility in expressing gender equality through movement. Cuban Rumba was selected almost exclusively for ideological reasons related to its identity with a particular community-the lower-class, dark-skinned workers of Cuba.
…the ‘ossification’ and standardization of the Catalan sardana is an indicator of the legitimate defense of the Catalans against the threat of Castilian cultural hegemony in Spain.
Dance has been in many societies one of the few sites where women can legitimately perform in public.
Notes on
Royce
Towards an anthropology of performing arts
We have recognized ritual and social drama as condensed presentations of and commentary about institutions and values. Now we must recognize movement, dance, theater, and performance as forms that are at once the most and the least resistant to distortion and misappropriation.
Aesthetics of experience: the tacit cultural forms, values and sensibilities- local ways of being and doing- that lend specific styles, configurations, and felt qualities to local experiences.
Virtuosity is based upon mastery of a technique described by a codified vocabulary.
Technique, or the rules of a genre, is what one must master. Techniques are specific to genres. They are created from very different selections of elements out of an almost limitless number of possibilities.
Technique, discipline, and artistry create the forms within which performers craft their interpretations. What all performing arts share is their interpreting function. All interpretation is a departure from the original yet it is crucial if we are to forge any understanding at all of things that matter.
The arts of music, dance and theatre are ones that exist as designs in space and time. They are manifested in performance, interpreted by performers that have mastered the techniques of the genres. Meaning recites both in the intrinsic qualities of form and the extrinsic qualities of content and context.
How audiences assess performances involves the reception of meaning but also judgements based upon skill and artistry.
Notes on
Richard Green
(Up)Staging the primitive: Pearl Primus and “the Negro Problem” in American Dance
Green will try to go beyond the notion that art merely ‘mirrors’ reality and to explore some of the ways in which it possibly functions to realize racial identities and political constituencies...in this case in role of the Negro in American concert dance.
Despite her ‘genuine’ modern training, ‘race’ still clings to Primus in performance; to the reviewer’s delight, she just cannot escape from giving the audience numbers that are more Negro than those presented by an African...the emphasis on race in relation to dance themes and styles haunted Primus’s career from almost the beginning.
...the Negro’s potentialfor artistic success was always delimited by the critic’s racialized expectations, however complimentary those expectations might be.
While in Africa, Primus was often recognized by her movement style as kin, as belonging to that continent. This experience of mutual recognition reaffirmed Primus’s belief that African Americans had retained some part of their African heritage, in spite of the traumatic cultural shock of bodies moving along the middle passage into slavery in the Americas.
*Not unlike the body of land called Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Primus’s body represented an(O)ther dark site for the projection of primitive fantasies.
Primus literally embodied the suffering and injustices that others could only attempt to portray. Her representations of Negro problems operated not only on a thematic level but also on a physical one. Primus’s dance offers a counterhegemonic narrative of identity by placing the Negro on the grand stage of inherited historical tradition.
...artistic productions by marginalized subjects can reinforce systems of oppression and structures of domination, but they can also contest and pull at the borders separating ‘blacks’ from ‘whites’, the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’...There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values.
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Notes on
Steven feld
Sound and Sentiment
Kaluli/Bosavi
About 2000, tropical rainforest North of Mount Bosavi; Great Papuan Plateau. Southern Highlands of Papua New guinea. Bosavi Language. More or less egalitarian. Horticulturalists; hunting and fishing. Patrilineal descent. Patrilocal residency. Gisalo ceremony: guests sing sad songs to move the host to weep. ecological adaptation, acoustemology.
Relationship between place, ecolog, sound pehnomena, and culture.
Intimate relationship between sound structure and social structure.
Analyzing these relationships ethnographically and theoretically.
-Myths that reinforce cultural ideas...the muni bird=reciprocity. Reinforcing also human realm and bird realm. Strong emotions.
birds are the voices of the ancestors.
when singing, trying to sound like birds which is associated with death, loss and abandonment.
Almost everything is a lamentation.
Feld’s postscript is important because reminds the reader of Dialogic editing and the ‘crisis’ of ethnographic representation (snooze)
also about the partial truths as said by Clifford, and the ethnographic knowledge which leaves out myths and other influences.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Poetics and Performance
Performance-based research shares some of the central goals of deconstruction, reader-response and reception theories, hermeneutics, the poetics and politics of ethnographic texts, and cultural studies.
Performance provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes.
Language as ‘mode of action’ rather than primarily a ‘means of thinking’
Participation structure, particularly the nature of turn-taking and performer-audience interaction, can have profound implications for shaping social relations.
The illocutionary forceof an utterance often emerges not simply from its placement within a particular genre and social setting but also from the indexical relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeded it.
Western theories of language and poetics pressuppose Western metaphysics.
Two problems inherent in the concept of context: inclusiveness and false objectivity.
The movement from context to contextualization and related concern thus enables us to recognize the sophisticated way that performers and audiences use poetic patterning in interpreting the structure and significance of their own discourse.
The basic conceptual and methodological premise of the ethnography of performance is that the structure and dynamics of the performance event serve to orient the participants-including the performer.
entextualization is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit-a text- that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.
Mapping the dimensions of transformation: Framing, Form, Function, Indexical grounding, translation, emergent structure (of the new context).
Notes on
Barbara Browning
Samba
Samba as a form that narrates a history of cultural contact betweem Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Brazilians. Candomblé dances are understoos to be embodiments not on the expressive potential of individual dancers but rather of the principles of belief which bind a community together. Capoeira embodies a history of racial struggle.
Spirituality in African Brazil doesn’t exclude notions of polotics or aesthetics-or even, for that matter, of sexuality.
Samba is the dance of the body articulate. The dance is a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk at the same time, and in seemingly different languages. The message is narrative and lyrical. The dyachrony of the layering of rhytmic times complicates all accounts of historical events, such as the collonization of Brazil, the suppression of indigenous peoples and cultures, and the period of the enslavement of African peoples, which lasted longer in Brazil than in any other nation in the New World. All these elements call into question the popular myth of Brazilian racial equity. The lyricism of the samba is its incorporation of figures that flash across time. Rhtymic and gestural vocabulary can endure, but it is not merely frozen in time, it can refer to ruptures in historical time, rythmic disjunction and it can figure itself in relation to its past. The body says what cannot be spoken-syncopation. The afoxés in candomble invoke political significance and embody aesthetic power. the caboclo is an emblem in Afro-Brazilian culture of the refusal to be or remain a captive. Many of capoeira’s maneuvers are inversions, whether literal, ironic, physical or linguistic. The protective roda has been a charged space for cultural transmission and creativity. Every political rally in Brazil degenerates into music after its inception.
Homi Bhabha: Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essential identities. It is the capacity of the dancing woman to embody her own spirituality and sexuality that counters western perceptions of patriarchal subordination in the Third World.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Story, Performance, and Event
...basic reorientation from a conception of folklore as things- texts, items, mentifacts- to verbal art as a way of speaking, a mode of verbal communication.
Bauman’s subject matter is oral storytelling. Oral narrative provides an especially rich focus for the investigation of the relationship between oral literature and social life becuase part of the special nature of narrative is to be doubly anchored in human events. that is, narratives are keyed both to the events in which they are told and to the events that they recount, towards narrative events and narrated events. Oral performance is situtaed, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events-bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation.
Consideration of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communities and story-telling situations. the aesthetic consideration of artistic performance may demand the embellishment or manipulation-if not the sacrifice-of the literal truth in the interests of greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value, contrast, or other elements that contribute to excellence in performance in this subculture. Fabrication-both enacted and narrated-represent a fertile field for the exploration of the interrelationships binding together the narrated event, the narrative itself, and the evnt in which the narrative is recounted. If we are to develop our understanding of those stories we have labeled personal experience narratives, thereby implicating the relationship between narrative and event and the management of point of view, then it is crucial that we set about investigating those dimensions of relationship directly, bolstering our social and linguistic insights with the literary ones, toward a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of the forms and functions of this powerful expressive vehicle.
Structure: Orientation->setup->trick event->discrediting of the fabrication->evaluation.
The relationship between story and event in these narratives thus turns out to be reciprocal, not in some vague, general ineffable sense but in ways that can be demonstrated on the levels of content and structure.
Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The speaking person in the novel is always to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologomes...It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel.
Jonathan Shannon
Sultans of Spin
World stage, examining how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts.
The sites of performance and consumption of world music are ‘heterotopic’: fraught with disjunctures between the comepting authenticities and realities promoted and consumed by artists, audiences, and culture brokers operating within the shadows of the transnational music industry.
The result of succesful framing of a musical performance is the creation and promotion of a distinct understanding and experience of style. Meyer defined style as consisting of replicable patterns of formal musical elements such as melody, rhythm, texture, timbre, instrumentation and voice. There are new extra-musical associations such as: venue, costume, audience, audience-performer interactions, and appropriate co-occurrence or coperformance rules, among others.
...analysis of the supposed reality behind the representation reveals further layers of representations, the entire complex being built on a fundamental deferral of meaning, in derrida’s sense; thus, the referent of the real does not exist except as a series of representations.
The world stage is structured by the representation practices inherent to the ‘global imagination’of the (post)modern condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The complexes of signs, texts, and representations of the global imagination are themselves intimately involved in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of global cultural forms.
The performance of al-Kindi in New York City thus can be understood in part as an actualization of the world stage principle: a staging of a music-dance complex constructed, rehearsed, and performed for a transnational audience of consumers.
...the ‘local’ and the ‘authentic’ in world music circuits are often those cultural practices which can best be packaged and presented globally.
Often it is musical cultures that are marginal or forgotten within their sites of local origin that are most easily appropriated for this role in the world music market, as in the case of the ‘Master Musicians of Jajouka’.
Notes on
Susan Reed
The Politics and poetics of dance
Kealiinohomoku demonstrated how dance scholars’ blanket categorization of non-Western dances as ethnic, folk, or primitive was based on an evolutionary paradigm in which Western theatrical dance, especially ballet emerged as ‘…the one great divinely ordained apogee of the performing arts.’
Poole shows how, despite the transformations in costumes, props and gestures, Andean dance retained characteristic movement patterns that embedded concepts of social hierarchy and social time fundamentally distinct from those of Europeans. Matachines dance derives from Medieval European folk dramas and was brought to the new world by the Spanish, with the purpose of Christianizing the Indians.
Dance is a powerful tool in shaping nationalist ideology and in the creation of national subjects, often more so than are political rhetoric or intellectual debates.
Political ideologies play a critical role in the selection of national dances. E.g. China’s cultural Revolution adoption of ballet because of its narrative possibilitse, movement vocabularies that stressed strength and action, and its flexibility in expressing gender equality through movement. Cuban Rumba was selected almost exclusively for ideological reasons related to its identity with a particular community-the lower-class, dark-skinned workers of Cuba.
…the ‘ossification’ and standardization of the Catalan sardana is an indicator of the legitimate defense of the Catalans against the threat of Castilian cultural hegemony in Spain.
Dance has been in many societies one of the few sites where women can legitimately perform in public.
Notes on
Royce
Towards an anthropology of performing arts
We have recognized ritual and social drama as condensed presentations of and commentary about institutions and values. Now we must recognize movement, dance, theater, and performance as forms that are at once the most and the least resistant to distortion and misappropriation.
Aesthetics of experience: the tacit cultural forms, values and sensibilities- local ways of being and doing- that lend specific styles, configurations, and felt qualities to local experiences.
Virtuosity is based upon mastery of a technique described by a codified vocabulary.
Technique, or the rules of a genre, is what one must master. Techniques are specific to genres. They are created from very different selections of elements out of an almost limitless number of possibilities.
Technique, discipline, and artistry create the forms within which performers craft their interpretations. What all performing arts share is their interpreting function. All interpretation is a departure from the original yet it is crucial if we are to forge any understanding at all of things that matter.
The arts of music, dance and theatre are ones that exist as designs in space and time. They are manifested in performance, interpreted by performers that have mastered the techniques of the genres. Meaning recites both in the intrinsic qualities of form and the extrinsic qualities of content and context.
How audiences assess performances involves the reception of meaning but also judgements based upon skill and artistry.
Notes on
Richard Green
(Up)Staging the primitive: Pearl Primus and “the Negro Problem” in American Dance
Green will try to go beyond the notion that art merely ‘mirrors’ reality and to explore some of the ways in which it possibly functions to realize racial identities and political constituencies...in this case in role of the Negro in American concert dance.
Despite her ‘genuine’ modern training, ‘race’ still clings to Primus in performance; to the reviewer’s delight, she just cannot escape from giving the audience numbers that are more Negro than those presented by an African...the emphasis on race in relation to dance themes and styles haunted Primus’s career from almost the beginning.
...the Negro’s potentialfor artistic success was always delimited by the critic’s racialized expectations, however complimentary those expectations might be.
While in Africa, Primus was often recognized by her movement style as kin, as belonging to that continent. This experience of mutual recognition reaffirmed Primus’s belief that African Americans had retained some part of their African heritage, in spite of the traumatic cultural shock of bodies moving along the middle passage into slavery in the Americas.
*Not unlike the body of land called Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Primus’s body represented an(O)ther dark site for the projection of primitive fantasies.
Primus literally embodied the suffering and injustices that others could only attempt to portray. Her representations of Negro problems operated not only on a thematic level but also on a physical one. Primus’s dance offers a counterhegemonic narrative of identity by placing the Negro on the grand stage of inherited historical tradition.
...artistic productions by marginalized subjects can reinforce systems of oppression and structures of domination, but they can also contest and pull at the borders separating ‘blacks’ from ‘whites’, the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’...There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values.
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation.
Notes on
Steven feld
Sound and Sentiment
Kaluli/Bosavi
About 2000, tropical rainforest North of Mount Bosavi; Great Papuan Plateau. Southern Highlands of Papua New guinea. Bosavi Language. More or less egalitarian. Horticulturalists; hunting and fishing. Patrilineal descent. Patrilocal residency. Gisalo ceremony: guests sing sad songs to move the host to weep. ecological adaptation, acoustemology.
Relationship between place, ecolog, sound pehnomena, and culture.
Intimate relationship between sound structure and social structure.
Analyzing these relationships ethnographically and theoretically.
-Myths that reinforce cultural ideas...the muni bird=reciprocity. Reinforcing also human realm and bird realm. Strong emotions.
birds are the voices of the ancestors.
when singing, trying to sound like birds which is associated with death, loss and abandonment.
Almost everything is a lamentation.
Feld’s postscript is important because reminds the reader of Dialogic editing and the ‘crisis’ of ethnographic representation (snooze)
also about the partial truths as said by Clifford, and the ethnographic knowledge which leaves out myths and other influences.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Poetics and Performance
Performance-based research shares some of the central goals of deconstruction, reader-response and reception theories, hermeneutics, the poetics and politics of ethnographic texts, and cultural studies.
Performance provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes.
Language as ‘mode of action’ rather than primarily a ‘means of thinking’
Participation structure, particularly the nature of turn-taking and performer-audience interaction, can have profound implications for shaping social relations.
The illocutionary forceof an utterance often emerges not simply from its placement within a particular genre and social setting but also from the indexical relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeded it.
Western theories of language and poetics pressuppose Western metaphysics.
Two problems inherent in the concept of context: inclusiveness and false objectivity.
The movement from context to contextualization and related concern thus enables us to recognize the sophisticated way that performers and audiences use poetic patterning in interpreting the structure and significance of their own discourse.
The basic conceptual and methodological premise of the ethnography of performance is that the structure and dynamics of the performance event serve to orient the participants-including the performer.
entextualization is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit-a text- that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.
Mapping the dimensions of transformation: Framing, Form, Function, Indexical grounding, translation, emergent structure (of the new context).
Notes on
Barbara Browning
Samba
Samba as a form that narrates a history of cultural contact betweem Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Brazilians. Candomblé dances are understoos to be embodiments not on the expressive potential of individual dancers but rather of the principles of belief which bind a community together. Capoeira embodies a history of racial struggle.
Spirituality in African Brazil doesn’t exclude notions of polotics or aesthetics-or even, for that matter, of sexuality.
Samba is the dance of the body articulate. The dance is a complex dialogue in which various parts of the body talk at the same time, and in seemingly different languages. The message is narrative and lyrical. The dyachrony of the layering of rhytmic times complicates all accounts of historical events, such as the collonization of Brazil, the suppression of indigenous peoples and cultures, and the period of the enslavement of African peoples, which lasted longer in Brazil than in any other nation in the New World. All these elements call into question the popular myth of Brazilian racial equity. The lyricism of the samba is its incorporation of figures that flash across time. Rhtymic and gestural vocabulary can endure, but it is not merely frozen in time, it can refer to ruptures in historical time, rythmic disjunction and it can figure itself in relation to its past. The body says what cannot be spoken-syncopation. The afoxés in candomble invoke political significance and embody aesthetic power. the caboclo is an emblem in Afro-Brazilian culture of the refusal to be or remain a captive. Many of capoeira’s maneuvers are inversions, whether literal, ironic, physical or linguistic. The protective roda has been a charged space for cultural transmission and creativity. Every political rally in Brazil degenerates into music after its inception.
Homi Bhabha: Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essential identities. It is the capacity of the dancing woman to embody her own spirituality and sexuality that counters western perceptions of patriarchal subordination in the Third World.
Notes on
Richard Bauman
Story, Performance, and Event
...basic reorientation from a conception of folklore as things- texts, items, mentifacts- to verbal art as a way of speaking, a mode of verbal communication.
Bauman’s subject matter is oral storytelling. Oral narrative provides an especially rich focus for the investigation of the relationship between oral literature and social life becuase part of the special nature of narrative is to be doubly anchored in human events. that is, narratives are keyed both to the events in which they are told and to the events that they recount, towards narrative events and narrated events. Oral performance is situtaed, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events-bounded segments of the flow of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation.
Consideration of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communities and story-telling situations. the aesthetic consideration of artistic performance may demand the embellishment or manipulation-if not the sacrifice-of the literal truth in the interests of greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value, contrast, or other elements that contribute to excellence in performance in this subculture. Fabrication-both enacted and narrated-represent a fertile field for the exploration of the interrelationships binding together the narrated event, the narrative itself, and the evnt in which the narrative is recounted. If we are to develop our understanding of those stories we have labeled personal experience narratives, thereby implicating the relationship between narrative and event and the management of point of view, then it is crucial that we set about investigating those dimensions of relationship directly, bolstering our social and linguistic insights with the literary ones, toward a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of the forms and functions of this powerful expressive vehicle.
Structure: Orientation->setup->trick event->discrediting of the fabrication->evaluation.
The relationship between story and event in these narratives thus turns out to be reciprocal, not in some vague, general ineffable sense but in ways that can be demonstrated on the levels of content and structure.
Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The speaking person in the novel is always to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologomes...It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel.
February 06, 2005
¡¡¡A multicultural musical revolution is taking place March 4th at the Knitting Factorya!!!
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January 11, 2005
Es un pajaro, es un avion, NO.
Es la original rebel patchank con el maestro DJ precursor del salto con garrocha piscinero, el GRAN duBta!!!
Todos los domingos en el muy acogedor bulgarian club, bar, restaurante, motel, circo: 'mehanata' en new york. Localizado en la esquina de canal & b'way.
ORIGINAL GYPSY PATCHANGA>>>>MEHANATA>>>>>EVERY SUNDAY>>>>>with DJ duBta coming from Volcanic equatorial zones to bring you the best party fo sh'o. solo pa' ti y na' mas que pa' ti.
Es la original rebel patchank con el maestro DJ precursor del salto con garrocha piscinero, el GRAN duBta!!!
Todos los domingos en el muy acogedor bulgarian club, bar, restaurante, motel, circo: 'mehanata' en new york. Localizado en la esquina de canal & b'way.
ORIGINAL GYPSY PATCHANGA>>>>MEHANATA>>>>>EVERY SUNDAY>>>>>with DJ duBta coming from Volcanic equatorial zones to bring you the best party fo sh'o. solo pa' ti y na' mas que pa' ti.
