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    19 Stokes - 1994

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    X__Notes on Contributors Martin Stokes teaches Ethnomusicology and Social Anthropology at The Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. une ree ee Ethacty, Solely amel Marie | 1994, Duper, Berg. => Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Miusic Martin Stokes he musicologist Joseph Kerman once sympathised with the plight of ethnomusicologists ‘as they struggle to make themselves heard in the seemingly tone-deaf conclaves and enclaves of anthropology’ (1985: 181). After at least two decades of well published discussion of music in university departments of sociol- ogy, politics, cultural studies and even art history, anthropologists hhave less reason than ever to maintain the ‘tone-deafness’ that Kerman was undoubtedly correct in identifying. In accordance with the highly pervasive fiction of an earlier musicology,! music is still however considered a domain of a special, almost extra-social, au- tonomous experience. What ethnomusicologists deal with in the societies they study, is - anthropologists are residually inclined to assume ~ either the diversionary or the arcane. By definition they cannot be dealing with the kinds of events and processes that make up the predominantly verbal and visual ‘real life’ of which social reality is assumed to consist. Ethnomusicologists disagree, but they often have little choice but to put up with, and enjoy as best they can, the limited benefits of a precarious periphery. This is a crude characterisation, but there is a struggle, and it has its problems, It might be argued that the response has been to over- state, to overargue the significance of music, to present a social world in which nothing exists outside of an overarching definition of mu- sic. This response was endorsed, if in 2 somewhat whimsical fashion, by Lévi-Strauss, for whom, in The Raw and the Cooked (1986), the 1. For an influential statement ofthis argoment, see Wollf 1987, For recent con tcibtion to this deconstrtion of masicology's “object, see Nett 1992 and Randel 1992, Martin Stokes essence of mythic thinking could be seen in music. Principles of symmetry, inversion, equivalence and homology which constitute the structures of mythic thought are illustrated by comparison with the repertoire of baroque and classical compositional technique. Music for Lévi-Strauss, in line with post-war serial thinking (especially that of Pierre Boulez), deals with pure, abstract structures of potentially infinite expansion (Lévi-Strauss 1986: 23). Lévi-Strauss's only excursion into Amerindian conceptions of music and musical instruments is a relatively brief passage (for a book dedicated ‘to music’) in From Honey to Ashes (1973: 360-470). Ethnomusicologists have however subsequently argued (see for ex- ample Turino 1989, Seeger 1987), that music is of central significance in South American Indian societies. Seeger, working amongst the Suyé of the Upper Xingu in Brazil, described his monograph as a “musical anthropology’. This formulation reversed Merriam’s semi nal description of ethnomusicology as ‘the study of music in culture’ But music is not just a thing which happens ‘in’ society. A society, Seeger argues, might also be usefully conceived as something which happens ‘in music’; itis through music and dance performance that fundamental aspects of Suyé social organisation (in particular moi- ety affiliations) are recognised, social time is ritually articulated, and an entire cosmological system is grasped. Suy4 society as a totality might be understood in terms of their music; as Seeger points out, *Suyd society was an orchestra, its village was a concert hall, and its year a song’ (1987: 140) ‘Seeger's monograph is a powerful argument which, amongst other things, overcomes the theoretical divide between the study of music and the study of society. It is one of a small number of recent ethnomusicological monographs of ‘remote’ tribal peoples, in which our own distinctions between the ritual and the technical, the cul- tural and the natural, music, dance, speech and other forms of communication have to be rethought from scratch (see also Feld 1982). But how is the anthropologist to make use of these kinds of insights in societies more like our own? In our own technologised and industrialised existence, the ritual forms of music have become peripheralised, and the rest, social dances, bar sessions, concert at- tendance, listening to a new CD at home in the evening or the radio during the day fit into gaps created by work, of at least, the working day. Music often scems to do little more than fill a silence left by something else, Introduction And yet the social and cultural worlds that have been shaped by modernity (that is to say, the industrial-capitalist order, the nation- state, and secular rationalism) would be hard to imagine without music. My own awareness of ‘the modem itself, in a remote Angli- can choir school in Herefordshire, was decisively formed through music. I had heard a recording of Honegger’s Pacific 231 before I had travelled on a large train, The sound of Messaien's Les Corps Glorienx, thundering from the organ whilst we processed out of chapel one Whitsun day, intimated a world of radical, violent and bitterly contested change. Music is clearly very much a part of mod- ern life and our understanding of it, articulating our knowledge of other peoples, places, times and things, and ourselves in relation to them Performance and Place ‘This becomes particularly clear when we think about the ways in which music informs our sense of place. Place, ot ‘locale’, follow- ing Giddens (1990; 18) ‘refers to the physical setting of social activity as situated geographically’. Giddens points out that one distinct con- sequence of modernity is the ‘phantasmagoric’ separation of space from place, as places become ‘thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them’ (ibid). This dislocation requires an anxiety ridden process of relocation or, to use Giddens’ term, ‘reembedding’ (ibid.: 88). Amongst the countless ways in which we ‘relocate’ ourselves, music undoubtedly has a vi- tal role to play, The musical event, from collective dances to the act of putting a cassette or CD into a machine, evokes and organises col- lective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity. The ‘places’ constructed through music involve notions of difference and social boundary. They also organise hierarchies of a moral and po- litical order, The insistent evocation of place in Trish balladry or the ‘Country and Irish’ heard on juke-boxes in bars in Ircland and amongst migrant communities in England and the United States is a striking example, defining a moral and political community in rela- tion to the world in which they find themselves. In this particular process of relocation, the places, boundaries and identities involved are of a large and collective order. People can equally use music to locate themselves in quite idiosyncratic and plural ways. A private collection of records, tapes or CDs, for example, articulates a number Martin Stokes of highly idiosyncratic sets of places and boundaries. A moment's reflection on our own musical practices brings home to us the sheer profusion of identities and selves that we possess, ‘The idea that music symbolises social boundaries might seem an obvious enough starting point for an anthropological approach to music. Ethnomusicologists, with anthropologists, have however be- ‘come less interested in the structuralist proposition that performance simply reflects ‘underlying’ cultural patterns and social structures, Firstly, as A. Cohen pointed out, ‘the view that any event or process or structure somehow replicates the essence of a society's culture has now ... been properly discredited’ (1982: 8). Social performance, following writers such as Bourdieu (1977) and De Certeau (1984), is instead seen as a practice in which meanings are generated, ma- nipulated, even ironised, within certain limitations, Music and dance, as all of the contributors to this volume stress, do not simply ‘reflect’. Rather, they provide the means by which the hierarchies of place are negotiated and transformed. The case of the private collection of records, tapes and CDs illustrates the ways in which music can be used as a means of transcending the limitations of our own place in the world, of constructing trajectories rather than boundaries across space. To take a different example, identification with urban genres provides the means by which rural-urban migrants can transform themselves from peripheralised proletarians to urbanites, ‘become members of the ‘clean’ middle class (Pefia 1985), become members of groups which represent in some way or another specific migrant interests (see Reily 1992), Music does not then simply provide @ marker in a prestructured social space, but the means by which this space can be transformed, ‘To take another example, documentary and advertising clichés de- noting place do more than reflect a knowledge already ‘there’. They preform a knowledge of other places that is borne out by subsequent experience, and this knowledge has a distinct role in the definition and control of problematic ‘others’. The augmented second denot- ing ‘the orient’ in the old Turkish Delight advertisement has little to do with Turkish musics, but it informs us in the context of our own musical language of an imagined world of violence and repressed sexuality. These deeply rooted images simultaneously justify the ‘Western use of the Orient as the basis of collective sexual fantasies, and allow its governments to mobilise their armies against Middle Eastern populations the moment their supply of oil is threatened. The popular images and sounds (currently much in vogue with advertis- Introduction 5 ing copywriters) of overweight Italian operatic singers denote to North Western Europeans a decaying and sensuous Mediterranean which we can simultaneously fantasise about in our collective his- torical myths as the root and source of ‘European culture’, and at the same time exploit for tourism and cheap labour. Clearly, these musi cal images do not just reflect knowledge of ‘other places" but preform them in significant ways. Secondly, as ethnomusicologists have recently come to insist, it is important that music and dance in these kind of rituals are not just seen as static symbolic objects which have to be understood in a context, but are themselves a patterned context within which other things happen (Waterman 1990: 213). What is important is not just ‘of musical performance, but good performance, if music and dance are to make a social event ‘happen’. Complex aesthetic vocabular- ies, or single terms covering a complex semantic terrain point to minute and shifting subtleties of rhythm and texture which make or break the event. The Yoruba ariya, neotraditional celebrations de- seribed by Waterman marking namings, weddings, funerals, and business ventures are crucially dependent upon the idanniin (‘sweet stomachedness’), Inrakd (‘unfolded body") and igbddiin (‘sweetness reception’) provided by Jiji musicians. In Ireland terms such as craic Crack’), and ‘nyah' (Wilkinson 1991), and in Greece, the Balkans and the Middle East, terms derived from the Arabic words keyf or zevk (see for example Cowan 1991, Sugarman 1989) point to the crucial relationship between the music and ritual, Without these qualities, however they are conceived in a particular society, the ritual event is powerless to make the expected and desired connections and transformations. T would argue therefore that music is socially meaningful not en- tirely but largely because it provides means by which people recognise identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them, The contributions to this volume illustrate some of the ways in which musical performance, as well as the acts of listening, danc- ing, arguing, discussing, thinking and writing about music, provide the means by which ethnicities and identities are constructed and mo- bilised, The fact that ‘music’ is left as a vague category is not a problem; it will be clear from the contributions to this volume that music ‘is’ what any social group consider it to be, contrary to the essentialist definitions and quests for musical ‘universals’ of 1960s ethnomusicology, or text-orientated techniques of musicological analysis. 6 ___ Martin Stokes Ethnicity Ethnicity is perhaps the more problematic word, Ethnicity is “an ar- guable and murky intellectual term’ (Chapman, McDonald and ‘Tonkin 1989: 11), but one which nonetheless continues to be useful for a variety of reasons. Barth’s seminal essay (1969) introduced the term in his analysis of boundary construction and maintenance. Ethnicities are to be understood in terms of the construction, main- tenance and negotiation of boundaries, and not on the putative social ‘essences’ which fill the gaps within them. Ethnic boundaries define and maintain social identities, which can only exist in ‘a context of opposition and relativities’ (Chapman, McDonald and Tonkin 1989; 17). The term ethnicity thus points to the central anthropological concern with classification, It allows us to turn from questions di- rected towards defining the essential and ‘authentic’ traces of identity ‘in’ music (2 question with which much nationalist and essentially racist folklore and ethnography is explicitly concerned) to the ques- tions of how music is used by social actors in specific local situations to erect boundaries, to maintain distinctions between us and them, and how terms such as ‘authenticity’ are used to justify these bounda- Chapman's contribution to this volume illustrates the point that it is always the categories and not the content that remain important. ‘The immense significance of ‘Celtic’ music lies in the fact that whilst it is a strictly defined category (as a romantic ‘other’ in binary op- positions such as European periphery vs. centre, Celt vs. Anglo-Saxon or French) its content is capable of a great deal of variety and left relatively undefined. ‘Celtic’ music is thus always potentially easy, participatory, and crosses national borders. Consequently it allows people access to ~ in their own terms ~ a domain of 'Celtdom’ de- nied to them by the complexities of, for example, a Celtic language, or the theoretical and practical difficulties of maintaining a coher- ent political identity. ‘Celtic music’ is then something which has been created by certain ways of classifying musical experience, and is certainly not a residue of authentic ‘Celtness’ waiting to be discov- ered in the many and various musical styles and genres played in the Celtic world, ‘Authenticity’ is a term that was frequently raised in questions during the seminar. Clearly, notions of authenticity and identity are closely interlinked. What one is (or wants to be) cannot be ‘inauthentic’, whatever else itis, Authenticity is definitely not a prop- Introduction 7 erty of music, musicians and their relations to an audience. It is not even a Benjaminesque ‘aura’ of uniqueness that surrounds @ live situ- ation as opposed to mechanically reproduced music, even though one frequently hears the term used in this way. We are inclined to make the mistake of hearing a word and assuming that the various things it points to are similar, if not the same.” Instead, we should see “au- thenticity’ is a discursive trope of great persuasive power. It focuses ‘a way of talking about music, way of saying to outsiders and insid- crs alike ‘this is what is really significant about this music’, ‘this is the music that makes us different from other people’. The ways ‘which authenticity is structured, defined and employed in discursive contexts are discussed in a number of contributions to this volume, particularly those by Chapman, Cohen and Stokes. ‘This kind of per- spective enables the interested anthropologist is enabled to see music, less as a fixed essence with certain definable properties than as a wide field of practices and meanings with few significant or socially rel- ‘evant points of intersection. Without understanding local conditions, languages and contexts, it is impossible to know what these practices and meanings are. Ethnicities, as Ardener pointed out, positively “demand to be seen from the inside” (1989: 111); the same is true of their musical strategies. ‘The ‘emic’ perspective is not however the end of the story. Ethnicities can never be understood outside the wider power relations in which they are embedded, as a number of well-established critiques of the term as used by anthropologists point out (see the contribu- tors to Asad 1973). This is more clear now than ever, ‘The notion of the ‘ethnic’ today (particularly in journalistic language) points to an area of experience around which some of the most violent conflicts in Europe are being played out, particularly in the context of ‘ethnic conflict’ in the former Soviet Union, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, and ‘ethnic violence’ in British cities. Perhaps this will mark a final break with the romantic notion of ‘the ethnic’ as the harmless and colourful ‘folklore’ on the remote peripheries of our own societies. Groups are self-defining in terms of their ability to articulate dif- ferences between self and other, but issues of colonialism, 2, Wittgenstein repeatedly pointed to the ways in which we a re mislead by this kind of language in the Philosophical Investigations: ‘What this language primarily

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