Part of what I post below I wrote as part of an online discussion in a purely online section of the "Peoples and Cultures of the World Course." It also relates to an in-class discussion yesterday about "society" and "culture" in a more conventional "live" section of the course.
Society and Culture are really the two big topics of this course and of much scholarly inquiry in sociocultural anthropology and related social science disciplines. There has been long-running debate about how to conceptualize and define them. There is no single, set definition for either. Most every anthropologist or sociologist would offer a slightly different (but not wildly different) perspective and definition.
The following is my “take” on what society and culture are. (What I address are the conventional anthropological senses of both words. As with many words, both have multiple possible senses or references. “Society” could refer to a semi-secret group, such as a Moose Lodge or the International Order of Odd Fellows that function as “secret societies.” It could also refer to people of the upper class, as in “high society.” Neither of these senses is what anthropologists usually mean by “society.” Likewise, “culture” could also refer to the habits and manners of a mainly upper class set of people, as in “high culture,” or it could refer to bacteria in a Petri dish, and neither of these is the sense I’ll talk about.)
A society is in part a group of individuals. It’s not just any group of individuals, though, but a group who, taken together, are organized in such a way as to provide for their productive and reproductive needs, i.e. a group that functions as a population.
Society also involves the organization of interactions between those individuals. Individuals who together comprise a society don’t interact with one another randomly, but in patterned ways. The elements that comprise this social organization will be among the recurring course topics for us.
While there is considerable disagreement about how to precisely define culture and/or human culture, most definitions include the minimal elements of “learned and shared ways of life.” For humans, ways of life or lifeways includes a wide variety of things (also to be a key course topic throughout the semester), such as beliefs, values, worldview, ethos, customs and traditions, etc. What makes them all cultural is that they’re learned and shared – they’re not components of who we are as human beings that derive largely or wholly from our biological nature.
I would tend to define human culture a bit more elaborately, e.g. “learned and shared ways of life transmitted mainly through language and other forms of symbolic communication.”
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Is There a World Music?
I originally posted the following short essay on my main blog (Robert Philen's Blog) back in July. Since I showed the video documentary, Kienes?, which I discuss below, in class the other day, I thought I'd repost the essay here as well:
Kienes? (a variation on “Quién es?” – “Who are you?”) is a short documentary of Algerian-French singer Rachid Taha’s tour of Mexico from 2004. (A DVD copy is included with Taha’s album Tékitoi.) At one point in the video, Taha responds to a question from a Mexican journalist about World Music. Taha argues that “World Music” is simply a convenience for shopkeepers. He also says that “World Music” is a short hand for music from “there” rather than “here,” and that for a Mexican audience, U2, as an Irish band, is a band from “there” and hence “World Music.”
Part of Taha’s comment is straightforwardly true. World Music is a catch-all label that serves as a marketing tool and a convenience for music shops and customers. Another part of his comment is playful and facetious, though making a serious point. World Music is music from “there,” but where “here” and “there” have become fixed locations (“here” is the U.S., the U.K., and sometimes the rest of northern and western Europe – “there” is everywhere else) rather than deictic shifters. To the extent “World Music” exists, and largely as a marketing tool, U2 doesn’t fit (though some other bands from Ireland, like Clannad, might).
World Music as a Marketing Tool
There are many types of music with very real histories and traditions, some quite old, some more recent, that are often today lumped together (at least in the U.S. and some other parts of the world) as “World Music.” “World Music” as this catch-all category would not exist were it not convenient for the recording industry and record dealers (whether conventional stores or online). As I began to argue above, world music is largely the music of there, with here defined largely from a North American or European and mainly English-speaking perspective.
What defines this catch-all category? What’s included? The most important criteria seem to be culture, geography, language, and modernity.
Culture, geography, and language are separate criteria, but in the marketing of World Music, they’re inextricably intertwined. Much of the marketing of World Music plays on the tropes of purity, authentic linkage between voice and place (which links culture, language, and place), primitiveness as sign of purity, authenticity, and autochthony – it’s the marketing of “natives,” and as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, one of the qualities of “the native” in many genres of discourse, including a lot of ethnographic writing, is the intertwining of culture and place, such as to imprison the (non-modern) native in contrast to the world wandering (and modern) Westerner.
The music of all non-western cultures and places is included in the “World Music” category, whether the musics of Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Asia, or the Pacific.
Most music not sung in English is World Music. The major exception to this is that rock and pop genre music performed in languages of Northern and Western Europe that are perceived as modern (i.e. a language like Gaelic is typically perceived and marketed as “traditional) are generally not marketed as “World” (though I’ve seen plenty of record stores market French and German pop music as varieties of World Music, too). Rock and pop “en español” are more ambiguous. They are typically marketed as “Latin” music, which might or might not be marketed as World Music, marking, I think, English speakers’ ambiguous sense of Latin America’s place as part of “Western Culture.”
Some Western musics are included also. Some North American and Northern European musical traditions are at least sometimes marketed as varieties of World Music. The key is that they’re not the traditions of populations that are or were historically mainly English-speaking, and simultaneously, they’re musics associated with tradition rather than modernity. So, North American genres like blues, country, bluegrass, or folk might be seen as rural, or traditional, or even quaint,” musics, but they’re not generally “World Music,” while zydeco (associated with both tradition and French-speaking Cajuns) sometimes is. “Irish” or “Celtic” music (which doesn’t include all the music of Ireland, e.g. U2 are not “Irish” in the “traditional music” sense), with its association with a Gaelic speaking population (even if many if not most of the musicians are now English speakers), has an ambiguous relationship to World Music like that of zydeco – sometimes it’s included in the category and sometimes not.
Looking at what’s included in the category of “World Music” provides an interesting, if not all that surprising, window into how culture is marketed and how many North American and European English speakers view their relation to the world. English-speaking Europe and North America is definitively “here.” Northern/Western Europe is pretty clearly “here.” Cajuns, Celts, and Spanish speakers are ambiguously “here/there,” and everyone/everyplace else is definitively “there.”
There is a real World Music
“World Music” is a marketing tool. There’s not a lot of commonality to much of the music included within it, e.g. not a lot in common between Tuvan throat singing, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Mexican ranchero, or Native American flute music.
There is within the catch-all category, though, and growing largely out of the success of the marketing of world music, a subset that has developed into a meaningfully coherent genre in its own right. It is a hybrid genre, generally mixing the rhythms of western pop and rock music with musical elements from a wide variety of non-western musics. A typical result is western electric bass, drum kit, and/or synthesizers and drum machines providing rhythms recognizable to the average western listener surrounded by other “exotic” sounds, i.e. producing at once music that is familiar and different.
Much of this is done cynically, a way to cash in on the “exotic,” often at the same time watering down non-western musical traditions with not much compensation (economic or aesthetic) for the musicians. Some of this World Music, though, is done quite creatively – and it’s not always a matter of westerners appropriating non-western exotic material, but in some cases of musicians incorporating western musical elements (or simply elements from other places) into their own music, such as with Rachid Taha’s “Rock El Casbah,” Sheila Chandra’s “Love is a Killing Thing,” Sekouba Bambino’s version of the James Brown classic “It’s a Man’s, Man’s World,” or the incorporation of electronic beats into Issa Bagayogo’s music.
Kienes? (a variation on “Quién es?” – “Who are you?”) is a short documentary of Algerian-French singer Rachid Taha’s tour of Mexico from 2004. (A DVD copy is included with Taha’s album Tékitoi.) At one point in the video, Taha responds to a question from a Mexican journalist about World Music. Taha argues that “World Music” is simply a convenience for shopkeepers. He also says that “World Music” is a short hand for music from “there” rather than “here,” and that for a Mexican audience, U2, as an Irish band, is a band from “there” and hence “World Music.”
Part of Taha’s comment is straightforwardly true. World Music is a catch-all label that serves as a marketing tool and a convenience for music shops and customers. Another part of his comment is playful and facetious, though making a serious point. World Music is music from “there,” but where “here” and “there” have become fixed locations (“here” is the U.S., the U.K., and sometimes the rest of northern and western Europe – “there” is everywhere else) rather than deictic shifters. To the extent “World Music” exists, and largely as a marketing tool, U2 doesn’t fit (though some other bands from Ireland, like Clannad, might).
World Music as a Marketing Tool
There are many types of music with very real histories and traditions, some quite old, some more recent, that are often today lumped together (at least in the U.S. and some other parts of the world) as “World Music.” “World Music” as this catch-all category would not exist were it not convenient for the recording industry and record dealers (whether conventional stores or online). As I began to argue above, world music is largely the music of there, with here defined largely from a North American or European and mainly English-speaking perspective.
What defines this catch-all category? What’s included? The most important criteria seem to be culture, geography, language, and modernity.
Culture, geography, and language are separate criteria, but in the marketing of World Music, they’re inextricably intertwined. Much of the marketing of World Music plays on the tropes of purity, authentic linkage between voice and place (which links culture, language, and place), primitiveness as sign of purity, authenticity, and autochthony – it’s the marketing of “natives,” and as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, one of the qualities of “the native” in many genres of discourse, including a lot of ethnographic writing, is the intertwining of culture and place, such as to imprison the (non-modern) native in contrast to the world wandering (and modern) Westerner.
The music of all non-western cultures and places is included in the “World Music” category, whether the musics of Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Asia, or the Pacific.
Most music not sung in English is World Music. The major exception to this is that rock and pop genre music performed in languages of Northern and Western Europe that are perceived as modern (i.e. a language like Gaelic is typically perceived and marketed as “traditional) are generally not marketed as “World” (though I’ve seen plenty of record stores market French and German pop music as varieties of World Music, too). Rock and pop “en español” are more ambiguous. They are typically marketed as “Latin” music, which might or might not be marketed as World Music, marking, I think, English speakers’ ambiguous sense of Latin America’s place as part of “Western Culture.”
Some Western musics are included also. Some North American and Northern European musical traditions are at least sometimes marketed as varieties of World Music. The key is that they’re not the traditions of populations that are or were historically mainly English-speaking, and simultaneously, they’re musics associated with tradition rather than modernity. So, North American genres like blues, country, bluegrass, or folk might be seen as rural, or traditional, or even quaint,” musics, but they’re not generally “World Music,” while zydeco (associated with both tradition and French-speaking Cajuns) sometimes is. “Irish” or “Celtic” music (which doesn’t include all the music of Ireland, e.g. U2 are not “Irish” in the “traditional music” sense), with its association with a Gaelic speaking population (even if many if not most of the musicians are now English speakers), has an ambiguous relationship to World Music like that of zydeco – sometimes it’s included in the category and sometimes not.
Looking at what’s included in the category of “World Music” provides an interesting, if not all that surprising, window into how culture is marketed and how many North American and European English speakers view their relation to the world. English-speaking Europe and North America is definitively “here.” Northern/Western Europe is pretty clearly “here.” Cajuns, Celts, and Spanish speakers are ambiguously “here/there,” and everyone/everyplace else is definitively “there.”
There is a real World Music
“World Music” is a marketing tool. There’s not a lot of commonality to much of the music included within it, e.g. not a lot in common between Tuvan throat singing, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Mexican ranchero, or Native American flute music.
There is within the catch-all category, though, and growing largely out of the success of the marketing of world music, a subset that has developed into a meaningfully coherent genre in its own right. It is a hybrid genre, generally mixing the rhythms of western pop and rock music with musical elements from a wide variety of non-western musics. A typical result is western electric bass, drum kit, and/or synthesizers and drum machines providing rhythms recognizable to the average western listener surrounded by other “exotic” sounds, i.e. producing at once music that is familiar and different.
Much of this is done cynically, a way to cash in on the “exotic,” often at the same time watering down non-western musical traditions with not much compensation (economic or aesthetic) for the musicians. Some of this World Music, though, is done quite creatively – and it’s not always a matter of westerners appropriating non-western exotic material, but in some cases of musicians incorporating western musical elements (or simply elements from other places) into their own music, such as with Rachid Taha’s “Rock El Casbah,” Sheila Chandra’s “Love is a Killing Thing,” Sekouba Bambino’s version of the James Brown classic “It’s a Man’s, Man’s World,” or the incorporation of electronic beats into Issa Bagayogo’s music.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Language Extinction and Global Patterns
National Geographic online has posted an interesting (and depressing) article on language extinction, noting the presence of five global “hotspots” for the extinction of languages currently spoken by only small numbers of individuals. These hotspots are: the Northwest Coast of North America, Oklahoma, Central South America, Northeast Asia, and Northern Australia, which is also to say that Native American, Siberian, and Australian Aboriginal languages in particular are disappearing quickly at the present time. As the article discusses, this is a concern not just in terms of the loss of linguistic diversity, but also the loss of knowledge, e.g. of the natural environment, that was thoroughly embedded in each of these languages.
I’d simply note two things in terms of how these five hotspots reflect underlying global patterns. First, these instances don’t reflect just any random languages going extinct. Rather, they reflect particular sorts of interactional histories between quite different sorts of societies. Each is the end result of a few centuries interaction between societies (Native American, Siberian, Australian Aboriginal) with relatively low population densities and technologies that were less efficient for the specific purposes of armed conflict or intensive agricultural production (capable of supporting larger, dense populations) being faced with colonizers from much larger societies (European and Euro-American) with technologies that gave them a distinct edge in direct confrontation. (In the case of the Americas, especially, diseases brought along with Europeans were another major factor in the process of social disruption and linguistic disappearance.)
Second, the current hotspots of linguistic (and cultural) disappearance do not reflect a new phenomenon. They represent the tail end of a now centuries long process of social disruption, cultural loss, and cultural and linguistic assimilation. These hotspots represent remnant areas. What’s happening now in these areas already happened (often long ago) in other areas of the Americas with dense Euro-American settlement, in more densely populated Southern Australia, or in more westerly Siberian areas closer to the heartland of Russian culture.
Tragically, in all likelihood in the near future, very few Native American, Siberian, or Australian Aboriginal languages will remain. The ones that will remain will also not be random. They will in most cases be languages of cultural populations that had relatively high population numbers and densities prior to colonization (e.g. Mesoamerican or Andean languages and a few other North and South American languages), or populations settled in places where the effects of colonization have been particularly light on the ground.
I’d simply note two things in terms of how these five hotspots reflect underlying global patterns. First, these instances don’t reflect just any random languages going extinct. Rather, they reflect particular sorts of interactional histories between quite different sorts of societies. Each is the end result of a few centuries interaction between societies (Native American, Siberian, Australian Aboriginal) with relatively low population densities and technologies that were less efficient for the specific purposes of armed conflict or intensive agricultural production (capable of supporting larger, dense populations) being faced with colonizers from much larger societies (European and Euro-American) with technologies that gave them a distinct edge in direct confrontation. (In the case of the Americas, especially, diseases brought along with Europeans were another major factor in the process of social disruption and linguistic disappearance.)
Second, the current hotspots of linguistic (and cultural) disappearance do not reflect a new phenomenon. They represent the tail end of a now centuries long process of social disruption, cultural loss, and cultural and linguistic assimilation. These hotspots represent remnant areas. What’s happening now in these areas already happened (often long ago) in other areas of the Americas with dense Euro-American settlement, in more densely populated Southern Australia, or in more westerly Siberian areas closer to the heartland of Russian culture.
Tragically, in all likelihood in the near future, very few Native American, Siberian, or Australian Aboriginal languages will remain. The ones that will remain will also not be random. They will in most cases be languages of cultural populations that had relatively high population numbers and densities prior to colonization (e.g. Mesoamerican or Andean languages and a few other North and South American languages), or populations settled in places where the effects of colonization have been particularly light on the ground.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Food, Culture History, and Globalization
Foodways are a critical component of any culture. What people eat, and the ways they acquire and prepare food offer important insights on a culture in general. Likewise, as cultures change through time, foodways change as well - new foods are added (e.g. the "Colombian Exchange" and introduction of New World foods, like chiles, maize, most beans, or potatoes, to the Old and Old World foods, like pork, rice, or chickpeas, to the New); new preparations are introduced (e.g. frozen entrees); while at the same time, old foods and preparations ("gopher soup" in Pensacola - see below; grinding corn by hand in Mexico) may become rarer or fall to the wayside altogether.
This Food Time Line provides a fun and insightful window on global cultural history, including especially some of the major cultural changes and changes to food ways in the context of the globalization of the last 5 centuries.
For perspectives on how things have changed and stayed the same in our local area, check out the link to the "Pensacola Souvenir Cookbook" from 1900. I myself was intrigued by the two gopher soup recipes (where for those not familiar with, perhaps now archaic, local lingo, the gopher in question is not a mammalian gopher [those don't exist around here] but the gopher tortoise).
This Food Time Line provides a fun and insightful window on global cultural history, including especially some of the major cultural changes and changes to food ways in the context of the globalization of the last 5 centuries.
For perspectives on how things have changed and stayed the same in our local area, check out the link to the "Pensacola Souvenir Cookbook" from 1900. I myself was intrigued by the two gopher soup recipes (where for those not familiar with, perhaps now archaic, local lingo, the gopher in question is not a mammalian gopher [those don't exist around here] but the gopher tortoise).
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