Twila Tharp.
Monthly Archives: December 2008
WHY NOT MUSIC?
Why Music?, appearing December 19 in The Economicist, summarizes some of the theories evolutionary anthropologists have been floating to explain why music is a pervasive feature of human life.
In reading this article about subject matter I am long acquainted with and, moreover, about a question I have recently focused upon, I saw how the treatment circles back to a previous posting here about the fault line drawn between evolutionary and social anthropologists in the academy. (We post-anthropologists, being heuristic whores, simply see poorly sighted researchers fondling the part of the elephant nearby.) This divide seems clear enough in pondering the biological fact of sound organization, and, the function of music in a social context.
These two concerns, twin concerns if you will overlap:
A second idea that is widely touted is that music binds groups of people together. The resulting solidarity, its supporters suggest, might have helped bands of early humans to thrive at the expense of those that were less musical.
The evolutionary conceit requires function to advantage selection, or, as Stephen Pinker would have it, a function can also be equivalent to detritus if it implements no clear advantageous function. The rejoinder from the side of culture obviously stands on the ground of functionality being–at least–clearly advantageous to, well, culture.
The article is decent enough, and, the comments are also worthwhile. As is the usual case, some of the comments express various ideas of ‘folk’ anthropology, or how the uninformed necessarily look at the subject. My own view is that those informal views figure into it too in the sense that they are self-reports of the value of music.
The uncredited (online) author of the article ends with a weird and untrue assertion:
The truth, of course, is that nobody yet knows why people respond to music.
Actually, the truth is that neuroscientists understand all sorts of stuff about the effect of music on the brain. These insights don’t answer the entire question of ‘why,’ yet they answer the necessary mechanical half of the question.
See Dr. Daniel Levitin on this, and, don’t read his two excellent books-check out the audio book (Amazon) equivalents with their audible samples.)
The other half can be approached by asking people why they respond to music. Right? (The phenomenologists day is never done!) Obviously, this real time inquiry can’t address the departed subject, but there is no lack of secondary and tertiary material.
There is a third interdisciplinary move too: which is to admit into the field of consideration esoteric, yogic, meta-physical, perspectives and flesh out a primary supposition concerned with the integral vibrational nature of, as it were, the inside and the outside. On a gross level, this can be approached simply by blocking one’s ears so as to become more acutely privy to what the body is sounding all the time. Try this if you never have before. There’s no reason to exclude such suppositions from research focused on higher conceptual orders of musical life because those suppositions are explicit features, are facts discoverable in all sorts of cultural instances and locations, such as the Berber and Gnawa cultures in North Africa.
(There are some reference suggestions over at the Rhythm River complex; see Resources.)
Filed under music
RHYTHM RIVER PROMO
The Rhythm River pages are up at squareONE. I made a quickee montage to promote this latest tool; albeit the development unfolded over twenty years.
[flashvideo filename=http://squareone-learning.com/video/RhythmRiver2.flv /]
Music is Kayyam, from my 2002 recording In Khorasan. It can be streamed in its entirety over at nogutsnoglory studios, at the bottom of the world hed music page.
Filed under adult learning, music
OBSERVING THE OBSERVER – NOT!
On December 16, The Uncertain Future of News, (WCPN Stream,) joined host Dan Malthrop with Lauren Rich Fine ContentNext, Kent State University and Ted Gup Case Western Reserve University to discuss the imploding old print newspaper media. The discussion was interesting but it didn’t really capture the confluence of trends, one of which is most germane: that people increasingly are reading less. This trend is a generational trend. This noted, if you’re interested in the business of news and newspapers’ role in providing information, it’s a worthwhile 45 minutes.
At about 11 minutes in Ms. Fine responds to the host’s mention of the example of local free newspapers The Lakewood Observer, (the ‘mothership,’) and The Heights Observer, (spawned by the mothership.) Both exemplify the mostly volunteer ethos of amateur community journalism. However, after praising their ability to “develop community consciousness” Professor Gup comments from the perspective of the old school professional model, that such community newspapers don’t have the resources to pursue “real” investigative journalism.
And then the discussion turned back toward analysis of the faltering old print news. Listening to this segment, I chuckled to myself. What a missed opportunity! Then, as the discussion returns to what might be new models for news delivery, the panel never circles back to the vital local model of the Observer, which, in Lakewood’s case, has been thriving for three-and-a-half years.
In an organic discussion focused on the old media it is not surprising that an active new model gets short shrift. But, Mr. Gup’s acute point about community journalism, that it can develop community consciousness, could have been deployed to ask why the old media doesn’t do this, and why community journalism can do this. The criticism of community journalism from the perspective of old media can be inverted: what advantages The Lakewood Observer and disadvantages, for example, The Plain Dealer from the perspective of the model of the new volunteer, “post-professional,” community media?
Scrolling back to the genesis of The Lakewood Observer offers a crucial clue. I was there and nobody talked about emulating conventional newspapers. The Observer model was not born of thinking about news provision as much as it was born of thinking about community consciousness and its revitalization. My guess is that old newspapers don’t think about this at all.
Although Gup’s point about community newspapers not having resources to, as it were, drag resistant institutions into court, is true, he never discusses the type of investigation community journalists can unleash. From the perspective of the efficiency of resources, it’s obvious that the work product of free correspondents is much more efficient than the million dollar model of conventional newspapers.
But, there’s more.
Community newspapers can really raise a high velocity and high volume ruckus. The key point here is that–what I’ll term–the community consciousness model is itself the product of local journalists really having a stake in the community, of their direct engagement, and subjectivity rather than objectivity. This is contrasted with The Plain Dealer’s stake being quite different, more professional, more detached, and resulting in ‘just another story’ at a scale oriented toward a wide readership as opposed to a local, (or micro,) readership.
Gup mentioned, later, how local powers can gauge and probably ignore this ruckus. This caused me to say to myself that the professor needs to do his homework on this point, and do it in Lakewood. The community consciousness model doesn’t aspire to implement an ephemeral, objective, string of investigative stories. It’s model is much better disposed to sustain a point of inquiry and, sometimes, attack. In Lakewood, the paper instigates, and the community sustains, much of this unfolding in the continuing discussions on the paper’s online forum. By the way, the forum is itself an interpersonal form of community journalism. The forum focuses and sustains community concerns. The genius of the Observer’s model is that it’s aggregation has to do with aggregating consciousness.
Circling back, although Professor Gup’s later point about opinion being cheap to produce, facts expensive to produce, is true enough, at the beginning of the Lakewood Observer project, we discussed how a certain type of journalist, by virtue of their engagement, and intensity, and–indeed–subjectivity, would be in a good ‘affectual’ position to loosen facts from resistant institutions and personages. This personality factor elevates emotional commitment to a community to be a key component of tenacity. This recognizes that subjectivity, in a rich social psychological context, is pragmatic and very useful.
The Lakewood Observer, since its beginning, is in the position to always hash out, re-hash, reconfigure, its model and analyze anew the system it’s a part of. This nimbleness is also a crucial feature of its ability to shape-shift and redeploy volunteer journalists in real time. After all, the unpaid journalist many times will only pursue what interests them; another point of ‘affect’ and ‘energetics.’
My uninformed guess is that old model newspapers aren’t likely to engage their own human resources in ongoing meta-discussions and pragmatic discussions, both enabled to deeply reflect on their predicament. There’s too much money at stake and the stakes are driven too deeply. If this is true, it could be hard to have a deep dialogue about one’s model, especially one that can address the question of community consciousness, and its ‘raising’ in a profound and post-professional manner!
I’ll urge Professor Gup, if he hasn’t already, and Mr. Malthrop, to investigate the Observer model closely. The Observer may observe the same terrain as the big city newspaper, but it does it with different eyes and a bigger ‘unpaid’ consciousness.
Filed under Kenneth Warren
LIT UP STORY
November 25th I sat at a table of participants I had just met, and then collaborated to create a vision for Cleveland’s sustainable future. In collaborating together and imagining together a middle ground where we fruitfully share our different interests, the group set about doing something I immensely enjoy. This is to then synthesize and express the collaborative product.
The piece of the vision I hoped others could relate to was the relationship between sustainability and human artistry and creativity. Well, my colleagues did relate to this. My own sense has been developing for forty-five years, ever since I conjured up in a boy’s daydream a picture of utopia, a idealized human universe in which everybody made art for everybody else.
In 2005, working with the Visionary Alignment team in Lakewood, I unleashed my conception of the CIMPLE Lit-Up Center. This concept integrates an egalitarian performance space, after school and continuing arts education, and, civic inquiry in the form of a dedicated folk anthropology.
Here’s the floor plan. Download the position paper. [pdf 13mb] It’s beyond open source.
Filed under Cleveland, Kenneth Warren
TENTATIVITY
I came across Hannah Fearn’s article The Great Divide, about the battle between social anthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists, (in Times Higher Education; Nov 20:2008) several days after it had been published and decided to let the comments percolate a bit. It’s not a very good article in the sense of offering any substantial definition of the controversy.
It revolves around Fearn’s awkward formulation:
Put crudely, social anthropologists describe and compare the development of human cultures and societies, while evolutionary anthropologists seek to explain it by reference to our biological evolution.
I will forgive the tautological miscue, “explain development by reference to evolution” and forgive the superficial “describe and compare,” while I chuckle to myself about a half century’s worth of controversy in anthropology, hapening just among social anthropologists!
I suppose in jockeying for grants and assistants and for promoting prominence in curricula, there might be lots of snobbery acted out between socios and evos, but nothing in the article points to how actual distinctions of difference have been hashed out in anthropology, the philosophy of science, and the application of theoretical meta-science in anthropology. This, doh, only reveals once again that most scientists don’t have to be expert in the philosophy of science. (If they were, they would be adept at playing the devil’s advocate against their own ‘brand.’)
The concise way to settle this controversy isn’t given enough weight in the article. It’s a controversy about what part of the elephant the different blind researchers are touching is the “best part of all.”
Obviously, both evolutionary and social anthropologists generate hypotheses and then deploy stable evidence and secure suppositions from within a proven methodological and self-consistent verification regime yada yada yada. I would guess there are evolutionary anthropologists who propose that quantifiable research, based in strict nomothetic frameworks, utilizing only biological scale evidence, offers a more veracious result. Whatever. There is no ground to stand on with such a claim, or, maybe one can visualize the elephant standing on the bio-anthropologist’s head in such cases.
Because we could classify entire classes of inquiry to be both worthwhile and also immune to the minds, tools, and procedures, of evolutionary anthropology, there is sometimes no possible discussion about what is a more appropriate road for investigation. (Roughly the instructive point is: what kind of investigation best matches what one wishes to know.) This, basically, is a kind of didactic point of meta-science. I also suppose it is today ironic that evolutionary anthropologists work in the same field that has such sturdy offshoots oriented around a critique of science and scientism. But, nevertheless, an anthropologist could become interested in making an account for the existence for some evolutionary or another kind of reason of just these kinds of divides!
Anyway…the comments to the article are better than the article but nothing there really acknowledges the actuality of a philosophy of the various schemes (sub-disciplines,) of anthropology.
(Note my own interest in all of this issue from my low position as a lay reader, albeit one whose reading tends these days to focus on subject matter more in the camp of evolutionary anthropology. However, I have a long-standing fascination with meta-science and, specifically, the problems of verification and what conceptual structures are necessary to truth claims.)
My mentor Mulla Nasrudin shall have the last word:
See: Philosophy of Anthropology and sociology; Turner and Risjord.
A favorite volume I recommend:
Anthropology In Theory; Moore, Sanders, ed. Blackwell | Amazon (Editor Henrietta Moore is a preeminent scholar on the philosophy of anthropology.
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December 15 (add)
Nicholas Baumard’s article Neuroanthropology or Ethnographic Neurosciences, at Culture and Cognition, can be read as a practical view on the controversy.
Oliver Morin supplies a single comment, from which its first of two paragraphs is:
Interesting point. I am afraid things are likely to evolve in exactly the opposite direction: methods and skills are more bankable than theory in many fields. Using a specific, easy to identify method gives an immediate appearance of professionalism. Theories are much more common, and their quality is much more difficult to control. Even if a theory has powerful implications about, say, the way the brain processes a sentence, if it makes no predictions in terms of localization or cell activity (many excellent theories of syntax do not provide such predictions), it won’t be considered neuroscience, even though no one can deny that your object of study is the human brain. The shiny “neuro” label is much praised and envied, so scientists try to control what gets the label and what does not in the cheapest and easiest possible way.
Filed under Uncategorized
DOUBTING THE ANCIENTS MADE MODERN MISTAKES
The categorical splitting between masculine/feminine; head/heart; thinking/feeling; (etc./etc.) is at least interesting for this splitting maneuver being long-standing. It sometimes says more about the splitter. It carries with it the appeal of heartfelt reductions. On the other hand, for me, a useful dichotomy or polarity–and they are a crucial structural aspect of some of my work–requires them to be the ground for a substantial and oft fuzzy and meaningful richness. What’s the overlap between head and heart? …for example.
In terms of favored investigations into the phenomenology of folk psychology, a dichotomy such a head/heart often turns out to be robustly reified in self reports.
However, casting backward upon indigenous peoples contemporary theories of mind as if these peoples were able to psychologize about themselves as moderns do is mistaken. This is an error of reflexivity: our self sense confirms a bias about other, olden selves.
In doing this it is possible to buffer away actual differences. And next to simplify; while at the same time dropping modern tools, tools which could come in very handy in integrating, as it were, head and heart.
Filed under folk psychology
