Why Suy Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People by Anthony Seeger Review by: Steven Feld Yearbook for

Traditional Music, Vol. 21 (1989), pp. 134-138 Published by: International Council for Traditional Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/767784 . Accessed: 07/05/2012 15:16
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

International Council for Traditional Music is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Yearbook for Traditional Music.

http://www.jstor.org

134 / 1989 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

are the many Bellonese musical terms, the song poetry and allusive dance gestures found widely in western Polynesia. By contrast, it appears that Bellona has independently developed a predilection for heterometric songs, anhemitonic tetratonic and pentatonic scales, relatively wide ranges, stable tempi during performance, and the non-encouragement of innovation. In a review of Rossen'sfirst disc (1976), Mervyn McLean(1978) noted the marked difference in style between the Bellona sample and songs recorded in 1933 from neighbouring Rennell island (despite Rossen's having been assured (p. 3) that "theirsongs" were "the same"). The Rennell sample contained responsorial couplets, were in duple metre and had melodies emphasising the interval of P4-all features of western Polynesian style. In her present work also, Rossen does not address this apparent contradiction; one must conclude either that the 1933 recordings were not representative, or that the Bellona people's assertions of "sameness"referredto something other than style, or that Bellona style itself changed rapidly between 1933 and 1958. The work itself would have benefited from careful proofreading, e.g., Britishand American nomenclature is juxtaposed ("semiquavers"vs "quarternotes"),"?"vs "degrees","Kolinsky" for Kolinski (p. 358), and "Brailoui"for Brailoiu (p. 323). The lack of titles on the spines is regrettable. The writing itself has a few stylistic detractions. The introduction, with its sometimes ingenuous chronicle of activities and researchmethods, tends to be more distracting than diverting, and contributes little to the study itself. And overall, there are difficulties in maintainingcontinuity; to some extent this is due to the chapter sequence, e.g. explanations of musical terminology and associated concepts occur four chapters after the section on the nine major occasions for song performance, occasions which embody these very concepts. Within this book lie several avenues for furtherresearch;one hopes that, just as the Bellonese shared their musical wealth with Rossen, she herself will continue to perpetuatethis Polynesian tradition. Richard M. Moyle References Cited Burrows, E.G. 1945 Songs of Uvea and Futuna. Bulletin 183. Honolulu: Bishop Museum. Christensen, Dieter and Gerd Koch Die Musik der Ellice- Inseln. Berlin: Museum fur Volkekunde. 1964 McLean, Mervyn [Review of Rossen 1976.] Journal of the Polynesian Society, 87:144-148. 1978 Moyle, Richard M. 1987 Tongan Music. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Traditional Samoan Music. Auckland: Auckland University Press. 1988 Rossen, Jane Mink 1976 Polynesian Songs and Games from Bellona (Mungiki) Solomon Islands. Ethnic Folkways Records FE4273. (New York: Folkways records & Service Corp.) Thomas, Allen 1988 Report on Survey of Music in Tokelau, WesternPolynesia. Working Papers in Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Maori Studies No. 79. Auckland: Anthropology Department, University of Auckland.

Anthony Seeger, Why Suya Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xxi + 147 pages; photographs, diagrams, musical transcriptions. (Cambridge Studies in Ethnomusicology). Accompanied by cassette of examples discussed in the book. Reader beware: this lean book appears deceptively modest, but in just 150 low-key and smoothly written pages, Anthony Seeger spins out enough of an integrated theoretical and empirical meditation on why Suya sing to set a good portion of traditional ethnomusicology

REVIEWS

BOOKS / 135

on its ear. The book moves through terrifically detailed ethnography and cultural analysis with such ease, confidence and sophistication as to almost make it look easy. At the same time the account is laced with many provocative theoretical insights, summations, asides, and suggestions. Seeger does not always mine the depth of some of these ideas the way he does the ethnographic material; neither does he dramatize to assert just how foundational they might be to a refiguringof a good deal of the ethnomusicological enterprise. But they are. In his terse preface Seeger gets right to business, contrasting Alan Merriam'santhropology of music, with its emphasis on the study of music in culture, to his own crisp notion of musical anthropology, which stresses "social life as a performance", "society from the perspective of musical performance", and research "meant to establish aspects of social life as musical and as created and re-created through performance." While the difference may seem slight or subtle to some readers, in fact it is highly significant, and reflects upheavals in social theory in the last two decades. The Merriam program grew out of the functional or structural-functional approach in anthropology; even though this version was infused with an admirable dose of Herskovitsian historicism, the tendency was still to view music as a relatively static "thing"residing in the autonomous container called "culture." While explicitly integrating a concern with musical concepts, behavior, and products as a dynamic loop, there was a dimension clearly lacking in Merriam'santhropology of music: the systematic view of musical production as a cultural enactment whose very dynamics reproduce social relations. This dimension, what I would rhetorically call the actively social life of music as it embodies the musical life of society, is Seeger's refigured theoretical turf, and he sets as his key concern "the way music is part of the very construction and interpretation of social and conceptual relationshipsand processes"ratherthan the way music is an end product of concepts and behaviors. While this repositioning, presented here in a characteristically understated tone that continues throughout the volume, is often matter of fact and without elaboration, it raises something of an intellectual call to arms for ethnomusicology, one very worthy of sustained scholarly discussion. Chapter one cleverly inverweaves a personal narrative with a variety of contextualizing statements that bring the Suya, their cosmology and their ceremonial life into cultural, geographical, historical and comparative ethnographic relief with other Ge-speaking Amazonian communities. While the Suya emerge here as historically complex, culturally resilient, and ritually energetic, Seeger emerges in tandem as both the engaged and engaging fieldworker, equally able to query the Suya, entertain them with his banjo and songs, and graciously accept his pet status among them as "ourWhiteman."Mixed through these agendas Seeger gets a case study underway, of the Mouse ceremony, whose two weeks of activities are so symbolically replete and saturated with Suya-ness that their analysis will span throughout the book, continually re-anchoring the reader to the events by detailed day-byday concrete explications of each ritual activity and modality of expression, inserted in a series of chapters that present various theoretical and ethnographic contexts. This narrative strategy is well crafted and very appealing; Seeger here begins to draw the reader into the spatial and temporal world of the Suya and into the microcosmic temporal progression of the ceremony, both of which unfold through the course of the book. This is a particularly effective way to convey the dramaturgical and performative force of the ceremony; the reader's immersion into the stretch of Suya ceremonial time parallels an immersion into a book-length ethnographic account, one whose own dramatic structure evidences similar cumulative intensification to the rite de passage it explicates. Like the Suya Mouse ceremony participant, the reader emerges at the other end of the experience drained and euphoric, out from the liminality of trying to fit what went before with what comes next, socialized and invigorated with new intelligence and warmth. Additionally, there is something about the gentle quality of Seeger'snarrativeand descriptive style that lends both authority and genuineness to the account as it opens; it instills a sense of the author as a careful fieldworker, as a musical and musically curious man able to embrace the discoveries, mysteries and difficulties of the Suya world with an unconflicted mixture of analytic clarity and downright affection. Clearly many forms of knowledge exchange underlie this account; but Seeger is careful to be clear about what he couldn't figure out, isn't sure of, couldn't talk about with Suya, or simply found that Suya were not much interestedin. This incisive directnessand lack of pretensionadds a tremendoussense of mature assurance to the account.

136 / 1989 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

Chapter two is an analysis of Suya discourse styles, genres and performance practices, locating the major Suya categories-speech, instruction, song, and invocation-in relational continua of social, pragmatic, textual, and sonic-performative features. While I found the accompanying tape recording quite a nice addition as I read Chapter one, it turns out that here, for Chapter two and in the later stages of the book, for example the analysis of rising pitch in Chapter five, the tape is really such an integral part of the presentation and analysis that no reading should be without interspersed and repeated listenings. Although sold separately, it is my feeling that the tape is in no way optional to Seeger's text; so add to its many other shining virtues the fact that this study is an admirable example of how to fit a text and recording together, not just illustratively, but also intertextually. Seeger's approach to verbal art carefully balances Suya emic categories and explanations with various etic analytic grids demarcating dimensions of the speech-song continuum. He nicely underscores the problematic nature of privileging melody for differentiating Suya speech, instruction and song, yet does not detail many of the dimensions of texture and timbre in vocal quality that seem so prominent in the tape examples (including the potential for various levels of iconicity in vocal styles and articulation, e.g., airy-breathy expiration in the articulation in the invocation vis-a-vis the blowing aspect of the performance). Additionally Seeger's apparently unintended biasing (or is it the Suya intended biasing?) of musical over linguistic dimensions at various junctures might rub conversational discourse analysts the wrong way. For example "everyday speech" is here presented as a rather undifferentiated and singular category marked by free texts without parallelism, and with little attention to style and phrasing. Surely Suya speak more ways than one. Is there really no parallelism (patterned repetition with variation) in the structure of Suya argument or persuasive rhetoric? Such minor criticisms in no way reduce the impact of the chapter, for what Seeger manages to pull off forcefully is a demonstration that "ratherthan studying forms of speech and song singly, in the supreme isolation of different disciplines, we should be studying them as interrelated genres . .." While a number of previous researchers have pointed out the importance of analyzing song via the interrelationship of text and tune, Seeger is resituating the argument in an important way, emphasizing the cultural and social construction of discourse genres. Seeger's treatment of song genre construction and particularly what Suya do and don't speak about with regard to song form and meaning raises some powerful questions. I would like to known Seeger's views of why Suya and other Native Lowland South Americans seem to have relatively less of a metalinguistic/metamusical tradition than might befit a musical imagination that is so rich and so cosmic. Does this thinner exegetic tendency relate more principally to the position of speaking in the community, that is to Suya concepts of what language can and should properly transmit, an indigenous theory of linguistic efficacy? What underlies this question of course is another one that Seeger is most sensitive to in this chapter: Given the central presence or absence of text-making in the formation of Suya genres, how much does a musical anthropology of an Amazonian people requirea linguistic anthropology of same? To put it in a frame appropriately honoring the lineage of Grandfather Seeger, why does Suya musical discourse obviate in such a specific way the Suya verbal discourse about music? Is it perhaps that communal participatory accountability here overshadows notions of specific personal accountability for knowledge that might be more typically transmitted in speech? I'm persuaded that both the specific analysis Seeger gives and the questions that arise point to the necessity of a musical anthropology that is even more centrally discourse-centred in its theoretical formulation of genre, style, and performance. Discourse is, par excellence, the encompassing metaphor that neither privileges formal structure nor social function, but situates them dialectically, and not just as an end-product of social action, but, rather always constituted in and as social action. Although Seeger does not use the term "discourse-centred" for this analysis, the notion seems to capture precisely how process and performativity are inventive embodiments and enactments, right along the lines of his other emphases with a musical anthropology, emphases that would be right at home with Bakhtin, Jakobson, Bauman and other theorists of discourse genres, verbal semiosis, and narrativity. Before I fill up this whole review with pages of questions and responses to this incredibly provocative chapter, I should say a little something about the other chapters, which are no less rich, rewarding, and exciting in their own terms (they just happen to come after

REVIEWS

BOOKS / 137

the one that set me spinning longest). In Chapter three, on the origin of songs, Seeger discusses the three major patterns of Suya song introduction; myths, 'men without spirits' = quasi"composers,"and foreigners,employing them as furtheravenues into Suya cosmology, nature, symbolism, and history. This chapter ends with a teasing and tantalizingly all-to-brief comparison of Kaluli (Papua New Guinea), Suya, Ancient Greek and American mythical ideologies of song transmission. Seeger's main concern is to provoke us to think about how "nature" and the "natural"are culturally rationalized, and he does. Chapter four addressessinging as a creative activity; Seegerindulges us here in some Murray Shafer-esque soundscape/acoustic ecology metaphors: village as concert hall, seasonal activities as concert series, social groups as orchestral ensemble. Through these he elaborates the congruence of social, ecological, and spatial relationships that seem so essential to the temporality of Ge cosmology and performance, and elaborates on how the interaction of gender, the physical and social body, and concept of person are essential to understanding the social bases of Suya creativity. Chapter five addresses that mysteriously complex and famous phenomenon for which Native South Americans will always be dear to ethnomusicologists: the performance of microtonal pitch rising. Through an analysis of the Suya case Seeger provides a lucid metacommentary on transcription and the interaction of field and lab approaches in the analysis of performanceaesthetics, a sort of meditation on the subjectivityof objectivity and objectivity of subjectivity, or, on the acoustic reality of the social and social reality of acoustics. This chapter raises many question for me about what traditional transcription and computation can and cannot capture about phenomena like microtonal rising, questions that I would have liked to see Seeger juxtapose with a number of other linguistic, musical, and acoustic analytic techniques,like Greg Urban'ssocio-acoustic and discourse analyses of South American ritual dialogues and ritual wailing, or Gilbert Rouget's analysis of a South American chant in his Transcrire ou Decrire? essay in honor of Levi-Strauss. In Chapter six we are back to the Mouse Ceremony, and Seeger here pulls together aspects of space, time, ritual transformation, social relationships, and discourse genres in parallel to the way Suya pull together and difinitively wrap up and end the ceremony. One curiosity I had concerning this part of the book involves contrastive approaches to ritual performance and cosmology found here and in Ellen Basso's A Musical View of the Universe, about the Carib-speaking (non-Ge) Kalapalo of the Upper Xingu. In her analysis of the musicality of ritual performance Basso relies deeply and quite persuasively on Sound and Symbol by the music philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl,particularlyhis approach to musical space-time. While Seeger's symbolic analyses are in several ways congruent with Basso's, and while he mentions the possibility of some Suya borrowing from Upper Xingu Indians, he does not draw upon Zuckerkandl. This made me wonder whether Seeger simply found Zuckerkandl irrelevant to the Suya case, or whether specific differences between Ge and Carib-speaking groups account for why both Basso and Seeger draw substantially on Victor Turner, yet only Basso found Zuckerkandl so resonant both with Turnerian analysis and Kalapalo cosmology. Chapter seven is such a lean, intense and masterful summation that any re-summation seems violent! Seeger navigates through everything from physiology, psychology, and economics of song all the way into matters of socio-political change and comparative Ge and Amazonian ceremonialism, then repositions the whole with a few pages of implications that take us back to musical anthropology, and some prescriptive invocational chants of the author's own, something of a cross between a hypodermic booster and personal ethnomusicological credo. I suppose that every researcher has his or her own yardstick for assessing when and how a book really speaks to them; when it is that reading or reviewing is not just a matter of scholarly need to keep up with things or an offering of congratulations for a volume that is a welcome addition to the field and its literature. My own personal yardstick tends to be the extent to which a study compels me back to my own writings, field notes, texts, transcriptions, or analyses in order to rediscover or juxtapose angles, nuances, or paths that were once not so theoretically or empirically evident. Why Suya Sing was exactly this kind of book for me; it reopened many vexing questions about the intersection of musical, poetic, narrative, and mythical discourses, about ways musical participation empowers people and stimulates intense sociability, about the analysis of ritual performance, about the centrality of musical practices in historical consciousness and the reproduction of identity, about the dialects and dialogics of fieldwork and presentation, about the extraordinary disjunctions

138 / 1989 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC

between surface sonic-musical simplicity and deep cultural-musical imagination, about the necessity for transcendingan anthropology of music and embracing a musical anthropology. I want to end this review by urging you to go right out and buy this book, but there is a slight problem with that, namely the pricing policies at Cambridge University Press. While neither Seeger nor CambridgeStudies in EthnomusicologyGeneralEditorJohn Blacking are to blame here, the combination of $50 for a book of 150 pages and $15 for a cassette of 50 minutes strikes me as rather steep by contemporary standards. This is an important book and cassette to which many students and scholars need ready access, yet it is priced such that only a small number of research libraries and a small number of well-salaried professors might imagine purchasing it; others will simply be put off or tempted to violate the print and audio copyright. This is hardly a deserved fate for an excellent ethnomusicologist who publishes a state-of-the-art book in a prestigious series under the imprint of a major international press. I hope this unfortunate circumstance will not unduly constrain reception of this superb study by the broad interdisciplinary audience to which it so provocatively speaks. Steven Feld The University of Texas at Austin Note: This, and only this review was commissioned and edited by the Editor-in-Chief, not by the Book Review Editor (and author).

Slawek, Stephen M. Sitar Technique in Nibaddh Forms. xix, 232 pp., tables, figures, photos, musical transcriptions. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. The importance of sitar in modern Hindustani music is widely recognized. Nonetheless, the instrument has rarely been the subject of a critical study. For this reason alone, Stephen Slawek's Sitar Technique is a welcome addition to the scarce literature on Indian stringed instruments. It attempts to develop an 'inside-out' description of improvisation in the rhythmicallybound sections of sitar performance.Slawek'stwenty year experienceas a student of the instrument under the late Dr. Lalmani Misra of Banaras Hindu University and Pandit Ravi Shankargives him the credentialsand perspectivefor the project. An originalcontribution to the field can be found in the work's detailed descriptionof sitar techniquesand the treatment of their application in a performance. A number of shortcomings, however, undermine the value of the work as a piece of scholarship. Chapter I is an introduction to the book and the author; Chapter II quickly surveys the history of the instrumentand its music, and the third chapter discussesa few historical sources of sitar techniques. The main substance of Slawek's work lies in the next four chapters. In Chapter IV a number of left and right hand techniques and their combinations as applied to a practice regimen are described. This is done with precision and in considerable detail. In Chapter V the three gat (composition) types that dominate sitar music are explained, again in some detail, along with their respective systems of improvisatory expansion. Chapter VI concerns the techniques in actual performance, and consists of a long 82-page transcription in staff notation (with additions above and below to show left and right hand actions) of a recorded performance by Ravi Shankar. This is followed in Chapter VII by a statistical analysis of the performance with respect to the rate of composition and variations, the occurrence of specific techniques and the progression of tempo and gamut expansion. A conclusion, glossary, small bibliography/discography and an index conclude the book. Slawek's descriptions of techniques are thorough, and his conceptualization of first, second and third level combinations (in Chapter IV) to explain increasingly complex techniques is original. His discussion of gat types and their expansion through learned systems of improvisation provide a substantive introduction to some aspects of modern performance. The analysis of the Ravi Shankar performance gives a detailed breakdown of the techniques and system used by this performer. All this, however, is only available to those who can struggle through the transcription and the dense mixture of technical terms and statistical tables that make up the analysis. Almost half the book consists of transcribed music examples. Since this work "should prove useful to studentsof north Indianmusic and sitar, both in theory and practice"(foreword by Ravi Shankar, p. xv) and has been published in India, one wonders why the author has