THE FOLKLORE OF IDENTITY THEFT

Restorying Abebe Biqila

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba 

Indiana University

USA

Now four years back, this brief Article I wrote to correct one historical folly and in so doing to deconstruct similar neo-Abyssinian discourses and unveil the forced  "social invisibility" upon the Oromo. In any case, it was sad to hear in July 2010 the sudden death of my long time college friend (27 years back at Kotebe College of Teachers Education in 1985) and colleague at the AAU, Berhanu Gebeyehu, whose entry to the Encyclopedia Aethiopica Vol. I on Abebe Biqila, shallow that it is,  initiated this Article. 

____________________

The purpose of the article is twofold: one is, to pin down with some greater accuracy the life history of the legendary Abebe Bikila Waqjira. Second, to pay tribute to this Olympic Champion who suffered from cerebral hemorrhage, a complication related to the accident four years earlier, and gathered to his ancestors with his failed narratives in 1973. The right to write our life stories is a natural extension of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equally important, the right to feign others' life history as we please inflicts serious pains. In a society not valuing individualism, may we, also, say and write what we please when we engage in self-narration? Or, do we misrepresent people in a caricature or comic DVDs for cheep popularity? Not necessarily! Not, unless we are prepared to suffer consequences of considerable gravity.

It generates a flood of condemnation in the public and press for apparently mercenary self-exposure (in the case of self-narration) or egotistical ascription in narrating others' at the expense of one's reputation and trust, propriety and wholesomeness. No doubt to say, we are judged by what we tell and how we tell it when we tell the stories of our lives and others. This judging, always taking place, manifests itself most strikingly when memory loss and other disabilities prevent our performing self-narration, or performing it at all, and this chance, be taken by others witty to make benefits out of us, is a fatal hard luck. Berhanu Gebeyehu's Article,1 a biography degree-zero, I would say, is a case in point. If Berhanu argues Abebe Bikila's failed narrative reflects a failed identity, it is amateurish—unprofessional debut!

I argue that while we may well have the right to tell our life stories, or narrate others', we do so under some constraints: we are governed by rules, and we can expect to be held accountable to others for breaking them. These rules are tacit because many a daily performance we carry out is done under such a strict but implicit moral code and decorum, that we live to violate or abide by or both.

Based on the data obtainable from primary and secondary sources I refute Berhanu's work to be reckless and unprofessional. It is total identity theft. In the Article Berhanu commits a fatal mistake unreliably to compose a biography of Abebe Bikila in Encyclopedia Aethiopica vol. i.. This can be observed on two levels: one, he must have concocted legend best suits to him and to his likes out of chauvinistic myopia. Two, despite the countless up-to-date information on the Athlete, the author must have limited his article only to a few ‘heralds' & ‘observers' out of sheer meanness.2 I have come across a handful information about the Athlete based on primary and secondary sources: people, i.e., family and professionals, and the Internet. There are also books, articles and newspaper reports on the athlete and his achievements: Tsige Abebe Bikila's Triumph and tragedy: a history of Abebe Bikila and his marathon career (1996), inter alia, Paul Rambali's The Barefoot Runner (2003). More recently Giorgio Lo Giudice and Valerio Piccioni also published a book in Italy in 2003 titled Un sogno a Roma - Storia di Abebe Bikila.3 These and perhaps many others are books and accessible sources the author deliberately shoved aside to consult and to update his work. When the athlete died in 1973, he survived by four children with his wife. These are all reliable living sources the author must not have disregarded.

Like so many of those who make up the historical fabric of Abyssinians and Abbyssinianists, no wonder to say, Berhanu Gebeyehu tactically feigned a wrong but quick-to-last narrative of Abebe Bikila's short life and enduring work. The author is my colleague now for over twenty-three years now from Kotebe College in 1985 and '86. In so far as he has any philosophy at all, it is this: if a Man has come to be of some Great Success, s/he must be Habasha. Even more, sometime, for my friend, I remember, the Axum Obelisk was an absolute form of a surplus labor; and Pyramids, the margin of Death in the horizon—as it were.

Let me first reiterate what the author has to say in his article, before I proceed to the general account of my critique:

One,
A. B. [was] born [on] 20 November 1927, [at] Wayyu warada, Debra Brehan awraja, in Southern Shawa (emphasis mine).

Two,
A. B. was named after his Godfather ato Bikila, who took care of him as his real father had died before he was born.

These are the two points make the kernel of the present article: that Abebe Bikila was born at Wayyu near Debre Berhan, Southern Shawa, and that Bikila is Abebe's benefactor, not a biological father.4

Let's observe the first premise: that Abebe was born at Wayyu, Debre Berhan, Southern Shawa.

Of those different assertions about A. Bikila's date- and place of birth and his background, one states that he was born on August 7, 1932 in a town called Jato, about 130 km from Addis Ababa, in the district of Nya'a Dannaba of the Tulama Oromo branch in North-east Show. His parents were Widnesh Menberu and Bikila Demssie—though Yetinna-yet Abebe witnesses Abebe's father to be Bikila Waqjira.5 Abebe is said to have spent most of his childhood as a shepherd while also playing traditional game like ‘ganna.' At the age of 12, he completed the traditional "Qes" schooling. In 1952, the young Abebe was hired by the Imperial Body Guard, where he participated in both athletics and "ganna" game. In 1954, he married Yewubdar W/Giorgis with whom he fathered four children.6

In line with this, another author, Paul Rambali, in his book The Barefoot Runner (2003) confirms that Abebe was born on August 7, 1932 in the village of Jato, located 9km outside the city of Mendida, Ethiopia, to a shepherd Bikila Waqjira. Abebe decided to join the Imperial Guards to provide support for his family and walked to Addis Ababa to start privately athletic business. Later he was spotted as a potential athlete by a Swede Couch Onni Niskanen.7

There is this another excerpt: the Ethiopian track and field athlete, Abebe Bikila (1932-1973), was the first black African to win an Olympic medal, and the first man ever to win two Olympic marathons. Known for his grace and stamina, he was considered the most perfect example of a naturally talented distance runner. This author recognizes Abebe Bikila to be such a celebrity but with a modest family background: ‘he was a son of a shepherd born in the mountains of Ethiopia.'8

Needless to say, there are unsolved tangles of confusions and untied knots of desires and passions to know A. Bikila's birthplace so much as I try hard to find out Abebe's Biological father. For example, a certain Tony Marelich, from San Francisco, asks:

I have seen Abebe Bikila's birthplace shown as "Jato" on the Ethiopians.com website. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) also lists A. Bikila's birthplace as “Jato,” yet I have also seen it listed as ‘Mont Province,' ‘Mont,' and ‘Mout.'9

As if to curb his curiosity, the same person justifies himself as saying,

because the Ethiopians.com website maintains such a comprehensive list of Ethiopian athletes, and because the IOC is such a prestigious institution, I have been left to conclude that the town name of “Jato,” not Jatu, is in fact Abebe Bikila's true birthplace.

He correctly locates Jato as near Debre Birhan, northeast of Addis Ababa, which Berhanu dislocates it to be Wayyu, Southern Shawa. The person says that he has seen so many different town / village names in various places on the Internet and in publications. And, “Mont” seems to be quite a frequent attribution, yet he could find none of those towns / villages on any current or older maps of Ethiopia, nor within Google Earth or Encarta Atlas, as he says.

Was Abebe Bikila really born in "Jatu"? Could you help me understand these apparent discrepancies regarding Abebe Bikila's birthplace?

he asks.

Someone addressing Tony as Toneman, reacts thus:

The confusion, I think, comes from the distinction between village names, county names (we call them Woredas in Ethiopia) and the so-called Qeyih name (something like sub-county division).

From all the evidences that I see, I conclude that Abebe Bikila was born in the village of Jato, which is in the district of Nea Deba and the sub-province of MouT, which itself lies in the Tegulet and Bulga Awraja.

This village is about 130 kilometers Northeast of Addis Ababa.

Hope this helps...

Ethiopian Athletes Fan ET_Fan10

Thanks to the Editors' meticulous overlook, lets excuse Berhanu for his misplacing the locale, namely, Wayyu, near Debre Berhan, Southern Shawa as an oversight and unintentional, but can we forgive him for his attempt at curving out an imagined identity for the Athlete? This leads us onto the second premise, that ‘[Abebe] was named after his God-father, ato Bikila.'

Where was this life story from? Was it chiseled into Abebe's loins, as he was already disappearing stuffed into his own unheard voice—with his untold success stories for good as the Myth had him do? Who knows, we all have our life stories cut into our loins, and who knows, who ever will feign out of us a wrong narrative to tell the World instead of the right deeds on our behalf? Maybe we have forgotten how we die precisely the same way as we had forgotten how we be? And, this is my own view, that we must start to learn how we die when we stop learning how to be!

An academic article that abuses or hides sources invites a problem to itself and is greeted with less credibility or hostility like a political rally than an academic event. What is more irritating about the Article is that the Editors—some are University Professors now—pass such misinforming Article as Berhanu's inattentively, if not deliberately. I am of the view that if someone has the theory which involves a radical departure such as this from what experts have professed, one is expected to defend his position by providing evidence in its support. I, on my part, thanks to the existing data, have found out that Bikila Waqjira, born and bred in Jato, northeastern Shawa, is Abebe's biological father.11

There is a lot to learn for our living Oromo athletes: Darartu Tullu, Turunesh and Ejigayyoo Dibaba, Berane Adare, Gete Wami, Fatuma Roba, Qananisa and Tariku Bekele, Selashi Sehen, Marqos Genati, and many more, while bearing Habasha flag high on every track. They have to learn from this Abebe Bikila Waqjira's (and many other Oromo Legends') Habasha-made bogus stories and maintain their identity, document their success and failure and pass it on to the young generation with greater care and concern. The sooner the better, I believe!

I have done this Article just out of morbid curiosity if nothing else: who is Abebe's father if not Bikila? Berhanu tells us nothing in the Article. In this aspect, if Abebe were an animal, he would already be extinct. I thought a man of his intellectual distinction does not do what Berhanu did. But this happened: to betray ones identity is a disgrace to one's people, and to alter others' identity out of the blue is equally a disgrace to one's faith.

Why a classic image of the Athlete engraved in the minds of hundreds of millions of people on this planet is now made to blur is not very clear. It is this disregard, more than anything else, that urged me to excavate the facts beneath the unfathomed depth of many such Mythologies. For example, as school kids, who told us publicly Haile Silassie's pedigree to be Oromo on his father's line of decent and Guraghe on his mother's? If my friend breathed it to me when we were in College now nearly 23 years back, I wouldn't have been duped to believe the Emperor to be a direct elect of Waaqa (God) or a descent from the line of Judah and to be worshiped as God far away in Jamaica.

Thanks to my friend, Berhanu, he gave me a cause to chisel this elegy on A. Bikila's tomb which he ascribed himself to this his tactical errors.

Now, to cut short the long narrative: 40 days prior to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, during training near Finfinne, the Athlete started to feel pain, which he attempted to overcome but collapsed. He was taken to hospital where he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. In 1969, during civil unrest in the country, A. Bikila was driving his Volkswagen Beetle back home when he had to swerve to avoid a group of protesting students. He lost control of his car and landed in a ditch, trapped in, the accident which left him quadriplegic. He was operated in England and his condition improved to paraplegic. According to Raymond Krise and Bill Squires in Fast Tracks: The History of Distance Running, A. Bikila talked about his automobile accident in an interview. He said,

Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily.

In 1973 Bikila died from a brain hemorrhage.12 He was 41 years old and left a wife and four children. His career included fifteen marathon races with twelve victories.

In August of 2005, with the assistance of Isabel and Dave Welland, and Philip and Donna Berber of the organization A Glimmer of Hope Foundation, an Oromo school named Yaya Abebe Bikila Primary Village School was erected in Bikila's honor by the local Mendida community. The school exists a few hundred yards from the remains of the village of Jato.

My friend, for old time's sake, we have been so good remembering the Past. It is time we started foreseeing the Future now stuck in the Present. Whatever we say, whatever we write as educators, let us not forget that our words represent people who are not here yet, at present!

The broken-hinged Eagle is ailing and now won, not a word spoken, not even a single; all narratives failed, but murmured this to the Sky:

Now,
We run slowly
We too shall arrive!
Adieu.

Endnotes

1. See “Ababa Bikila” in the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. I (A-C), Siegbert Uhlig, ed., 2003, pp22-23
2. See the Article as above
3. See Tsige Abebe Bikila's Triumph and tragedy: a history of Abebe Bikila and his marathon career (1996) and Paul Rambali's The Barefoot Runner (2003).
4. See Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. I, p22
5. Abebe's son gave this interview.
6. Addis Zeman, Oct 26, 1973 http://www.ethiopians.com/abebe_bikila.htm; http://www.databaseolympics.com/players/playerpage.htm?ilkid=BIKILABE01 Database Olympics profile Barefoot Runner by Rambali, ISBN 1852429046 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila#Background)
7. Tsige Abebe Bikila's Triumph and tragedy: a history of Abebe Bikila and his marathon career (1996) (http://www.ethiopians.com/abebe_bikila.htm)
8. Encyclopedia of World Biography© on Abebe Bikila
9. http://www.mediaethiopia.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2
10. Bekele Abebe, his guddifachaa son, and Lieutenant Kinfe Bikila, his brother, share the same view.
11. Victory Poem for Ababa Bikila
Abebe Bikila
With you
Our dreams
Never broken.
Born in 33
Reborn that 73
The foot soldier
Of forty years
Led Ethiopians to run.
This medal avalanche
Abe the shepherd boy
The kid of Jan Meda
First ran with the sheep
Ran with horses and mules
Too deep at heart
Until autos run over him
And this said he in silence:
We are the Ethiopians
Whose lions made to sleep
Need the ran twice as fast!"
Left Ethiopia
This medal avalanche,
With short steady pace
Unconquered will,
Across boarders of Rome,
Troubling the heart of men
And made our flag to fly
Right above:
Dead and gone Mussolini
Then and then,
Abebe Led Mamo followed
Ethiopia led
Kenya followed
Made us friends among nations
Running for Victory
With that Abe's Legacy.

October 27 1973

Written by Taddele G Hiwot and published in the Ethiopian Herald the day Abebe Bikila rested his victorious heart.

See this Article also on http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard/Article/Abebe-Bikila-s-Identity-Theft-and-Amharas-Refuted-by-Oromo-Intellectual-Asafa-Dibaba/38633

CULTURAL REVIVAL

READINGS, CRITIQUES, AND REVIEWS


Asafa T. Dibaba
Indiana University
USA

Context: Folklore Colloquy

It is the interdisciplinary nature of folklore and ethnomusicology as two separate fields sprouted at different times to converge out of necessity in reaction to the real life situation of humankind and integrate the lines of enquiry, conceptual frameworks, theoretical perspectives and methods and ethnographic tools. Since the same people we study with do sing songs of their lived experience, tell stories, perform festivals and rituals in different cultural forms, the study involves dialogue around historical, folkloric, anthropological, linguistic and musicological inquiries spilling over a single discipline onto other boundaries. As the primary goal of the course has been to identify theoretical concepts and methods central to our discipline and apply them into our own research, issues of authenticity; “memory (project)” and historicity; performance/communication; cultural revival; folklorization, continuity and change; institution/power; and “cultural identity” have been among the multifaceted topics of theoretical and methodological concern.

It is the purpose of this final paper to revisit those topics, nuances, theories and methods, and themes in the two books and journal articles and consolidate the colloquy on the bases of ‘folkethnic’ (folklore and ethnomusicology) interdisciplinary/eclectic paradigms. Two of the books read during the colloquy were Poetry and Violence and The Black Rhythm of Peru, and while comparing and contrasting the perspectives and themes of the two books next, we will also discuss issues of major significance in the journal articles. 

Themes and Patterns

In John McDowell’s (2000) Poetry and Violence, the theme of Costa Chica balladry points at the inevitable death of the hero, and “the way” such beautiful ones die! The valiant verses such as “…I am your friend; where you die, I will die;” “Only if you kill me, I will surrender,” and “I won’t surrender even to my father” (p137) are fires that come out of irresistible firebrands, of fearless insurgents riding the “Pegasus,” of the “Don Quixote” (another “Alonso Quijano” of de la Mancha) of the corrido of Costa Chica.  In some world, ‘the beautiful ones are not yet borne;’ in another, they are borne but to live short. Some heroes, like Simon Blanco, lived to die and live through again in the commemorative songs of equally haunting heroes of corrido such as Juvencio Vargas. As verbalization helps to crystalize experience into a more stable (finished?) product and also to activate a social arena to exercise power in a collaborative process (p23), the longer corridos of Costa Chica have become commercialized beyond their commemorative function like the recordings of Runa songs of the northern Ecuador. 

The courteous gestures of corrido during performance that the performer opens with a differential nod and closes with a respectful farewell  has a healing force, a pacifying and mediating power to mitigate against offending the audience (p175). To celebrate violence through composing and performing corridos as a tool of making and keeping promises, the corridos serve to display loyalty among fighters unto death, the promise made but not sometimes kept (p136).  Men would rather die than to surrender their honor, like the archetypal Chante Luna of Guerrero whose name maintained a celebrity status through commemorative ballad (p139). A controlling function of corrido is equally immense to enforce deliberation and caution through such commentaries as “Don’t ever trust your friends, as they are the worst of traitors” (p149).

Poetry and Violence evolved out of the field data the author collected through long ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the relationship between poetry and violence. I have a related interest in folkloric and anthropological inquiry involving interdisciplinary research into the role of folklore, especially, protest folksongs, personal experience narratives of activism, and social banditry progressing into a wider political movement rooted within the resistance culture of the society. The corrido performances center on the racial and ethnic bases of the realities and forces that have shaped modern Mexico including the racialist and essentialist modes of thought which discredited the actual presence and role of the black in the history and culture of the nation. The corrido performances are proofs of social injustices, mass unrest and the resulting violence and challenging views of the people in the region about corrido as voices “of the people who are accustomed to use arms and used to live in the world of much violence” and those who critique the celebratory role of corrido as saying “often works to increase violence” (p137).

Poetry and Violence provides an in-depth study of the Mexican ballad form called corrido, a body of oral poetry that takes violence as its theme. The author offers a general corrido history in the region and detailed patterns of particular ballad performances and social contexts through interviews with corrido composers and performers that he appended the sampling of his ballad texts.  The poetry of violence reveals a living vernacular tradition and chronicles local and regional rivalries as a detailed case study with broad social and cultural implications. Poetry and Violence is a study that approaches balladry not just as a literary expressions but in relation to its cultural and social bases, the motives for composing it, occasions for singing balladry and response of the audience (public) to performances as central features of ballad process  (p45) and it further establishes evidence that ballad is a compelling commentary on violence as human experience and as communicative action.

 European ballad scholarship introduced “powerful analytical tools” and methodological precepts such as “the emotional core,”  “communal recreation,” “incremental repetition,” and “leaping and lingering narrative technique”

“Memory Project,” “Cultural Identity” and Performance

Like Heidi Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru (2006), John McDowell’s Violence and Poetry (2000) built on the theme of memory, history and historicity of violence, identity, and the nostalgic cultural revival through performance implanted in “the Africa thesis” (McDowell, p99). As clearly depicted in Feldman’s study, the Afro-Peruvian revival mapped the Peruvian Black Pacific as the periphery of the Black Atlantic and such distinct memory projects through music, folklore and dance traditions connected performances of blackness with criollo (p265ff). Feldman analyzes those artistic activities of Jose Durand and his Pancho Fierro company back in the 1950’s “reinscribing the history of people of African descents in Peru” through criollo nostalgia and staging Black performance traditions (p18) as “Criollo” (“creole”) which refers to the acculturated children of African slaves (p19) different from bozales, that is, “slaves who came directly from Africa” (p269).

In Feldman’s study, “memory” as a main theme serves Afro-Peruvians engaged in the revival to remember a collective past or the “cultural memory” they did not personally experience.  In McDowell’s Poetry and Violence, corrido serves to link the past to the present and, in so doing, to celebrate and regulate the memorable violence as characteristic of the heroic age, “the heroic society,”  an “aristocratic and military ethos”’ (McDowell, p124) and the good old days that Feldman’s White criollo folklorist Jose Durand (1925-1990) is haunted by (Feldman, pp25-30).  In both works, through “memory projects” the forgotten Costa Chica’s corridos and the Afro-Peruvian music and dances were recreated from ancestors and relieved. By the same token, memory is also selective as certain agenda and goals dictate people to remember particular elements of the past and exclude others.

John McDowell’s (2000) “Africa thesis” wrapped up in corrido rooted in the social matrix of Costa Chica of Mexico raises the fundamental question “what are we to do with the common belief that violence on the Costa Chica revolves around the black African ancestry of its population?” (p103) the historical enquiry to be echoed in Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru built on memory, history and historicity of class, race and the Black cultural identity in Peru and beyond.  Elements of African “cultural identity” in Costa Chica include bride capture (forced marriage(?)), round houses, polygamy, speech patterns, hallowed canoes, and names evocative of African regions and peoples (p104). In Feldman’s study, the Afro-Peruvian revival mapped the Peruvian Black Pacific as the periphery of the Black Atlantic and such distinct memory projects through music, folklore and dance traditions connected performances of blackness with criollo, Black Atlantic, or African origins and traditions to negotiate the Black Pacific double connections (p265ff).

Authenticity, Traditions

To operationalize the authenticity of “ethnic art” and/or traditions and, in so doing, to establish standards, especially where rival traditions operate is problematic (Evans-Pritchard 1987). Authenticity of a craft for the natives is, for instance, in the story behind the item, not just in the item at hand or in the labor or money invested in it; authenticity is in the fragile primitive culture once caused and owned the item now tenuously coexisting with modern technology. Among other institutions that determine this rather delicate authenticity and the process of tradition and innovation are tourist (consumer) expectation, media, and the law.

The search for authenticity in continuity and change is evident in the works by John McDowell and Heidi Feldman.  While focusing on the process of relocation of folklore from its original setting to a new expressive contact zone, McDowell explores the multivocality of traditions among the Quincha speaking people of Runa, Otavalo area, north Ecuado (………). There he observes a leap from a static recitation to a dynamic folk-narrative session, a narrative epiphany, as he calls it, and the artists’ search for indigenous people’s consultancy in the Runa music records by the Inti Rumi bands (p….).  In the case of the discourse of the Costa Chica corrido, the major theme is functional in that its impetus is toward violence to commemorate the fallen comrade in violence (McDowell, p101).

By the same token, Feldman compares two competitive performance groups on equal planes: one, the rural Chincha performance rooted in pre-modern authenticity, and another, the Lima Afro-Peruvian performance practice, competing with the rather authentic Chincha with its legend as the rural cradle of Afro-Peruvian culture.  Chincha later evolved into two coexisting forms of double consciousness as “two Chinchas”: the authentic cradle of Black tradition and the modern tourist stage (p14). Before it was staged in the 1990s, Chincha was already identified as the cradle of both all Blacks in Peru and their Black culture following the 1960s and 1970s search of authentic rural origin of Afro-Peruvian Music (p175) by revival artists. In both cases of the Chincha and Quincha traditions, the search for authenticity is an unended quest since the rift between tradition and modernity is not as such simply crossable.

Tradition and Human Agency

From the Costa Chica corrido evidences show that interventions of authorities bear more violence. That is, the human agency is regulated more by government institutions than by traditions and is susceptible to structured violence by “agents of local, state, and federal governments” (McDowell, 101).  Such a violence portrayed in Costa Chica corridos is a substance that evolves out of outlaws, social bandits, and revolutionaries. In Feldman’s study the nuance between the nationalist State-driven “local-color” versus the “authentic” arts of subaltern cultures within the State  expresses the Black Pacific dual consciousness and its dual allegiance: locally, through the musica criolla and the military government’s folkloric memory project and, transnationally through the Black Atlantic models, and borrowed religious chants (p13).

It is evident that the rich representations of the composer's voice in Poetry and Violence are interwoven with the theoretical overlay in the book as a critique of the racist allegations that the African heritage of Costa Chica afromestizos, the term the author uses to refer to the costenos, i. e., “the people of the coast as a general category” (p9), is the source of the patterns of violence has to share roles with the causes of Afro-Peruvian musical revival in Feldman’s study.

Conclusion

If art that depicts violence generates more violence is itself problematic but McDowell’s critical analysis of corrido as a vernacular tradition critiques regional rivalries around three issues of significance: land redistribution since the revolution (land, property rights), capital formation (backwash effects of globalization), and consolidation of federal authority (power/institution). Both studies concentrate on the reconstruction of history and reconstitution of “cultural identity” through “memory project” and performance of traditions where the ethnic mix includes a strong African-Mexican and/or Afro-Peruvian components as protagonists enacting cultural revival and violence, another folklorization of actual events.

Through interviews, observations and discussions with composers and performers, both researchers reveal a living vernacular tradition that amounts to a chronicle of local and regional rivalries. Poetry and Violence explores the tragic corrido and its stories of heroic mortal encounter by perpetuating the role of oral poetry to theorize violence on three general themes and patterns: one is, the theory that poetry celebrates violence, as it does for receptive audiences the deeds of past heroes; second, it also evaluates, censures and regulates upon reflection the nature of violence, that is,  the coaching voice within the corrido that places violent behavior within the confines of a moral universe; third, the contention that oral poetry has a therapeutic force of healing that helps sustain the community in the wake of violent events.

FALL, 2011

FOLKLORE COLLOQUY

CRITICAL ABSTRACTS, BOOK REVIEW IN FOLKLORE & ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

FALL, 2011

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

Indianan Univeristy

USA

Critical Abstracts:  Each week, all students will prepare a 250-word Critical Abstract of one of the pieces for that week.  These short writing assignments will be used as the starting point for class discussion and will be scored on a five-point scale.  The final Critical Abstract grade will be the percentage obtained by dividing the total number of points received by the total number of possible points.  Guidelines for writing the Critical Abstract as well as their scoring criteria will be posted on the Oncourse site.  Critical Abstracts will be due at the start of class each week.  Given that these critical abstracts are meant to facilitate in-class discussion

 Professors,  John McDowell and Javier Leon

F501. FOLKLORE COLLOQUY

Ass. 1. CRITICAL ABSTRACT / Exercise 1.

_____________________________________

TOPIC:  “Migrant Labor, Folklore, and Resistance in Hurston's Polk County: Re-framing Mules and Men”

Author(s): David G. Nicholls

Source: African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 467-479.

Adopting a concept of “everyday resistance” in Robin Kelley’s writings about a “dissident political culture” of the Jim Crow South and James Scott’s “hidden transcript” the author explores Zora Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935). The author’s primary focus is the analysis of Zora’s narrative frame and the “revisionary reading” of articulation of resistance acts in the stories told by migrant laborers at a work camp. In analyzing the narrative frame, the authorial voice supersedes the narrative voice. Hence, Zora is more self-reflexive, resisted as detective not welcomed as a researcher on her first visit to the camp. The author persuasively argues, until her voice gradually recedes, by the exclusive link between autobiography and ethnography Zora tends to oversimplify the role of folklore as a subversive presentation of everyday resistance in the Jim Crow South. But by setting scene and framing a story of a day on the job, by presenting the relation of the teller to the tale and relocating the migrant laborers within history, the author concludes, Zora goes beyond the limitation of oversimplifying the role of folklore as “the weapon of the weak” in the Jim Crow South.  The author claims there should be the scholars’ shift of attention from political leaders to the consideration of everyday acts of resistance by the oppressed. In this article the author’s focus is meant to provoke an agenda about the revaluation of the role of Zora’s folkloric exploit to help understand the people’s knowledge of social structure and power relation in African American communities.

  

10/03/2011

WEEK 6

Week 2. LABOR DAY

09/12/2011

WEEK 3

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 3.

Professor John McDowell and Professor Leon

___________________________

Topic:                          What(’s) Theory?

Author:                        Margaret A. Mills 

Source:              Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2008

2008 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

___________________________

The aim of the article is to propose ways of effective (cultural/critical) theory-building. The author argues folklore theory, like qualitative social theory, is interpretive in nature, not prescriptive, and is close to metaphor. Interpretation of data/phenomena is not just ascribing meanings but also theorizing the expressive processes, rules and roles generating the ethnography of cultural performance and form (styles and types). The productivity of interpretive theory (high, grand, middle, low/humble) is to be evaluated by its aptness, openness, and indeterminacy, which are in turn determined by three interdependent factors: 1) practioners’/insiders’ approval or disapproval (“emicization”/”vernacularization” of data/phenomena), i.e., emic-theory; 2) epistemological (ontological) background of the theorizer; and 3) the implicit politics, the system maneuvering both the expressive culture and the interpretive authority/power (“informant intimidation”). In this view, an effective (interpretive) theory is accessible, addresses distance problem (theoretical distance from its object) and aims at challenging, changing or reforming suppressive processes through “outing” it and “liberating” human agency, and transforming expressive life from what is marginal to liminal. Hence, maintaining the relationship between theory and method goes beyond “philology’s text-focused” legacy and involves localizing, examining the processes of cultural performance, transmission, differentiation, and traditionalizing, an issue sidelined by grand theory.  Based on her experience of the 2005 AFS debate, the author claims, attempts at effective theory making, localizing and liberating expressive life is entangled by debates about disciplinary identity/boundary when the problem of lack of critical mass, small number of training sites, and capacity to ensue self-replication remains a challenge in folkloristics.

____________

No of words: 251

WEEK 4

Sept 19/2011

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 4.

___________________________

Topic:                Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life

Author(s):          Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs

Source:               Ann. Rev. Anthropology. 1990. 19:59-88

 1990 by Annual Reviews Inc.

____________________________

The authors elucidate critically how communicative relations are accomplished taking the full account of form-function-meaning interrelationships within situational context of language use. The shift of paradigm from language as rules to performance also influenced the traditional view of folklore as artifact, ‘past thing,’ to a performative and communicative mode of action. As performance approach assumed a place both in linguistics and folklore studies, poetics, the art of performance, or verbal artistry, also came to be understood not as extraneous but as pertinent to what society and language do. The communicative function of language is its constitution of social life.

The relocation of performance, texts, and contexts in systems of historical relationship is not unproblematic, however. The assumption is that beginning at the level of local oral tradition a given folk art performance can be traced through connected process of decentering and recentering in local oral tradition to the national performative scale. The authors suggest a framework to solve the theoretical difficulties of performance-centered line of inquiry: to give ethnographic attention to building upon the accumulated insights of past performance analysis, the investigation of the interrelated process of entetextualization, decontextaulization (decentering), and recontextualization (recentering) and then constructing histories of performance; linking performance with other  modes of language use as performances are decentered, recentered, referred to, cited, evaluated, reported, replayed, and transformed.

The article is a critical and reflexive perspective to (re-)examining own scholarly practices and “to exercise power” along the performance-oriented analysis of situational language use while clarifying the abstract notion of Bakhtin’s dialogism.

____________

No of words: 253

10/03/2011

WEEK 6

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 6

_______________________

Topic:                 “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres”

Author(s):             Dan Ben-Amos

Source:              Reprinted from Genre 2, no. 3 (September 1969): 275-301, by permission of the University of Illinois Press

___________________________

In folklore scholarship, the search for thematic and structural attributes of folklore forms and analytical categories have been part of the problem of defining folklore and both attempts overlooked ethnic genres. This is evident in the four major approaches, namely, thematic approach, holistic approach, archetypal, and functional approaches, where the cultural realities of the genres have been neglected and more attention has been given to theorizing rather than considering genres as ethnic based cultural categories of communication. Based on the examples from West Africa, Dan Ben-Amos relocates folklore forms back into their native context where genres serve some definite communicative purposes under a set of rules and cultural affirmations. The examples show that the binary division of the native folklore forms in the region is primarily between prose and poetry. Such ethnic categorization of genres into prose and poetry as primary literary activities (cf. Franz Boas) is based on prosodic features as a “physiological reality of speech,” and on thematic and behavioral attributes of the ethnic genre to formulate a paradigm of relationships for various elements of the folkloric system. In some cases, however, examples show that the boundary between prose and poetry is thin since there are stories that involve songs. The sentimental view in folklore taxonomy that the natives are quite “indiscriminate” about genre is a methodological problem that emanates from the lack of understanding about the differences between analytical categories of genres which serve the purpose of folklore scholarship and ethnic taxonomy of genres which has no such objective purpose outside itself.

______________________

No. of Words: 255

                                                    

10/17/2011

WEEK 6

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 6

______________________

Topic:                “Thick Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture”

Author(s):          Clifford Geertz             

Source:             The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), pp3-30.

___________________________

In Geertz’s study, there are three key methodological and theoretical concepts dealt with: “thick description,” “interpretive theory,” and “culture.”  To explicate the three concepts is not easy since Geertz avoids operationalization as a method and this renders concepts rather fragmented, intuitively held and fuzzy. Culture as webs of significance, man has spun it and trapped in it. “Culture,” in Geertz’s view, is not a self-contained super-organic reality with forces and purposes of its own (reductionist view) but is rather semiotics. The analysis of culture is interpretive, and the approach seeks for meaning.  The “thick description” of culture is the social construction of “expressions on their surface,” which involves explanation of not just human actions, language and behavior but also context. That is, the ritual, idea, event or custom that the ethnographer needs to know is just background information to the “thing” to be examined—the “thing” is the “meaning”. The role of interpretive theory is evident. It sorts out the structures of signification of culture and established codes and determines their social ground (semiotics). Geertz focuses on three problem areas: “culture” as “symbol,” “meaning,” and “semiotics”. The notion of culture as “symbolic” human behavior is signified by phonation (speech), pigment (painting), line (writing), and sonance (music), publically available symbols, not hidden subjectivities or whole of life. Culture is public also because “meaning” is. To think that knowing only how to “wink” is winking is, he cautions, to take ‘thin description’ for “thick,” an error and distortion of meaning out of context, a “semiotic” disjunction. 

_________________

*Operationalization as a process of creating operational and theoretical definition of a fuzzy concept makes it more clearly distinguishable and measurable and also specifies its scope. Geertz avoids it saying, “Operationalization as a methodological dogma never made much sense so far as the social sciences are concerned…we should look at what the practitioners do” (p5) (emphasis mine). Geertz starts with an intuitive grasp and ends with a “conclusion that conceals the tedium of the procedures” (Colson 1975). His anthropology is said an art, not a science. Hence his work does not provide a model for other less talented anthropologists to follow. (also Egon Renner’s “On Geertz’s Interpretive Theory Program”, 1984)

Number of Words: 254

10/24/2011

WEEK 9

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 8

_______________________

Topic:                 “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious”

Author(s):           Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin

Source:              The Journal of American Folklore. Vol 97. No. 385 (1984). pp 273-290

____________________________

The present study demonstrates people’s own understanding of a ‘nation’ in relation to “culture,” “tradition,” and “heritage” as ideal elements in the process of (re)constructing national identity. For this purpose the researchers analyzed two case studies, i.e., Quebecois’ and Hawaiian peoples’ version of tradition in line with the ongoing task of nationalism and the idea of the nation. The works of Edward Shils and A.L. Kroeber have been also carefully reviewed and analyzed in parallel with the two peoples’ own view of tradition and to finally determine if tradition is purely genuine or spurious. Hence, by the naturalistic (commonsense) model tradition is an object bounded and handed down in time, and the social scientific model understands tradition as a process of thought to be interpreted in the present. By the naturalistic/atomistic paradigm, tradition is a core cultural trait (Kroeber’s view), and a “substantive content” kept in memory as an “objective deposit” (Shils’s view) in time. By this commonsense view of tradition both Kroeber’s historical-particularistic view and Shils’s “objective deposit” view regard tradition as having temporal continuity (and change) while there are core traits that remain unchanging. The findings show that, though it is difficult to justify theoretically and discover empirically, the naturalistic view of tradition and society as bounded objective entity is persisting both among the Quebecois and the Hawaiians. However, the recreation (invention), commercialization and explicit discussion of it render tradition spurious while in the rural life it is naively inherited and unself-consciously handed down in memory from the past as genuine.

_____________________

Number of Words: 253

11/07/2011

WEEK 10

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 10

_______________________

Topic:               “The Portal Case: Authenticity, Tourism, Traditions, and the Law”

Author(s):          Deirdre Evans Pritchard            

Source:            The Journal of American Folklore. Vol. 100, No. 397 (Jul –Sep. 1987), pp287-296

____________________________

“The Portal Case” is an intense fight of right between the Indian and non-Indian craftsmen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to present “ethnic art” for the lucrative market of arts/crafts. For Native Indians, the right is traditional and therefore rational; for the non-Indians, it is constitutional, therefore, rationalized. For officials and courts, to make differentiation (between cultural and racial discrimination) and enforce law, folklorists and anthropologists had a major role to play. Thus, by operationalizing “ethnic art” as a cultural expression by a self-identified cultural group also identified thus by others for its unique aesthetic tradition, it came to be a yardstick for law enforcement. It was problematic also to establish standards of authenticity,¹ however, four criteria suggested to evaluate authenticity of Indian crafts include: quality (of art), ethnicity (of artist), traditionality, and purpose (for production). Authenticity, for the natives, is in the story behind the item, not just in the item at hand or in the labor or money invested in it; authenticity is in the fragile primitive culture once caused and owned the item now tenuously coexisting with modern technology. Among other factors that determine this rather delicate authenticity and the process of tradition and innovation of the Indian art and craft are tourist (consumer) expectation, media,² the law, and the museum. All these dynamics work on the internal processes of the Indian art tradition and it is where the enforced museum protectionism is sustainable, it seems, that the interplay between tradition, innovation and authenticity is only on a par!

_________________________

1. There was a persistent definitional problem of what is authentic Indian art when one fails to identify between the handmade and machine-made Indian art/craft and Indian and non-Indian art/craft.

2. One Santa Fe local news dated August 20, 2011 goes, “A flyer promoting the idea of moving the Santa Fe Indian Market from the Santa Fe Plaza to Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino at Pojoaque Pueblo was stuffed in some Santa Fe Reporter boxes this week.”  (santafenewmexican.com). This shows that there are information viruses spread to incurably infect tradition, tradition bearers and consumers.   

Number of Words:  2252

11/28/2011

WEEK 14

CRITICAL ABSTRACT /Ass. 12

_______________________

Topic:                “National Patrimony and Cultural Policy: the Case of the Afroperuvian Cajon”

Author(s):          Javier Leon       

Source:             Music and Cultural Rights (2009)

                       Eds. Edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bell Yung

___________________________

This study is a critique of a cultural policy in Peru regarding the Afroperuvians’ cultural right to Cajon, a traditional idiophone wooden box perhaps brought to Peru from West Africa in 16^th century. The primary goal of the study is to assess the significance of the Cajon thus declared a national heritage and to examine the relevance of the declaration as a cultural right to Afroperuvians. The cultural right to the Cajon became more national than ethnic beyond the Afroperuvian context where historically it belonged. In the country such as Peru where race, ethnicity, and cultural identity is a serious debate, the role of Afroperuvians is also regarded as insignificant to the development of Peruvian nation and remains an invisible social enigma.  Towards that “social invisibility”¹ and marginalization contributed the relatively small size of the Afroperuvian population, the unfortunate association of African descendants to the colonial institutions than to the pre-Colombian past, and the creolized Afroperuvian cultural practices. Dongon’s project of the Criollo Song in 2001 involved different Cajoneros and fed into the idea that Cajon belongs to all Peruvians and annihilated the orthodoxy that Cajon is to be played only by Afroperuvian males² and only thus to maintain it more “authentic.”  This rather complicated issue of cultural right is mediated by institutions that are overtly egalitarian but in practice they protect the neoliberal interest in social and cultural space. Hence, it is argued, such cultural gaps occur due to unclear policy that puts societies in a conundrum about representations and cultural rights.

________________________

1. With regard to music and dance, “social invisibility” is less felt since musicians, artists and intellectuals could promote cultural expressions as part of the cultural revival to revitalize and re-Africanize cultural repertoire little known outside Afroperuvians.

2. Hence, the issue of the Cajon ownership involved gender as to Dongon’s campaign which consecrates the Cajon as more national product than ethnic and also empowering women as cajoneros.

No of words: 253

BOOK REVIEW

_____________________________________

Topic:                           The Black Rhythms of Peru

Author(s):                    Heidi Carolyn Feldman (2006)

                                    Wesleyan University Press     

____________________________________________

Heidi Feldman’s Black Rhythms of Peru (2006), put together in an over 300-page book is a systematic ethnomusicological study based on ethnographic data of testimonies and other materials used to reconstruct history of the revival of Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions. The book is organized into six intricate chapters of the facts carefully woven into such a whole story of Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions and revival covering the time span of the late 1950’s Pancho Fierro show of a criollo recreation of the Black Peruvian Past (Feldman 2006:12) to the present day. 

In her introductory note, Feldman states, her book evolved out of the inspiration came about during her first encounter with Susan Baca, also known as “The Soul of Black Peru” (p215), and the Cultural Minister, who led the Afro-Peruvian music concert in Los Angeles in 1998. The idea instigated this project was Baca’s response to Feldman’s question how Baca’s “work differed from scholarly research about music” and Baca’s answer that her work is a personal endeavor by such an untrained person just to contribute to the Black popular culture in Peru (p1). 

In my view, every research project we do and the book we write and publish has its own genealogy of moral/social obligation and historical background including the name it bears as most personal/place names! Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru is no exception. Her aim is primarily to support Afro-Peruvian artists such as Susan Baca who rescued their traditions “performing work that resembles ethnography in order to sustain a living artistic culture” (ibid) and also to document ways in which they brought to success such revival undertakings. Hence, such a project is a divine duet! That is, it works on reconstructing the past while reenacting the present to lay a fertile ground for the future.

In her book, Feldman discusses how White criollo folklorist Jose Durand (1925-1990) created the Pancho Fierro Company for a landmark 1956 performance at Lima Municipal Theatre, the company known to have staged for the first time the Black Peruvian Music and dance in the twentieth century (pp25-30). In this section the author describes the criollo, peasant migration, and public stage that positively affected black performance as basis for the future of the Black-Peruvian music and dance (Chapter 1).

According to Feldman, Pancho Fierro was a criollo recreation of the Black Peruvian past. It reaffirmed the idea that African heritage had “disappeared” into criollo culture and it opened the door for more Afrocentric and diasporacentric approaches in the revival. The criollo nostalgia in Lima is a compelling experience that it maintains the connection to the past and also serves as a means “to keep the past alive” (Leon 1997 in Feldman p17). In her study Feldman analyzes those activities of Jose Durand and his Pancho Fierro company back in the 1950’s “reinscribing the history of people of African descents in Peru” through criollo nostalgia and staging Black performance traditions (Feeldman 2006:18). “Criollo”, its English equivalent is, Feldman states, “creole”, to refer to acculturated children of African slaves (p19) different from bozales, that is, “slaves who came directly from Africa” (p269).

Joce Durand, also a book collector, was a man of two epochs as he “was always trying to relive colonial times,” i.e., Lima of the past, so much as he also loved the present, an enigma of living in two ages that later came to correct the wronged past by shaping Durand’s mistaken perceptions of contemporary Black culture ( p26). His company, Pancho Fierro, was formed by involving 35 Black artists and named after the 19^th century Peruvian mulato artist and “made its public debut” by staging Black performances in the prestigious downtown Municipal Theatre on June 7, 1956 (p29). Among other genres successfully preserved and revived by the Pancho Fierro was el son de los diablos / song of the devils, a Carnival dance (p31) which Durand used ethnographic method to collect and stage. As Feldman rightly argues such an application of academic research methodology to the reconstruction and presentation of Black music tradition in Peru is heartening but presenting the Black music and dances “almost exclusively as framed visions of history,” as Durand’s legacy handed down to his subsequent artists, and not as “expressions of a living tradition” needs serious attention (p47). 

Thus, Feldman historicizes the Afro-Peruvian revival in relation to the intervention of the white criollo intellectual, José Durand in the 1950s. Durand’s “memory project” also identified as “criollo nostalgia” is an intricate concept (León 1997) understood as a sentiment identified at the core of Peruvian urban criollo identity, roughly defined as a longing for a collectively imagined colonial past, through Pancho Fierro company also serving as a catalyst for the Black diasporic consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s (p44).

Following the Jose Durant’s ventures of the 1950’s was the rise of another Black theatre and dance company, the Cumanana, as a “site of memory” led by Victoria Santa Cruz in the 1960s and ‘70s (p54). Feldman carefully reviews relevant literatures and available documents on diaspora, history and memory and profiles the revival activities of the two decades, i.e., the 1960s and 1970s. Feldman’s analysis is also based on the intensive interview sessions made with Victoria, famous in Peru as a co-director of the theatre group Cumanana, and worked on the re-creation of “ancestral memory” (p67) through Afro-Peruvian dances (p12ff; ), which mobilized a new diasporic consciousness (pp65-79).

Led by Santa Cruz the Cumanana theatrical productions built on the preceding Durant’s nostalgic Pancho Fierro criolo show and reconnected the Black Peruvians with an African past before the colonial period partly giving way to the transnational African diasporic feelings (p49). Hence as the classic diaspora came to refer to the coerced geographical dispersal of other peoples, forged on the classic Jewish model, then commonalities shared by diasporas became the topic of interest for scholars (p50).

Feldman suggests that the Afrocentric recreation of Black Peruvian dances as sites of memory led by Santa Cruz challenged the criollismo discourse hitherto exclusively Peruvian and past-oriented but now extended to cover the transnational diasporic identity of Black Peruvians across Black Atlantic. Using the tools of history and memory she reconstructs the ancestral memory project of Victoria Santa Cruz who, together with her brother Nicomedes, collaborated to direct Cumanana,  Peru’s first all-Black theatre company. Thus, the author builds on the historiography of the Santa Cruz family and the Cumanana Company that brought Black Peruvian folklore to life in 1960 and 1961 in productions of “ancestral memory”, the belief that holds the spirits of the deceased “watch over and intermingle with the living” (p66), and also a basic tenet to Victoria’s method that “a sense of rhythm is innate in all black people by way of ancestry” (p68).

The contribution of Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Victoria’s brother, was also central to the then Afro-Peruvian revival (pp83-124). He is remembered both as the father of Afro-Peruvian music revival and a literary voice of Peruvian negritude, and also honored as a folklorist who researched Black musical traditions in other countries and excavated African origins of Peruvian criollo music (p83). Feldman cautiously evaluates Nicomedes’ unforgettable contribution to the Afro-Peruvian revival, and the problems and strategies for the achievements. Speaking of Nicomedes’ negritude in Peru, though it can be categorically risky, as she says, to conclude an unstudied comparisons, Feldman argues there is no place more definite than Latin America where Fanon’s assertion is true that ‘there is no black culture and the black people are fast disappearing’—less physical disappearance than racial and sociocultural— and where the “the negritude of synthesis as the opposite of racialism” is closer to Senghor’s theory of synthesis” (p85). Nicodemes, as a famous reciting poet, his negritude shared much with international negritude movement through his poetic, musical and folkloric endeavors, as the sole voice of Peruvian negritude from the 1950s until the 1970s along its impact on the Afro-Peruvian revival. The tittle of the present book comes from Nicomedes’ poem “Ritmos negros del Peru,” about hardships of enslaved African grandmother: ‘…to the beat of their pain / black drums sounded / …black rhythms of Peru’ (p90).

Feldman argues that Peru Negro, Peru’s leading Black Folklore Company since the 1970s navigates between nationalist State-driven “local-color” versus the “authentic” arts of subaltern cultures within the State, and the Peru Negro sound, musically, continues to define most Afro-Peruvian genres today. It also expresses Black Pacific dual consciousness and its dual allegiance: locally through the musica criolla and the military government’s folkloric memory project and transnationally through the Black Atlantic models, and borrowed religious chants (p13). The duality derives from the double visions of the Afro-Peruvian urban leaders who looked inward to criollo culture and outward to both an imagined “Africa” and the transnational Black Atlantic (p13)—the double vision that often characterizes subaltern groups.

In her study Feldman also compares the two competitive performance groups on equal planes: one, the rural Chincha performance rooted in pre-modern authenticity, and another, the Lima Afro-Peruvian performance practice, competing with the rather authentic Chincha with its legend as the rural cradle of Afro-Peruvian culture. Chincha later evolved into two coexisting forms of double consciousness as “two Chinchas”: the authentic cradle of Black tradition and the modern tourist stage (p14). Before it was staged in the 1990s, Chincha was already identified as the cradle of both all Blacks in Peru and their Black culture following the 1960s and 1970s search of authentic rural origin of Afro-Peruvian Music (p175) by revival artists.

Towards the end, Feldman contrasted two manifestations of Afro-Peruvian music in the US: one is the emergence of Afro-Peruvian singer, Susana Baca, and, another is, cultural preservation efforts in US. Feldman brings the story (p14) back to a closure by narrating “how Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca was ‘discovered’ as a cosmopolitan world music artist in the 1990s (p219; pp224-230). Feldman argues that Susana Baca is an artist on the cosmopolitan periphery of the Black Pacific since Feldman considers that Afro-Peruvian Black Pacific is a periphery of the Black Atlantic (p219) while she concludes by discussing the current trends of Afro-American music which young Peruvians begun forging new black pacific consciousness and new hybrids from both Afro-Peruvian and other ingredients leaving the Afro-Peruvian music in vogue while their creations perform both “folklore” and what they call “fusion” (p259).

Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru builds on memory, history and historicity of the Black art revival and reconstruction of Black identity in Peru and beyond. The Afro-Peruvian revival mapped the Peruvian Black Pacific as the periphery of the Black Atlantic and such distinct memory projects through music, folklore and dance traditions connected performances of blackness with criollo, Black Atlantic, or African origins and traditions to negotiate Black Pacific double connections (p265ff).

In Feldman’s study, “memory” as a main theme serves Afro-Peruvians engaged in the revival to remember a collective past or the “cultural memory” they did not personally experience. The nostalgic incursion into the “source” was a return to an imagined “Africa” homeland, or “Africa” relocated in the Black Atlantic constituting Afro-Cuban or Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions. Through such “memory projects” forgotten music and dances were recreated from ancestors and relieved. By the same token, memory is also selective as certain agenda and goals dictate people to remember particular elements of the past and exclude others.

The ambivalent position and allegiance of the Afro-Peruvians is evident in Feldman’s study that they were considered as part of Peruvian coastal criollo culture and also they were both part of and separated from the Black Atlantic diaspora. Hence through the “memory project” and the “cultural memory” strategies employed in the revival, Afro-Peruvians imagined the homeland “Africa,” and at the same time, relocated it to the Black Atlantic, and thus, Black Peruvian past is produced and staged through Peruvian criollo culture.

Through knitting together carefully and presenting each chapter chronologically Feldman built up the challenges and achievements of Afro-Peruvian cultural revival and provides the life history and commitment of particular Peruvians and artistic groups who reinvented Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions through exercising memory projects, throwing cultural memory pool and relieving it. 

In this study of the Afro-Peruvian "revival," Feldman offers not a definitive history of a genre, but rather an 'ethnography of remembering' about performed reinventions of Afro-Peruvian music in Peru and the United States" and the transnational cultural world marked by double consciousness and circulating ideas. Feldman proposes the Black Pacific as a newly imagined diasporic community reconstructing identity and negotiating ambiguous relationships with local criollo and indigenous culture.

Insider performers and researchers of Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions share the local artists’ and scholars’ disappointment that foreign work and its profit doesn’t make it back to the people who contribute to the study. This is a common problem of any ethnographic / participatory study putting its practical purpose and significance into question and Feldman’s study is no exception. The issue of representation is another concern. That is, how a foreign researcher such as Feldman can represent the native voice and if the people’s voice is heard indirectly through a foreign researcher whose membership and loyalty is rather to what ethnomusicologist Stephen Loza (2006) calls “Euroamericentric” academic hegemony than to the people who contributed directly to the study.

The author supports her analysis through remarkable research consists of numerous interviews and extensive archived material that include Afro-Peruvian poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz’ personal research materials José Durand’s personal collection of books and manuscripts. Her style is clear and easy for a non-native English speaker to read. She unified each chapter and organized it chronologically including her travel journal to make it more reliable and help the reader understand her perspective. There are notations and musical transcriptions of songs and rhythmic patterns that can illustrate the complexity of Afro-Peruvian music and its indigenous influence in certain Afro-Peruvian musical practices.  Hence, in my view the book gives a substantive analysis of Afro-Peruvian historiography and is the compilation of life histories of some of the main characters involved in Afro-Peruvian music and dance production since the 1950s.

The skepticism such as this rather emanates from the fact that the African descent population of Peru has been neglected in the sociocultural fabric of the Peruvian nation and their voice has not been given due attention and historically been ignored. Hence, as part of the ongoing struggle Heidi Carolyn Feldman’s contribution is a great landmark for Afro-Peruvian cultural revival and inspiration for historians, researchers, local artists and activists engaged in resistance to give voice to their people against injustices. The book will help the Afro-Peruvian scholarship, activism, and artistry to gather a momentum and step forward and also serves as a substantive reference source for Art Activism and Activist Artists.

_______________________________

Poetry and Violence

and

The Black Rhythm of Peru

A Comparative Analysis 

__________________________

Context: Folklore Colloquy

It is the interdisciplinary nature of folklore and ethnomusicology as two separate fields sprouted at different times to converge out of necessity in reaction to the real life situation of humankind and integrate the lines of enquiry, conceptual frameworks, theoretical perspectives and methods and ethnographic tools. Since the same people we study with do sing songs of their lived experience, tell stories, perform festivals and rituals in different cultural forms, the study involves dialogue around historical, folkloric, anthropological, linguistic and musicological inquiries spilling over a single discipline onto other boundaries. As the primary goal of the course has been to identify theoretical concepts and methods central to our discipline and apply them into our own research, issues of authenticity; “memory (project)” and historicity; performance/communication; cultural revival; folklorization, continuity and change; institution/power; and “cultural identity” have been among the multifaceted topics of theoretical and methodological concern.

It is the purpose of this final paper to revisit those topics, nuances, theories and methods, and themes in the two books and journal articles and consolidate the colloquy on the bases of ‘folkethnic’ (folklore and ethnomusicology) interdisciplinary/eclectic paradigms. Two of the books read during the colloquy were Poetry and Violence and The Black Rhythm of Peru, and while comparing and contrasting the perspectives and themes of the two books next, we will also discuss issues of major significance in the journal articles. 

Themes and Patterns

In John McDowell’s (2000) Poetry and Violence, the theme of Costa Chica balladry points at the inevitable death of the hero, and “the way” such beautiful ones die! The valiant verses such as “…I am your friend; where you die, I will die;” “Only if you kill me, I will surrender,” and “I won’t surrender even to my father” (p137) are fires that come out of irresistible firebrands, of fearless insurgents riding the “Pegasus,” of the “Don Quixote” (another “Alonso Quijano” of de la Mancha) of the corrido of Costa Chica.  In some world, ‘the beautiful ones are not yet borne;’ in another, they are borne but to live short. Some heroes, like Simon Blanco, lived to die and live through again in the commemorative songs of equally haunting heroes of corrido such as Juvencio Vargas. As verbalization helps to crystalize experience into a more stable (finished?) product and also to activate a social arena to exercise power in a collaborative process (p23), the longer corridos of Costa Chica have become commercialized beyond their commemorative function like the recordings of Runa songs of the northern Ecuador. 

The courteous gestures of corrido during performance that the performer opens with a differential nod and closes with a respectful farewell  has a healing force, a pacifying and mediating power to mitigate against offending the audience (p175). To celebrate violence through composing and performing corridos as a tool of making and keeping promises, the corridos serve to display loyalty among fighters unto death, the promise made but not sometimes kept (p136).  Men would rather die than to surrender their honor, like the archetypal Chante Luna of Guerrero whose name maintained a celebrity status through commemorative ballad (p139). A controlling function of corrido is equally immense to enforce deliberation and caution through such commentaries as “Don’t ever trust your friends, as they are the worst of traitors” (p149).

Poetry and Violence evolved out of the field data the author collected through long ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the relationship between poetry and violence. I have a related interest in folkloric and anthropological inquiry involving interdisciplinary research into the role of folklore, especially, protest folksongs, personal experience narratives of activism, and social banditry progressing into a wider political movement rooted within the resistance culture of the society. The corrido performances center on the racial and ethnic bases of the realities and forces that have shaped modern Mexico including the racialist and essentialist modes of thought which discredited the actual presence and role of the black in the history and culture of the nation. The corrido performances are proofs of social injustices, mass unrest and the resulting violence and challenging views of the people in the region about corrido as voices “of the people who are accustomed to use arms and used to live in the world of much violence” and those who critique the celebratory role of corrido as saying “often works to increase violence” (p137).

Poetry and Violence provides an in-depth study of the Mexican ballad form called corrido, a body of oral poetry that takes violence as its theme. The author offers a general corrido history in the region and detailed patterns of particular ballad performances and social contexts through interviews with corrido composers and performers that he appended the sampling of his ballad texts.  The poetry of violence reveals a living vernacular tradition and chronicles local and regional rivalries as a detailed case study with broad social and cultural implications. Poetry and Violence is a study that approaches balladry not just as a literary expressions but in relation to its cultural and social bases, the motives for composing it, occasions for singing balladry and response of the audience (public) to performances as central features of ballad process  (p45) and it further establishes evidence that ballad is a compelling commentary on violence as human experience and as communicative action.

 European ballad scholarship introduced “powerful analytical tools” and methodological precepts such as “the emotional core,”  “communal recreation,” “incremental repetition,” and “leaping and lingering narrative technique”

“Memory Project,” “Cultural Identity” and Performance

Like Heidi Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru (2006), John McDowell’s Violence and Poetry (2000) built on the theme of memory, history and historicity of violence, identity, and the nostalgic cultural revival through performance implanted in “the Africa thesis” (McDowell, p99). As clearly depicted in Feldman’s study, the Afro-Peruvian revival mapped the Peruvian Black Pacific as the periphery of the Black Atlantic and such distinct memory projects through music, folklore and dance traditions connected performances of blackness with criollo (p265ff). Feldman analyzes those artistic activities of Jose Durand and his Pancho Fierro company back in the 1950’s “reinscribing the history of people of African descents in Peru” through criollo nostalgia and staging Black performance traditions (p18) as “Criollo” (“creole”) which refers to the acculturated children of African slaves (p19) different from bozales, that is, “slaves who came directly from Africa” (p269).

In Feldman’s study, “memory” as a main theme serves Afro-Peruvians engaged in the revival to remember a collective past or the “cultural memory” they did not personally experience.  In McDowell’s Poetry and Violence, corrido serves to link the past to the present and, in so doing, to celebrate and regulate the memorable violence as characteristic of the heroic age, “the heroic society,”  an “aristocratic and military ethos”’ (McDowell, p124) and the good old days that Feldman’s White criollo folklorist Jose Durand (1925-1990) is haunted by (Feldman, pp25-30).  In both works, through “memory projects” the forgotten Costa Chica’s corridos and the Afro-Peruvian music and dances were recreated from ancestors and relieved. By the same token, memory is also selective as certain agenda and goals dictate people to remember particular elements of the past and exclude others.

John McDowell’s (2000) “Africa thesis” wrapped up in corrido rooted in the social matrix of Costa Chica of Mexico raises the fundamental question “what are we to do with the common belief that violence on the Costa Chica revolves around the black African ancestry of its population?” (p103) the historical enquiry to be echoed in Feldman’s The Black Rhythm of Peru built on memory, history and historicity of class, race and the Black cultural identity in Peru and beyond.  Elements of African “cultural identity” in Costa Chica include bride capture (forced marriage(?)), round houses, polygamy, speech patterns, hallowed canoes, and names evocative of African regions and peoples (p104). In Feldman’s study, the Afro-Peruvian revival mapped the Peruvian Black Pacific as the periphery of the Black Atlantic and such distinct memory projects through music, folklore and dance traditions connected performances of blackness with criollo, Black Atlantic, or African origins and traditions to negotiate the Black Pacific double connections (p265ff).

Authenticity, Traditions

To operationalize the authenticity of “ethnic art” and/or traditions and, in so doing, to establish standards, especially where rival traditions operate is problematic (Evans-Pritchard 1987). Authenticity of a craft for the natives is, for instance, in the story behind the item, not just in the item at hand or in the labor or money invested in it; authenticity is in the fragile primitive culture once caused and owned the item now tenuously coexisting with modern technology. Among other institutions that determine this rather delicate authenticity and the process of tradition and innovation are tourist (consumer) expectation, media, and the law.

The search for authenticity in continuity and change is evident in the works by John McDowell and Heidi Feldman.  While focusing on the process of relocation of folklore from its original setting to a new expressive contact zone, McDowell explores the multivocality of traditions among the Quincha speaking people of Runa, Otavalo area, north Ecuado (………). There he observes a leap from a static recitation to a dynamic folk-narrative session, a narrative epiphany, as he calls it, and the artists’ search for indigenous people’s consultancy in the Runa music records by the Inti Rumi bands (p….).  In the case of the discourse of the Costa Chica corrido, the major theme is functional in that its impetus is toward violence to commemorate the fallen comrade in violence (McDowell, p101).

By the same token, Feldman compares two competitive performance groups on equal planes: one, the rural Chincha performance rooted in pre-modern authenticity, and another, the Lima Afro-Peruvian performance practice, competing with the rather authentic Chincha with its legend as the rural cradle of Afro-Peruvian culture.  Chincha later evolved into two coexisting forms of double consciousness as “two Chinchas”: the authentic cradle of Black tradition and the modern tourist stage (p14). Before it was staged in the 1990s, Chincha was already identified as the cradle of both all Blacks in Peru and their Black culture following the 1960s and 1970s search of authentic rural origin of Afro-Peruvian Music (p175) by revival artists. In both cases of the Chincha and Quincha traditions, the search for authenticity is an unended quest since the rift between tradition and modernity is not as such simply crossable.

Tradition and Human Agency

From the Costa Chica corrido evidences show that interventions of authorities bear more violence. That is, the human agency is regulated more by government institutions than by traditions and is susceptible to structured violence by “agents of local, state, and federal governments” (McDowell, 101).  Such a violence portrayed in Costa Chica corridos is a substance that evolves out of outlaws, social bandits, and revolutionaries. In Feldman’s study the nuance between the nationalist State-driven “local-color” versus the “authentic” arts of subaltern cultures within the State  expresses the Black Pacific dual consciousness and its dual allegiance: locally, through the musica criolla and the military government’s folkloric memory project and, transnationally through the Black Atlantic models, and borrowed religious chants (p13).

It is evident that the rich representations of the composer's voice in Poetry and Violence are interwoven with the theoretical overlay in the book as a critique of the racist allegations that the African heritage of Costa Chica afromestizos, the term the author uses to refer to the costenos, i. e., “the people of the coast as a general category” (p9), is the source of the patterns of violence has to share roles with the causes of Afro-Peruvian musical revival in Feldman’s study.

Conclusion

If art that depicts violence generates more violence is itself problematic but McDowell’s critical analysis of corrido as a vernacular tradition critiques regional rivalries around three issues of significance: land redistribution since the revolution (land, property rights), capital formation (backwash effects of globalization), and consolidation of federal authority (power/institution). Both studies concentrate on the reconstruction of history and reconstitution of “cultural identity” through “memory project” and performance of traditions where the ethnic mix includes a strong African-Mexican and/or Afro-Peruvian components as protagonists enacting cultural revival and violence, another folklorization of actual events.

Through interviews, observations and discussions with composers and performers, both researchers reveal a living vernacular tradition that amounts to a chronicle of local and regional rivalries. Poetry and Violence explores the tragic corrido and its stories of heroic mortal encounter by perpetuating the role of oral poetry to theorize violence on three general themes and patterns: one is, the theory that poetry celebrates violence, as it does for receptive audiences the deeds of past heroes; second, it also evaluates, censures and regulates upon reflection the nature of violence, that is,  the coaching voice within the corrido that places violent behavior within the confines of a moral universe; third, the contention that oral poetry has a therapeutic force of healing that helps sustain the community in the wake of violent events.