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
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