Artifacts vs. Testimonies

In Jon Cruz's book I was most startled and struck by the section titled "Triumph of the Taxonomic." In this section Cruz quotes a song that includes the lines, "Fall out here and shuck dis corn / Oh. ...oh, ho / Bigges pil ever see sence I was born / Oh. ...oh, ho" (182). The rest of the song is a commentary not just on the physical labor demanded of the speaker, but a kind of lament and description of a world out of joint. For example, the line "What in the worl' is de marter here" is repeated at the beginning of the song, and the later verses narrate the social dynamics of slavery: subjugation, ownership, class divides and resentments, etc. The surprising thing is that the song was classified as a "corn song," corn songs being a sub-category of "work songs" in the new taxonomy. As Cruz writes, "What underwrites this historically embedded text's social reference--the social relations of slavery--is eclipsed by a budding ethnomusicology. In the new scientistic view, the song took on significance through ... the framework of the taxonomy that gave it a new place within folklore" (182). In other words, the same impulse that sought to make an artifact (as opposed to testimony) of a lived expression and a lived art--hence lodging the song as an object within the past--also divorced the song from the very past it was taxonomized within. "Technical neutrality" obscures the social reality--both the social reality of slavery, and the social reality of folkloric preservation and classification that alters and reinscribes and resignifies expressions as merely forms (183).

Of course, Deloria's chapter on music comes to mind, especially the section on musicologists' efforts to understand Omaha harmony. John Comfort Fillmore found that in the Omaha music he studied, "the melodies did imply harmony--indeed, a universally shared harmony--and could, therefore, be understood through standard music systematics" (Deloria 201). But in classifying Omaha music, Fillmore furthered developmentalist ways of understanding the world: Fillmore found in the music a "latent harmonic sense" (Deloria 201). In other words, Fillmore and others were able to simultaneously say that Indian music was just like European music, and less developed than European music. So, it was safe to appropriate Indian melodies as nationalist music because doing so furthered the desire to both highlight what was authentically American AND confirm the progress of European colonization.

In discussing folkloric approaches to understanding and documenting music from marginalized social and racial groups, Cruz and Deloria remind us of the dangers and responsibilities inherent when, in wanting to document or understand something, we deliberately or inadvertently objectify lived expressions of social experience. Reading Cruz and Deloria's critiques/warnings makes me appreciate Kathleen Stewart's approach even more. She said there's no perfect text for the social, but didn't abandon the effort of letting the surfeit of the social speak through her text. What other models do we have in this social moment?

- Esme