Dislodged Songs

The reading that really struck me this week was Jon Cruz's "Culture on the Margins." It was a quote pulled from Thomas P Fenner that I found the most thought provoking. Cruz notes Fenner's argument that songs should be viewed as "activities and practices" and that, "Dislodging songs from their context and transporting them through musical transcription invariably resulted in the loss of meaning (169).

We've talked a lot in the class about the way that the everyday is constructed by our culture and I find myself often thinking about the way that the very act of analyzing and recording an event or artifact can change it (very quantum). But I have never thought about it in the way that Cruz describes it. The song is not just studied, it is "dislodged." The word implies two things for me. One, the act of study implies a kind of violence across the object. Force is applied to seperate the artifact from it's context. The work not only can damage the object, but what of the context to which it belonged? Do we leave a sort of theoretical hole or scar on that context? The image that comes to my mind is my father working at pulling up a tree stump from our backyard. The stump was eventually pulled, but in the process the earth around it had be churned up and a whole mass of tiny roots had been riped off and left in the group.

Two, too believe we can dislodge an artifact from its context seems to imply that we can examine it in some sort of cultural vacuum. I think most in the class would agree that this is not true. But it does point to the reason that we strive to "dislodge" the artifact in the first place. It seems that this sort of study is employing methods more suited to the physical sciences than the social sciences. When we dislodge an artifact, we are trying to be objective and to limit variables, to control our experiment. There are any number of historical, political, and social reasons we would do that (some of which we've already talked about). But in the end, I think the most important thing to realize is that, in the social sciences, dislodgement often means that the artifact we are studying is very often not the same as the artifact before our attempts to pry it free.

- Josh Zimmerman