Sustainability is Environmental, Economic, and Cultural

Three Spheres of Sustainability, from Joshua J. Yates, "Abundance on Trial," The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2012.

     Musical and cultural sustainability are inseparable from environmental ecosystem sustainability. That’s been one of this blog’s themes from the outset. I advanced an ecological approach to musical sustainability beginning about 2006 with the Nettl Lecture at the University of Illinois, followed by presentations and panels at the American Folklore Society and Society for Ethnomusicology conferences—the latter published in a 2009 issue of the journal, The World of Music. Now a dozen years later, in May 2018, there will be a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, based on this very same proposition, that environmental and cultural sustainability are inseparable. 

     The conference announcement reads, in part: “Cultural Sustainabilities is a two-day conference driven by the proposition that environmental and cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. This conference brings together leading social scientists, humanists, and activists to address the premise that reversing or ameliorating the negative impacts of human behavior on the globe’s environment is at its core a human cultural question.” The conference is sponsored by the University of California, Santa Barbara, departments of Music, Anthropology, Media Studies, and Environmental Studies, with support from UCSB’s Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Music and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. The list of sponsors indicates that sustainability today is considered an issue for the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In 2006, of course, that was not the case; beginning in that year I spoke, and then wrote, that in the university world of theoretical and applied knowledge, sustainability discourses resided primarily in economics (particularly developmental economics) and ecology (particularly conservation biology), while in the public arena sustainability was associated with environmentalism, energy conservation, and living a “green” life. In addition, sustainability thinking led to ecological economics, an alternative to neoclassical economic theory. Today a robust discussion of sustainability is occurring in the arts and humanities. Indeed, sustainability is now mainstream enough for it to be critiqued in the environmental humanities, who (mistakenly in my view) believe that it promotes a version of deep ecology as the sustainability ideal. 

     I’ll have more to say about that sustainabilities conference at UCSB as this coming May approaches—it is free and open to the public, and parts or all of it may be streamed on the internet—but what prompts this post is the assault on environmental and cultural sustainabilities underway by the current US federal Administration, personified by the policies put in place by the heads of the US Department of the Interior (Ryan Zinke) and the Environmental Protection Administration (Scott Pruitt). Yesterday, it was announced that 9 of 12 members of the US National Parks Advisory Panel resigned en masse, in protest, because during the year 2017, the first year that Secretary Zinke was head of Interior, he never once convened or consulted his advisory panel. After they resigned, a spokesperson for the Department of Interior told the board chair, Tony Knowles (former governor of Alaska) that their resignation was “welcome” because the board had ignored sexual harassment in the Parks, and that they had also ignored an invitation to meet on January 8th. Knowles told a NPR interviewer that these charges were laughable; no invitation for a meeting had ever come to the board, while they had in fact offered advice to the previous Administration on sexual harassment policy, which was a serious problem in the Parks (and in the Interior Department as a whole). Knowles suggested that the Adminstration’s spokesperson, associate deputy secretary Todd Willens, was inventing facts to fit the false narrative he wanted to present. Willens' moral condemnation of sexual harassment, like that of his boss, rings false considering the history of sexual predation that accompanies the nation's chief executive. Having served on an advisory board myself, and having experienced something similar when the organization got a new leader, I know what it means when the new head is unwilling to follow the advisory board’s advice. But seldom does the new leader ignore the board entirely. 

     The Parks represent natural ecosystems set aside for conservation and preservation, in a nation where for centuries economic development has exploited natural resources without much regard for sustainability. But now, according to former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel, even the Parks themselves are at great risk. They face a $12 billion backlog of deferred infrastructure maintenance already, and it is clear from the environmental policies being put in place by the current Administration, that the Parks will not receive much federal help. One “solution” to their financial problem, scheduled to be implemented this year, is a rise in the Parks’ admission fees, by roughly 350%. Where it used to cost $20 to visit Acadia National Park in Maine, for example, this year the admission fee will rise to $70. (The advisory board had opposed the rate raise.) For a working-class family of four, part of the voter base that elected this President, a cost of nearly $300 in admissions alone would put such a vacation out of reach. And yet, these were meant to be “national” parks, available to all, not private land. As Woody Guthrie wrote in the song, “This Land Is Your Land,”

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; 

Sign was painted, it said private property; 

But on the back side it didn't say nothing; 

That side was made for you and me. 

This verse is not listed in the Wikipedia entry for this song, by the way. Someone should update it. 

      I’ve posted blog entries here about partnering with Scott McFarland at the Great Smoky National Park in the spring of 2016, on a soundscape project, part of the Park’s “natural sounds and night skies” initiative to preserve the sonic ecosystems of the Parks for visitors and also for the benefit of all Park inhabitants (plants, animals) that cannot survive without sound communication. But the assault on the Parks is just part of a larger agenda, a policy encouraging coal mining, timber cutting, oil and gas drilling, and so on, in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as well as federally owned lands; and in areas where an environmental disaster such as an oil spill would have adverse economic impacts on local and regional industries. Opening up the Gulf of Maine, for example, to oil drilling—which the current Administration may well accomplish, despite opposition from all the state's Congressional representatives, including the very conservative Republican, Bruce Poliquin—could destroy the fishing and tourist industries that the state of Maine’s population greatly depends on. The impact of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico stood as a warning to the previous Administration; but under the current one it’s open season on the environment, for the benefit of the oil corporations and the wealthy who have effectively bought the government (see Citizens United) at the expense of the people. 
     No clearer examples of the interlinks between environmental and cultural sustainability can be found than in the damage done to people and their ways of life caused by environmental disasters. The fact that these environmental disasters result in large part from human economic activity fueled by belief in maximizing material wealth in the short run, does not prevent those presently controlling federal policy from exacerbating the problem and causing further environmental injustice while mounting a propaganda campaign of denial and reversal. Such policies may yet trickle down to reduce and then eliminate federal support for the arts and humanities, for public media (NPR and PBS). The propaganda campaign infects the public sphere and threatens academic freedom while it gaslights scientific truth, and puts colleges and universities’ disinterested pursuit of knowledge at risk, in the same way that the Parks, the environmentally sensitive areas, and American cultural values (such as democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights, and human rights) are also under assault. It’s taken a dozen years, but now sustainability is understood to be cultural and social, as well as economic and environmental, with important connections among them. 

Toward a Sound Ecology: Activism, Community Engagement, and Ethnomusicology

    Several months ago I was invited to Limerick, Ireland, to give a plenary address in a conference for ethnomusicologists, on activism and community engagement. Community-engaged activism is characteristic of applied ethnomusicology, of course, but some who are activists in our field don’t self-identify as applied ethnomusicologists. No matter; the conference organizers wished to cast a broader net, and they therefore brought together many people whose work was unknown to each other—not just ethnomusicologists, either, but also arts promoters who’d done much to program concerts featuring indigenous performing groups. The gathering took place two weeks ago and resulted from a historic alliance between the US-based Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Europe-based International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). It was a great pleasure to meet and speak with some European colleagues whose work I’d read but whom I’d never seen before. Several old friends and colleagues were in attendance as well. While some ethnomusicologists are active members of both societies, SEM has been my only professional organization for ethnomusicology since I joined in back in 1971.
    I was impressed with many of the presentations. It so happened that Oxford University Press had a small book exhibit at the gathering where the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology was prominently featured. Although that book was published only two months earlier, it’s already had some impact. Many of the conference attendees had seen it; and parts of it, especially my introductory essay, were referenced in several presentations. A few of the conference highlights: Angela Impey from the University of London offered a description of her work with songs that “tell the truth” in war-torn South Sudan, where music makes meaning and expresses justice. Deborah Wong, a professor at the University of California, made an appeal for “witnessing” as activism, and related her work in Riverside, with the soundtracks of police violence against African Americans. José Jorge de Carvalho, from the University of Brasilia, described a program in which indigenous “masters” (bearers of traditional knowledge) are brought to teach in his university, on a level playing field with Western professors. Such a program, limited to the arts, does not threaten the established political order; but bring in masters to teach indigenous ideas about nature, for example, and give them authority equal to Western science, and you have the beginnings of a revolution. Denise Bolduc, a member of the First Nations (Canadian) Anishnabe group, spoke about her work in promoting concerts and other performances for a broad audience. One of the phrases that stuck with me from her presentation was “blood memory,” a kind of memory that is genetic rather than cultural, and which some indigenous people invoke to provide authority for a cultural process in which they feel they have re-created ideas and practices of previous generations that had been lost to cultural genocide or for other reasons. Andrew McGraw, from the University of Richmond, spoke about his work helping prison inmates make hip-hop tracks, describing the new Richmond (VA) city jail as a highly sophisticated surveillance state. Anthony Seeger spoke about lessons that could be learned from applied anthropology, and Rebecca Dirksen spoke of her efforts in applied ethnomusicology to make a documentary film involving music and waste in Haiti, where the streets of Port-au-Prince are piled high with trash. Mark DeWitt described (and played recordings of) songs made in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, meant to raise environmental consciousness. He added that the songs, while powerful statements in themselves, seemed like everything else done in opposition to the oil drilling culture to have little effect on the oil industry itself, and wondered what he, as someone supported as a university professor by the economic establishment in the region, and as someone answerable to many different and sometimes conflicting constituencies, could or should do about it. Luke Lassiter, whose work in collaborative ethnography was well known to me, and whose book on it I taught in the fieldwork seminar at Brown, talked about new developments in this area, including increased reflexivity and a broadening of the concept of collaboration. Some of the presenters referred to my published work when making a similar or related point, and one critiqued my ideas about music’s economic and cultural value. We disagreed politely and explored those disagreements in a question-and-answer session after his presentation, all of which was helpful to me and, I hope, to him.
    The one who was critical objected to my point (made in this blog and elsewhere) that music should not be considered intellectual property or bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, I’m not the only one to feel this way, nor was I anywhere near the first to say so. But I’ve argued that music has personal and cultural values that ought not be confused with exchange value in the marketplace, yet value and values are brought into tension and compromised when music is bought and sold. My critic raised the common objection that musicians needed to make a living and ought to be paid for their music, artists for their art, and so forth. Oddly, most of the musicians he discussed were amateurs whose main income wasn’t from music; but still, there are those whose is, and why shouldn’t they have the right to be paid for it? In the economic systems prevailing in developed nation-states, of course this makes sense; musicians are laborers and should be paid for their work. But I envision a different economy, one in which making music is as natural as breathing or walking, and where it is not labor at all.
    The presentation closest in concept and spirit to my plenary talk was by someone who was entirely unfamiliar to me, Professor Chad Hamill, of Northern Arizona University. It came at 8:30 in the morning, and the conference room was only half full, which was a pity. Chad is of both Native American (Spokan Indian) and non-Native ancestry, and has his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Colorado. His spoke about indigenous adaptation in the era of climate change, but began with a portrait of Spokan life in the natural world pre-European contact. Translated into my terminology it was a world of relational being, knowing, and doing, anchored in sound. Chad explained how in this Spokan world song bound humans to (and in) nature, linked to a sacred geography centered in the Spokane River. Today that river is polluted and dammed, and the salmon no longer run, all in the “photochemical haze” of the colonial legacy. Yet they are fighting all of this in the courts and gradually obtaining justice. He and I were able to speak about our common interests at times during the conference, and afterwards. I was reminded of the efforts of the Penobscots in Maine to restore the Penobscot River, efforts that are being rewarded as pollutants are outlawed, dams are being undone and the river is renewing itself. In that effort these Native Americans are joined by non-indigenous people who are conservation-minded, many of them sportsmen and women who would otherwise be on the right wing of the political spectrum.
    My plenary lecture came in the evening, after supper, and closed out the events that same day. It was fitting for Chad and me to bookend the day by speaking about nature, culture, and music within an environmental activist framework. I explained my current work in ecomusicology as it moves toward what I’ve been calling a sound ecology, or a new ecological rationality based in sound and presence, one that encompasses a sound community and displays a sound economy. These ideas have been gradually coming to me out of my concerns with music and sustainability, economy and ecology, nature’s economy, music, heritage and tradition, the sound commons, applied ethnomusicology, and so on as readers of this blog will understand. They had their first expression as music and sustainability in 2005 in my Nettl Lecture, at the University of Illinois, and then again at the SEM conference in 2006 in Honolulu, on a panel I organized on sustainable music—those papers were published in a 2009 issue of the world of music. Since then, they’ve been influenced profoundly by Thoreau’s writings, or at least by my interpretations of them, as they bear on ideas of presence, co-presence, and a critique of economic man, the business mentality that underlies the global corporate capitalism that turns music and art into intellectual property (and where traditional arts are given the value-added status of heritage) and fuel for the creative economy, cultural tourism, and so forth. I must emphasize that my critique is not directed at capitalism per se, as so many others’ is today (e.g., Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein). Rather, it is directed at what underlies contemporary neoclassical economics and capitalism, namely “economic man,” the assumption that humans are capitalists and traders by nature.
    Gradually I am bringing my ideas of a sound ecology to publication; two essays on Thoreau will be published very soon, one in Current Directions in Ecomusicology and the other in the inaugural issue of Sound Studies. The keynote address that I gave at the CSTM conference last June should appear in an issue of Ethnologies within a year or so. I also have a publication that will appear on sound and climate change, more of a personal essay, in Antioch College’s environmental journal, Whole Terrain, later this year. All of this thought on music and sustainability inches toward a larger, comprehensive publication that will bring the ideas on sound, presence, co-presence, community, economy, and ecology together.

Upcoming Cultural Sustainability Symposium at Sterling College

     I've been away from this blog for a little while, as I prepare a keynote address for the symposium on cultural sustainability, which is to take place in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, at the end of this week, August 15-18, on the campus of Sterling College, a small, liberal arts college emphasizing conservation ecology.
     The symposium is open to the public: general information may be found here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/symposium.php

and the schedule of presentations here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/schedule.php

     The convergence of college and place, conservation ecology and commons, ought to inspire us all and I'm very much looking forward to meeting new colleagues and re-connecting with old ones there. Among those who will be presenting at the conference is Mary Hufford, an old acquaintance whose work on commons in the Appalachian forest was (and is) very important to my own thinking in this area. We met in the 1980s when she was working at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She was one of a few scholars back then who was interested in my research into the Appalachian mountain farming ecology, a community worldview based in family, farming, and religious tradition, united by the concept of husbandry, which was an early version of what I now think of as stewardship. She asked me to write about that for the Encycopedia of Appalachia, which I did, and we had many interesting talks in the next decade, as she developed her research into forest commons and shared resources. At that time my research site had shifted south within Appalachia from Virginia to Kentucky, and to Old Regular Baptists, where I found the same ideas of husbandry and a mountain farm ecology. I also found the Lilley Cornett Woods, a preserved old-growth forest that one of the mountain patriarchs (Lilley Cornett) had stubbornly refused to sell out to the timber companies who were clear-cutting the forests in the early 20th century. Today the Lilley Cornett Woods is maintained by the University of Kentucky, and it is the only old-growth forest in the state. Cornett himself was quite a character, and I've mentioned him here before (see the blog entry for Feb. 7, 2011); but he and his forest deserve a separate entry, which I hope to make soon. At any rate, I recall speaking with Mary Hufford, who was at that time doing research into Appalachian forest ecology, and the "falling forest,"  very excitedly about the Lilley Cornett Woods and what it represented, in terms of resistance to the timber and coal corporations that were just beginning their cultural, economic, and environmental genocide in the region.
     For the conference keynote, I sent in the following abstract: "How may we contribute to the struggle for cultural sustainability in the face of increasing environmental, economic, and social injustice? Resilience thinking—today’s fashionable replacement for sustainability—puts us in a defensive posture that by itself is ultimately unsustainable. Nor will a greater reliance on Western economic reason lift all boats on a rising tide. On the contrary, economic reason, based on neoclassical assumptions about 'economic man,' has only exacerbated the current crises. Sustainable alternatives to economic rationality may be found in folklore’s emphases on commonality and orality. Commonality: folklore is not owned, but shared in a cultural commons. Cultural memory sequesters tradition by keeping it available; folklore is preserved by giving it away. Orality: sound vibrates us into co-presence with other living beings. Sound bundles human beings into relationships; economic man isolates individuals. Both commonality and orality may be observed at work in nature as well as culture. An enlightened cultural policy would borrow four principles from conservation biology: diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship. But the relationship between culture and the environment goes beyond analogy. The commonwealth of culture is entwined directly with social, environmental, and economic justice. It is impossible to contribute effectively to one without working for all." I'm scheduled to stand and deliver it Friday morning at 9:30 to open the conference, and am very much looking forward to it, and to continuing the conversation about commons, conservation ecology, and cultural sustainability.

Cultural Sustainability, Economics and the Environment

   Efforts at musical and cultural sustainability must not fall victim to tunnel vision. Even in those areas where musical loss appears to have been reversed, entire social groups remain at risk. Economic and environmental threats to cultural sustainability may be even more significant than media pressures. Public folklorists and applied ethnomusicologists, concentrating on short-term victories in cultural sustainability, have short memories. Only twenty years ago, folklife specialists understood the interdependence of culture and the environment. Bent on community partnerships for the arts, culture workers today seem to overlook the fact that cultural sustainability faces potentially catastrophic economic and environmental forces. That is the essence of what follows here.

A sea of mown hay 

Not long ago folklorists were theorizing cultural conservation; today the operative term is cultural sustainability. Both refer to partnerships between culture workers such as public folklorists, applied anthropologists, and applied ethnomusicologists, on the one hand, and communities of people who are rich in  expressive culture, with the goal of preserving, conserving, encouraging, and sustaining both the arts and the communities. These culture workers almost always work both with community artists and community leaders. These include community historians, scholars, arts promoters and political leaders. But whereas cultural conservation emphasizes preservation, cultural sustainability encourages development.
    In the cultural sustainability discourse, culture is used in three ways: one, as the whole way of life of a group of people; two, as a synonym for art; and three, in the phrase “expressive culture,” which refers to art as lived experience.
    Late last month, at the annual American Folklore Society conference, I heard dozens of public folklorists describe their cultural sustainability work. Most of these descriptions fell into a pattern. The folklorists described instances of successful partnerships that helped sustain the community’s traditional arts, usually through the tried and true methods of festivals, parades, artists coming into the public schools to demonstrate their arts, arts apprenticeships, museum exhibits, and media projects including recordings, videos, books, and Internet sites. These activities are intended to validate the artists and their traditional arts, to make them feel more secure in what they are doing, to help them support themselves by generating more of a market for their arts products, and to give a larger public stamp of approval (usually from a government agency such as an arts council) to community artists and their activities.
    The argument also is made—although it was not made so strongly at this past AFS conference—that these artistic activities constitute a “creative economy” which can help make up for financial losses in communities that have been hurt by the loss of manufacturing or other jobs, particularly if the traditional arts are branded as cultural heritage and attract tourist dollars. What I’ve just described is the general model, and although in some cases it’s worked better than others, at the AFS conference almost all the reports were positive. One success story followed another and another, at least in terms of encouraging the traditional artists and raising their profiles within the various communities (usually urban and ethnic), if not in terms of a creative economy whose impact was measured in dollars and cents.
    I, too, have written about cultural partnerships with the goals of conservation and development, describing my work in southeastern Kentucky in the 1990s with Old Regular Baptists to help the community maintain its music culture. This involved obtaining a self-documentation grant for them, teaching them how to use recording equipment, and their making recordings of endangered music among their own people and creating a library and a stock of teaching tapes to help maintain the tradition. In addition, we recorded two CDs for Smithsonian Folkways, some of them appeared at the Smithsonian Folk Festival, and then in the new century they participated in two conferences on lined-out hymnody at Yale University, organized by Professor Willie Ruff, where they demonstrated their singing—the oldest English-language religious folksong tradition in the United States (1).
    Cultural sustainability, in short, appears to be a growth industry. About four years ago Goucher College began offering the M.A. in Cultural Sustainability, to educate culture workers. Other graduate programs that emphasize, or at least include, public folklore or public humanities in their curricula, similarly are emphasizing community partnerships and cultural sustainability. Of course, many of the public folklorists who advocated for cultural conservation ten, twenty, and even thirty years ago were saying some of the same things about community partnerships and the traditional arts (2).

No train horn

     Nevertheless, I worry that overlooked in the celebrations of community expressive culture are economic and environmental threats to those communities themselves. Why? For one thing, partnering with community leaders is far more difficult when the subject is economics or the environment than when the talk is about encouraging the arts. Everyone likes the arts and the only argument is over whether and how to pay for them. But bring up problems involving industry, transportation and fossil fuels, community relations, poverty, unemployment coupled with crime and drugs, or schools, land use, the location of medical services and the cost of their delivery, energy sources, noise pollution, natural disasters, relations between natives and newcomers, discrimination based on gender, age, and race, global warming and climate change, the effect of floods and rising sea levels, income inequality, gentrification, public transportation, water rights, and the like, and communities show themselves to be in serious disagreement. When community partnerships are viewed as feel-good, kumbaya opportunities, and the "culture" in "cultural sustainability" is centered on the arts, then a focus on community arts and cultural sustainability has worked effectively, though this is not to say it has been easy. But when intractable problems and deep community divisions surface, and the "culture" in "cultural sustainability" is taken instead to mean the whole way of life of a people, then united action is far more difficult, if not impossible; and success stories will be fewer and farther between. Yet cultural sustainability is ultimately dependent on solving those environmental and economic problems, for the arts depend on it even as community sustainability does. 
    Mary Hufford was one folklorist who probed the connection between cultural and environmental conservation. Unlike most of her colleagues who were concerned then (as now) with the conservation of the traditional arts in communities, Hufford in the 1980s explored community expressive culture which related to conservation in the world of Nature, whether in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey or in the forests of West Virginia. Working for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, she helped initiate the Pinelands Folklife Project in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, thus linking cultural with government natural conservation management efforts and moving the field of folklife in this direction. After completing this project she turned her attention to links between folklife and the forest ecology of the southern Appalachian mountains while editing a volume of essays, Conserving Culture (3).
    Indeed, the Folklife Center had considered the links between cultural conservation, land-use planning, and the natural environment in the early 1980s in conjunction with the Tennessee-Tombigbee River Waterway project, already under construction, when they were asked by the National Parks Service to take part in so-called “mitigation efforts” to counteract adverse effects of the Waterway on the affected areas’ populations and surrounding resources. After initial enthusiasm for the project, the Center withdrew, citing ethical issues (4). Further attempts to partner with the Parks Service during the next fifteen years also produced uneven results, due to differences over politics, bureaucratic problems, and arguments among stakeholders over goals and methods. In 1999 a new Folklife Center director was hired, in 2002 Hufford left the Center to direct a newly formed folklife and ethnography center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center moved away from team projects involving ethnography, culture and nature (5). Meanwhile, intangible cultural heritage gained currency as both a term and strategy among public folklorists, particularly when UNESCO intensified its international efforts in this area in the new century.

    Hufford had approached me in the 1980s to discuss mutual interests because I too had been exploring the relations between culture and nature in my research for the Powerhouse for God projects (6). In the Powerhouse book I proposed an ecological model for farming, family, and belief using the metaphor of husbandry to unite the realms. Back in the 1970s when I started this research I was not thinking in terms of cultural conservation; rather, I was interested in how traditional ways of thought nurtured in that ecosystem had persisted into the twentieth century, particularly in a religious worldview, despite the loss of the farm economy and the transition to an industrial and service economy (7).

    And so despite the early efforts of folklorists like Hufford, the environment is not playing an important role in contemporary cultural sustainability discourse. I plead guilty myself. Although I’ve been talking and writing about conservation biology and environmentalism and their contributions to the sustainability discourse, until fairly recently I’ve been concerned chiefly with music, sustainability, and cultural policy. But as I continued to explore Nature’s economy and acoustic ecology, conservation biology became not only a resource for my cultural policy work but also a bridge to environmental sound-worlds themselves. My recent work in Thoreau and sound in the natural world instantiates this shift.

Yellow warbler

    Burt Feintuch, another folklorist who was an early leader in theorizing cultural conservation, asked me some years ago what role economics played in the Old Regular Baptist community that I had been working with in the 1990s (8). He had, himself, been researching music and cultural tourism and the creative economy in Cape Breton, where much of the industrial and fishing industry has departed, while the major economic activity of the island has become a tourist trade which depends, in significant part, on the traditional music and dance of the region. I did not have a good answer for him at the time, but I’ve thought about the question ever since. Economics also has been largely absent from the cultural sustainability discourse, except insofar as people were talking and writing about cultural heritage, tourist dollars and the creative economy. (Of course, the Old Regular Baptists would not care to become actors demonstrating their cultural heritage for tourists, except very occasionally, at festivals, conferences, and so forth.)
    Here, then, are some excerpts from what I said on the cultural sustainability panel, when I spoke about the perils of overlooking economic and environmental threats when considering work in cultural sustainability.
    “When thinking about culture, it would not be wise to overlook nature and the traditional economy as it relates to the community that culture workers partner with.. . . 
    “In other words, if the natural ecosystem that sustains traditional expressive cultures is damaged, drastically altered, or collapses, the effects on cultural sustainability are catastrophic. This is not an entirely new idea for folklorists, of course, but it is a principle that is liable to be forgotten when discussing cultural sustainability, for those discussions most naturally turn to cultural threats.
    “In those areas where traditional expressive culture is dependent on ecosystem maintenance or, in some cases, ecosystem restoration, the idea that culture is dependent on the natural environment is unavoidable. Examples include Native American basketmaking in northern New England, where a beetle, the emerald ash borer, threatens to destroy the ash trees from which baskets are made. Examples abound among traditional indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, the circumpolar regions, and Latin America whose lifeways are threatened or have been unalterably changed by destruction of the environment, usually done under the banner of modernization and economic growth. But in other areas the link between culture and nature is not always perceived as directly. I would like to suggest that this is a failure of imagination which folklorists and other humanists are in a position to understand and act upon, because we can understand these interconnections in terms of what humanistic geographer Yi-fu Tuan four decades ago called topophilia, or love of place (8).
    “. . . as folklorists are well aware, wholesale changes in local and regional economies, such as the drying up of fisheries or, in the case of central Appalachia, automation in the coal mines, threatens local cultures and causes out-migration. But threats to the natural environment rise to yet another level, because economies are themselves dependent on the natural ecosystem. The economic human does not exist apart from the natural world. An entire field, ecological economics, is devoted to that principle.
    “Thus in Appalachia an even greater threat to cultural sustainability, greater than cultural threats from newfangled music or trendy religion, and greater than from economic displacement, is the threat to the nature of Appalachia caused by the impact of modern mining methods on the mountain ecosystem: first strip mining, and now the horror of mountaintop removal. Topophilia is strong in Appalachia, as elsewhere; and it results in and from the intimate connection between culture and nature. But with wholesale alterations to the mountain ecosystem, and the resulting natural disasters—some obvious, like flooding, and others less obvious, such as microclimate change, unchecked predation in agriculture and elsewhere in the natural world because the ecosystem has been disturbed, and so forth—cultural sustainability is threatened as never before. Folklorists, in short, would do well to understand where and how cultural sustainability interacts with environmental sustainability, and build that into their cultural policies.”

Notes

(1) Jeff Todd Titon, “The Real Thing: Tourism, Authenticity, and Pilgrimage among Old Regular Baptists at the 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” The World of Music 41 (3), 1999, pp. 115-139. Also, Jeff Todd Titon, “Tuned Up with the Grace of God: Music and Experience among Old Regular Baptists,” in Music in American Religious Experience, ed. Philip Bohlman and Elizabeth Blumhofer, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.

(2) Ormond Loomis, ed., Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, 1983.

(3) Mary Hufford, One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, 1986. Also, Mary Hufford, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

(4). See Alan Jabbour, The American Folklife Center: A Twenty-Year Retrospective. Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, 1996.

(5) The University of Pennsylvania’s Administration decided about 2000 to put an end to its Folklore Department and distinguished Ph.D. program, and to put in its place a new Center for Folklife and Ethnography, hiring Hufford as its director. Tenured folklore professors were permitted to stay in the university.

(6) Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God (2 LP recordings, booklet), Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Also, Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1988. Also, Barry Dornfeld, Tom Rankin, and Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God (16mm film), 1989. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, Watertown, MA; also may be streamed and viewed in its entirety at www.folkstreams.net.

(7) My thoughts had turned in this direction partly because of my participation in the environmental movement of the 1970s, and partly because of my participation as a faculty member in a team-taught course in the American Studies program at Tufts University. The course was entitled “History and Ecology in America,” and it was in that context that I began linking my interests in ecology with my academic work.

(8) Burt Feintuch, ed., The Conservation of Culture. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1988. See, e.g., Jeff Todd Titon, Elwood, Cornett, and John Wallhausser, eds., Songs of the Old Regular Baptists of Southeastern Kentucky, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways CD, 1997. See also, Jeff Todd Titon, “Old Regular Baptists of Southeastern Kentucky: A Community of Sacred Song,” Smithsonian Institution, 1997, at http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/festival1997/baptists.htm.

(9) Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Photographs above: 1: "A sea of mown hay," East Penobscot Bay, Maine, summer 2012. Photo 2: "No Train Horn," Pittsfield, Maine, summer, 2009. 3: "Yellow warbler," East Penobscot Bay, Maine, summer 2010.All photos by Jeff Todd Titon, © under a Creative Commons license. You may freely share them, but you must not alter them and they must not be used for commercial purposes.

Anthropological Economics, Heritage, and Musical Sustainability

     The most influential thinker upon economic anthropology during early period (approximately 1940-1970) was Karl Polanyi, whose book The Great Transformation (1944) contrasted medieval European peasant economies with later capitalistic ones. For Polanyi, the “transformation” was not only a transformation of economic institutions but a transformation in the way of thinking about property, commerce, money, capital, and above all, social relations. Although for personal, political reasons he denied any connection between his thought and that of Karl Marx, the connections are obvious.

    Although Polanyi was not an anthropologist, his influence on economic anthropology was enormous and he remains a seminal thinker in the field. Like Herskovits, he promoted a cultural approach to economics, rejecting the classical and neoclassical construction of “economic man” and replacing it with an actor embedded in the social and cultural thought (Herskovits would have called it mythology) of his or her society. This approach to economics he called “substantivism,” and he contrasted it with the neoclassical approach, which he called “formalism,” maintaining all the while that formalism was not suitable for understanding economics in pre-literate societies. The implication was, of course, that it was unsuitable for understanding economics in developed Western societies as well; for economic decision-making and institutions are easily viewed as culturally embedded in the West as elsewhere.

    Polanyi's work was critiqued—by formalists—and gradually, beginning in the 1960s, economic anthropologists began relying on materialist rather than "mythological" explanations for economic transactions and institutions in pre-literate societies, to the point where in the 1970s and 1980s formal, quantitative, mathematical models prevailed. It appeared that principles of neoclassical economics could be applied universally with satisfactory results. “Formalism” in economic anthropology had re-established an “economic man” guided by principles of maximizing material well being at the center of many, if not all, non-literate societies as well as in developed economies.

    As the twentieth century came to a close, the powerful critique of cultural anthropology from within, based on post-structuralist, post-colonial Theory, attacked formalist approaches to economic anthropology, substituting instead the competing approach that has been dubbed “culturalism”: understanding a people’s economic thinking in their own terms or trying, as one would say now, to understand it in terms of local knowledge. In so doing, economic anthropology has, ironically, moved full circle back to Malinowski, who advanced the thesis, in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), that anthropology must be directed at grasping the native’s point of view in the native’s own terms. (Of course, for Malinowski, grasping the native’s way of thinking was only a starting point; ethnographic analysis and ethnological comparison followed on). 

    This post-structuralist strain within contemporary economic anthropology directs us at looking at local knowledge in order to better strategize sustainability for cultural as well as natural resources. In this reading a partnership, however uneasy, between local and comparative-based knowledge, so-called lay and expert knowledge, brings diversity to the enterprise and has the best opportunity for success.

    In our new century, a (predictable) reaction against post-structuralism has advanced formalism once more, to the point that formalist models now compete with culturalist ones, while a revival of interest is promoting Polanyi’s substantivist perspective. Formalists would direct culture workers towards “economic man” models stressing that sustainability of musical cultures depends on the degree to which they reward desires for material well-being. To that we may add desires for the social and cultural capital which participation in art worlds such as music provides.

    From a practical standpoint, commodification of music and heritage tourism do provide a certain degree of social and cultural capital, and of course there is a good deal of material culture surrounding the production and consumption of music, whether “gear” for producing music, or iPods and the like for consuming it. (Only a couple of decades ago one could speak of “cassette culture” and boom boxes.) More and more sophisticated, computer-based tools of music production are becoming available to lay individuals, while internet access offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to market their own music. Whereas twenty years ago musicians had to depend on the recording industry to get their music out beyond what they could do with personal appearances, today virtually all commercially-oriented musicians in developed economies make their own music available directly via the internet. Economic anthropologists of a formalist bent would urge culture workers toward a “realistic” view of music’s place in the economy, in effect advising those musical cultures interested in sustainability to join the marketing bandwagon. Giving music the cachet of heritage, in this way of thinking, adds value in marketing, and provides cultural capital for those who are willing to place a value on traditional music, thereby sustaining it.

    As I’ve written earlier in this research blog, marketing heritage is the prevailing strategy among contemporary culture workers who would effect policy in the direction of sustaining music. Make certain that traditional music takes up its rightful place in the global jukebox that the internet has become. Make it prominent among available choices for musicians and fans; encourage it however one can by adding value through heritage designations and attracting tourists. Those who remain uneasy with the commodification of traditional music are dismissed as idealists, romancers of the folk, and so forth. Are they? Further exploration of economic thinking in terms of musical commodities and their alternatives (usually conceived of as gifts) may offer some answers, putting us back again in Polanyi’s “great transformation” way of framing the questions concerning sustainability of music cultures.

Early Anthropological Economics

     Neoclassical economists take Euro-American economies as their principal subject of study, just as musicologists take Euro-American music as theirs. And just as it is short-sighted for musicologists to take Western music to stand for all music (see this blog, Feb. 6, 2009 entry), so in the context of my continuing exploration of ecology/economy, it would short-sighted to think Euro-American economies are fully representative of all economies. Looking at economic thought and behavior in non-Western (and early Western) societies should offer alternative possibilities and strategies for sustainability, both natural and cultural. This includes music, and it brings me to economic anthropology. 

     Economic anthropology as a sub-specialty within cultural anthropology developed in the US beginning around the time of World War II. Economic transactions in so-called primitive societies were an important topic for early twentieth-century anthropologists, especially because economic behavior of then-called primitive societies sometimes puzzled them. Malinowski's Trobriand Islanders and the Native Americans of the US Northwest Coast appeared to waste resources uneconomically. Western economists had assumed (and still do) that human beings always try to act in their economic best interests, to grow rich with the least amount of effort. “Economic man” came to be associated with rationality, self-interest, and the accumulation of material wealth; in John Stuart Mill’s words, “as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.” (See J.S. Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy, and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It," 1836.)

     As anthropologists studied their ways of life, information on indigenous economic thought and behavior accumulated. Some behaved as “economic man” did in the West; some did not. One of the first attempts at a comparative economics was Melville Herskovits’ Economic Anthropology: the Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (1940, 1952). He came to comparative economics with Cold War era questions concerning collectivity and economic determinism: whether “primitive” (by 1952 he was calling the societies “non-literate”) economies were based chiefly on individual or collective efforts; and the degree to which economic choices determined the rest of a people’s way of life. But he also considered sustainability in terms of tribal practices that seemed uneconomic or wasteful, such as the deliberate destruction of property, and not in the best interests of economic efficiency. As an anthropological relativist, he concluded that cultural reasons trumped economic ones: “economic considerations will not prevail over mythological ones if the latter are strong enough” (Herskovits, Economic Anthropology (New York: Norton, 1952), p. 492.)

     Neoclassical economists, not surprisingly, faulted Herskovits' understanding of economics. For them, the science of economics must apply to all cases; otherwise it could not be a science. There could not be one science of economics for developed economies and another for non-literate societies. Economist Frank Knight argued that Herskovits failed to comprehend that economics is a theoretical science based on principles which describe ideal, not actual, economic behavior. “Economic man,” according to Knight, is not meant to describe how people do behave; it aims at describing how, in the abstract, absent other considerations, they would behave. The behavior of economic man in an ideal world is analogous to the way an object would remain in motion in the physical world were it not for friction. Herskovits replied that, to an anthropologist, the facts on the ground, actual economic behavior, must be the starting point—that anthropological economics must be an inductive and practical science, deriving principles from actual behavior, and not the deductive science that Knight postulated. Actual economic behavior among non-literate peoples was not always rational in the Western sense; if one wanted to understand the economies of non-literate peoples, one needed to understand how “mythology” directed economic behavior. This was a different goal than Knight's.

    Separating the mythological (or ideological) considerations from the economic ones is no longer so simple, if it ever was. Veblen’s famous early twentieth-century work on “leisure class” economics showed that waste, or conspicuous consumption, did have economic advantage, in that a conspicuous consumer would be regarded as a wealthy, powerful person and be treated with due respect. In understanding the apparently inefficient behavior involved in the economics of art, it’s important to take into account social capital (roughly, a storehouse of trust and reliability among people who interact with one another) and cultural capital (roughly, a storehouse of taste, which includes appreciation of the fine arts, and which enables one to travel among the refined and wealthy.)  All of this “mythological” activity, this accumulation of social and cultural capital (knowledge, reputation, authority), is critical to any understanding of the ways in which musical cultures may be sustained, for behavior in relation to music cannot always be explained by recourse to the “economic human.”