Applied Ethnomusicology and the University: A Fraught Relation

    In the previous entry I said I’d return to the reasons why the false dichotomy between applied and academic ethnomusicology persists in the academic world itself. In the last paragraph there, I summarized four reasons, all of which I characterized as institutional. Not too long ago, Anthony Seeger wrote about “lost lineages” in ethnomusicology, pointing out that those academics who have constructed their histories of the discipline have neglected several people who might be considered applied ethnomusicologists.[1] These included Alan Lomax, and also Tony’s own grandfather, Charles Seeger, whose later theoretical contributions are part of those histories, but whose earlier work on behalf of music and social justice has been overlooked. Like me, Seeger thinks the reasons for this are primarily institutional and bound up with the professionalization of ethnomusicology as a discipline. He points out, also, that contemporary academics tend to pick and choose their own ancestors, with a view to finding a lineage that leads to their own way of thinking about their profession. He asks the question, Who is an ethnomusicologist? In what follows I would like to pick up some of the threads of his essay in order to account for the continuing confusions over applied ethnomusicology within the academy, noting again that those confusions are embedded in and result from ethnomusicology’s disciplinary culture and the academy’s orientation itself. As an aside, I note another reason why academics neglected applied ethnomusicology for so long: the suspicion, among the generation that founded the Society for Ethnomusicology in the 1950s, of those who would use the arts for political purposes, or as propaganda. Fresh in their minds were examples from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Bloc. But I will leave that point for a later publication.
    Let me return to Seeger’s question, Who is an ethnomusicologist? Ask most people outside the academy and they’d answer, A what? Some journalists do use the term popularly to refer to people who write about music, particularly world music. Academics get upset when media-types use the term so loosely. (See the update at the end of this entry.) Ask a professor of ethnomusicology at a college or university and the considered answer likely will be this: an ethnomusicologist is someone with graduate professional training in ethnomusicology; that is, someone who has absorbed its subject and methodologies; someone who understands its history, its scope, the questions that are properly asked of people making music, past and present; someone who knows the kinds of answers that are credible and those that are not; and someone who does scholarly research in ethnomusicology. The ethnomusicologist probably teaches at a college or university, or aspires to do so; and the career of an ethnomusicologist almost always includes publication as well as research. A US ethnomusicologist also belongs to the Society for Ethnomusicology, the discipline’s professional association. I myself qualify on the basis of all those criteria, but Alan Lomax, who practiced applied ethnomusicology, and who published scholarly research, did not. He never had graduate training in ethnomusicology and did not fully understand it as a professional discipline. His understanding remained original and idiosyncratic. In the 1940s, after he had been in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress for several years, with extensive experience in folk music collecting, in operating an archival repository, and in what we would now call public ethnomusicology, he did attempt to study with George Herzog, the leading ethnomusicologist in the US at that time.[2] Herzog, teaching then at Columbia University in New York, would not take him on as a student, though, and what Lomax learned of ethnomusicology he learned through acquaintance with the subject more or less on his own, as well as with some folklorists and ethnomusicologists who were willing at a later date to work with him as a colleague. (I was one of those.)[3]
    Lomax’s difficulties derived from an old division within fields like anthropology, folklore, and going back even further, natural history. Back in the day—way back in the day—people working in these fields were sorted out into traveling correspondents and those theorists whose work was more systematic and synthetic. Correspondents were collectors who sent specimens to the theorists who stayed put (for the most part) and worked on classification, speculating and building systems. Based on comparative analysis these theorists attempted to answer questions about origin, diffusion, development and the larger scheme of things. In the early days of comparative musicology (predecessor to ethnomusicology), when collecting, musical transcription, description and comparative analysis comprised the discipline, the distinction was made between what was called field work (the collecting work of traveling correspondents) and desk work or lab work (the analytical work of the theorists). This distinction was still current about 1950 when Curt Sachs described the field of comparative musicology thusly in his book, The Wellsprings of Music.[4] A few years later the Society for Ethnomusicology formed, adopting ethnomusicology as the new name for the discipline, reflecting a new American emphasis on the cultural study of music; but if you look in the Society’s early newsletters you’ll see “correspondence from the field” as well as analytical and interpretative essays. Of course, some of the notable theorists also did fieldwork; and based on anthropological models it wasn’t long before graduate training in ethnomusicology expanded in the US in earnest. Professional ethnomusicologists might rely on others' fieldwork but also spent much time doing their own. Travelers, correspondents, amateurs, and mere collectors were regarded now as unprofessional. Professional ethnomusicologists were those who had graduate training inside the academic world; the others were relegated to a second class status at best.
    Although this explains the academic vs. non-academic, professional vs. amateur divide, it doesn’t do justice to the reasons for it. In fact, amateur research and scholarship have long been valuable and valued, especially in fields such as ornithology and astronomy. But in the last century as anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology sought to establish and solidify their footing as relatively new disciplines within academic institutions where specialization, professionalism, and the appearance of scientific procedures lent prestige, it became important for them to distance themselves from the amateurs who operated on the outside. (This was, and remains, particularly difficult for folklorists, as the general public has its own idea of what folklore is and who folklorists are. Ethnomusicology had, at least, the advantage of unfamiliarity and more syllables.) Also, as Anthony Seeger pointed out in his “lost lineages” essay, academic institutions are engaged in, among other things, replicating themselves. Their “products” are not merely graduates, research and the dissemination of knowledge, but also professionally trained graduate students, who will in turn become professors and administrators inside the academy. And their professorial work is judged based on their teaching and the quality of their research, chiefly in print publication and by peer review. Applied projects accomplished by academics are much fewer in number, and difficult to endorse by the same scholarly criteria, especially when aimed at the general public.
    Although I knew this was so after fifteen years of teaching at Tufts, it was when I came to Brown to direct a PhD program in ethnomusicology that it became fully impressed on me. In one of my early meetings with the dean of Brown’s graduate school, I argued for the expansion of our ethnomusicology doctoral program, saying that our graduates would go on to careers not only in college teaching and research, but also as archivists and research scholars in museums and libraries, and as applied ethnomusicologists both inside and outside the university world. The dean countered by saying that the latter two goals were not unworthy, but that because Brown was a top-tier school she would offer graduate fellowships only to students who were likely to end up teaching at peer universities, for as I well knew, that was how we made our reputation for excellence, and not on the basis of how many librarians or community musical activists we turned out. That we did manage to “turn out” archivists and community activists and a fair number of applied ethnomusicologists (most of whom have remained in the academic world) in the 27 years that I led the program occurred despite the institutional pressures for self-replication, and because students were attracted to those ways of doing ethnomusicology after they arrived with their fellowships and decided that they wanted to do applied work, if not immediately, then eventually.
    A final reason for the persistence of the mistaken dichotomy of academic vs. applied ethnomusicology has to do with the isolation of universities from public life in the US. This separation has a history in the private institutions, particularly those in my section of the US (New England) with a reputation for elitism. Public institutions such as land-grant universities ought to have much more connection with the public sphere, but apparently they do not. Indeed, state legislatures have systematically cut their budgets, and relations between public universities and state governments are fraught, while federal funding of research also seems on a downward spiral. Universities' Internet front-pages are forever advertising the scientific research they have accomplished for the public good, but town-gown relations are perennially at a low ebb. If there were a strong cadre of public intellectuals in the US, or if academics took more of a role in public discourse, or if there were more intellectual public discourse—the level of discussion on the media talk shows discourages it, while the news media themselves do not permit it, instead offering up only one-way news stories and so-called expert opinion—perhaps things would be different. Although a few journals, such as the New York Review of Books, do carry on an intellectual public discourse at a high level, their audience is mostly confined to other academics. As a result that discourse, mainly critical, doesn’t influence public opinion.  The popular stereotype of the intellectual in the US is of an egghead unfit for anything but the classroom: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Academic institutions don’t as a rule supply our presidents or federal or state representatives, though international relations units within them do supply diplomats and occasional advisers. Our representatives move from government to the corporate/legal world and back far more than to and from academia. The usual preparation for government is law school and a legal or business career, not graduate school or university teaching. Such institutional academic isolation makes it all the more difficult for academics to conceive of applied work, and for non-academics even to imagine that professors might engage in it.
    Powerful currents within the academic establishment and outside of it are aligned to perpetuate the error of opposing applied to academic ethnomusicology. Yet there are some signs of change. SEM has various interest groups, or sections; the aforementioned Applied Ethnomusicology Section happens to have more members than any other, signaling the tremendous interest in this ethnomusicological subfield. Those within the Section who are employed in the university world are already doing, or will be doing, applied work; those who are graduate students would like to do it, but if they enter academia they may have to wait until tenure before they undertake it to any large extent. Working against that, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track positions at colleges and universities has been shrinking for at least a few decades, as academic institutions hire an increasing proportion of adjunct professors in lower-paying jobs with fewer benefits and without job security. Given the state of the academic job market at present, which tends to mirror the economy at large, some of those graduate students will choose, or be forced to choose, employment outside the academy, where they are more likely to begin by putting their ethnomusicological skills and knowledge to practical use. It’s clear to me that applied ethnomusicology is a growth field, but growth within the academy will depend on whether a sufficient number of professors turn to applied work, and whether they are willing to put applied ethnomusicology into the curriculum in a meaningful way.

     [1]. Anthony Seeger, "Lost Lineages and Neglected Peers: Ethnomusicologists Outside Academia." Ethnomusicology, Vol. 50, no. 2 (2006), pp. 214-235.
     [2]. Lomax's letters while he was employed at the Library of Congress say more about his encounter with Herzog. As I read them, Lomax didn't think he needed to take the course Herzog considered a prerequisite to the one Lomax did want to enroll in. Herzog wouldn't budge from the requirement, and Lomax came out of the meeting with the impression that Herzog was a "neurotic" little fellow. Indeed, Herzog had a reputation for being difficult. See Ronald Cohen, ed., Alan Lomax, Assistant-in-Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
     [3] My acquaintance with Lomax began in the early 1970s when I wrote to him requesting copies of his then unpublished Cantometrics training tapes. In exchange for letting me hear them, he asked me to test their effectiveness with students in my ethnomusicology classes at Tufts, which I did over a period of a few years.
     [4]. Curt Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).

Update, March 28, 2014: On this evening's NPR "The World" broadcast, PRI host Marco Werman introduced the show's daily world music track by saying he would play an "altiplano" selection and then apologized for "going all ethnomusicology on you." I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the popular/academic divide.

Applied vs. Academic Ethnomusicology: A Persistent Error

    Why do people continue to believe, mistakenly and with harmful consequences, that applied ethnomusicology stands in oppostion to academic ethnomusicology? I wrote about this in passing, in a 2011 blog entry. Here, as I prepare my part of the Introduction to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which I'm co-editing with Svanibor Pettan, I return to explain the reasons. The mistake arises out of a confusion of what applied ethnomusicology is, with where the person doing it is employed. Think of a grid with two fields and two categories. The fields are places of employment: either (1) inside colleges and universities, or (2) outside them. The categories: (1) ethnomusicological reseach and scholarship, and (2) ethnomusicological research and scholarship put to practical use--i.e., applied ethnomusicology. None of these is mutually exclusive. Ethnomusicologists do scholarly research whether employed in the academic world or not. Ethnomusicologists do applied work whether employed inside the academy or outside of it. In fact, considered as a worldwide phenomenon, more academics than non-academics are engaged in applied ethnomusicology.  
    One recent example of the persistence of this false dichotomy: At the 2013 conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), a meeting of “program heads” was convened for the first time, bringing together representative directors of university doctoral programs, faculty from colleges offering only undergraduate degrees, and heads of institutions doing applied ethnomusicology in the public interest, such as Smithsonian Folkways Records, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. For those who may not be aware of their work in this area, Smithsonian Folkways promotes the music of traditional musicians in minority groups and cultures, while the Rock and Roll museum has a large educational music outreach program. The convener of this event asked me (as a co-chair of the Applied Ethnomusicology Section of SEM) to suggest names of people who would represent “public sector ethnomusicology”—that is, ethnomusicology practiced by those employed by taxpayer dollars in government-funded institutions at the federal and state level. Not only did such a charge overlook the NGOs doing applied ethnomusicology, but it was based on the same mistaken bifurcation of academic vs. applied, while locating applied ethnomusicology as something done outside of the academic world, in the public sector. And at the program heads meeting, I noted that most of the "heads" unthinkingly adopted the same bifurcated view.
    As an aside, the term “public sector ethnomusicology” hearkens back to the 1980s when public folklore was called “public sector folklore.” This was a misnomer then, as it is now; and it arose out of the same mistaken dichotomy between academic and public in the folklore world, which dichotomy was valiantly opposed by the then-president of the American Folklore Society (AFS), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in her 1988 address to the AFS, later published in the Society’s Journal. Must ethnomusicology repeat folklore’s agonies 25 years later?
    Why, then, does this division persist in the minds of ethnomusicologists? I don't think it's only a matter of confusion, and that once the facts are on the table, the error will disappear. The reasons for it are deeper, and the explanation is cultural--in the cultures of our own institutions. Unless those cultures change, the division will persist. One way to pursue it is to ask why so many ethnomusicologists employed outside the academic world are content to equate applied with non-academic. In the early 2000s, on the initiative of its Applied Ethnomusicology Section, SEM regularly sponsored panels on alternative careers where practitioners employed outside academia spoke of how they did applied ethnomusicology in their work. Among these were public folklorists specializing in music. The Section also invited people from the corporate and government worlds to speak to SEM. They included, for example, field recordists who had produced a significant body of world music recordings, such as David Lewiston with the old Nonesuch Explorer series. I think it’s a stretch to call what he did applied ethnomusicology, but it surely was a different kind of career from university teaching and research, and it did involve making field recordings of the kinds of music that academic ethnomusicologists recorded and studied. The difference was that these were aimed at the general public. Ethnomusicologists employed outside academia welcomed these presentations not only because they provided models but also as opportunities to learn how to navigate outside the academy in the corporate and government worlds. They also were attractive to younger ethnomusicologists, including graduate students, concerned about whether they would ever become tenured academics. In addition, some ethnomusicologists employed outside the academy have mixed feelings about the academic world, viewing it as privileged and elitist, thinking it ought to be more involved in the world outside the ivory tower, and regarding it as mired in useless theorizing and arcane scholarship which has little or no practical use. Ethnomusicology graduate students stronger in music performance than in musical and cultural theory may become resentful when they are unable to compete with talented scholars. Applied ethnomusicology outside of the academic world then becomes a more attractive alternative. In short, ethnomusicologists outside the academic world persist in equating applied ethnomusicology with non-academic employment because they look at their cohort and find that to be true about themselves. They overlook the fact that academics also do applied ethnomusicology.
    Another way to ask why the false dichotomy between applied and academic persists is to shift the question to the academy and ask why many US professors do not place a high value on applied work. Of course some academics, myself included, do place a high value on it; but frankly within the academy we are a minority, particularly in the US. Besides, we do research and publish scholarship as well. Here, the problem seems to be institutional, tied to the nature of the research university and the ways academic disciplines operate in them. Research and scholarship are more prestigious and result in more rewards than applied work, or teaching for that matter. To get tenure and remain in the university world today, young professors, no matter how good in the classroom, need to earn a strong reputation by publishing their research. The ways academic institutions must reproduce themselves by training graduate students in their own image is another reason. The need for a relatively young field such as ethnomusicology to establish its credentials among the academic disciplines, and to institutionalize itself within the structure of colleges and universities, is a third reason. Finally, whereas outside the US professors often are involved in politics and the public sphere, inside the US there is no such tradition, despite the cries from the conservative right that professors lean left. Taken together, these cultural aspects of US academic institutions make applied ethnomusicology difficult to practice while employed in them, particularly prior to tenure. I will have more to say about them in the next blog entry.

Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

    Pete Seeger died three days ago. The Press is calling him a hero. But not that long ago the establishment portrayed him as a villain, a Communist who refused to testify to the US Congress in the HUAC hearings of the early 1950s. I was a little boy at the time, but I recall my parents being outraged at the way Joseph McCarthy and his know-nothings were smearing Americans who had as much right to be Communists as to be Republicans or Buddhists. Seeger's days as a Communist were long behind him by then, but he still believed in communal ideals. Alan Lomax saw the handwriting on the wall. He left the US for Europe, where he was able to continue collecting and promoting folksongs and folksingers. Seeger remained in the US, convicted and sentenced; and although cleared later on a technicality, he was blacklisted and prevented from appearing on major venues such as television. He was the original “alternative” musician, forced to make his way outside the established channels where only a few years later folksingers like The Kingston Trio, who had not taken the same political stand, became establishment darlings and were well paid for it.
     Pete was a populist, someone who believed in the inherent worth and dignity of the so-called common person. He gave his heart and soul, his hands and his songs to the workers, the unions, the oppressed and downtrodden. So humble a man he was, that only now is his influence in the various rights movements of the last century—labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights, the environment, the right to dissent--becoming known. Until now few knew, for instance, Pete was a crucial link in the chain that transformed the old, African-American gospel song, “I Will Overcome,” into the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
    I spent some time with Pete Seeger in 1981. We were working for the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, trying to decide how to apportion grant money in response to the dozens of proposals for projects that had come in. At our meetings where we discussed these proposals, Pete didn’t say very much. Much of the time he seemed bored, distracted. He would tilt his head back, showing even more of his already prominent Adam’s apple. I could understand how some people might have been put off over the years by what they thought was a patrician distancing, inherited from his father, the musicologist Charles Seeger. But he was paying close attention. He just didn’t think he had much to contribute, so he mostly kept silent. But there was one proposal that I recall he spoke for, passionately.
    It was a proposal made by an arts organization in one of the northern New England states, possibly Maine, or maybe it was New Hampshire. The organization wrote that they wanted to hire a professional photographer, with experience in taking pictures of vernacular folk art, to travel around the region documenting the yard art that people used in decorating the spaces outside their houses. Not the carefully manicured bushes, walks and foundation plantings of the suburban middle-class, but the oddball sculptures, the paintings and things hung on barns and garages, the junk carefully constructed and arranged in seasonal collages to depict the first Thanksgiving, or the piles of stones balanced one on top of the other—the sort of thing you'd find in the countryside. The best of these were to be collected into a traveling photo exhibit that would tour the public libraries in the region for a few years.
    We had read all of the proposals well before the discussion. This was one that I myself had particularly liked. I’m not sure why, but I’d been fascinated by yard art for years. Not the pink flamingos and stooping-over ladies showing their bloomers—that was store-bought yard decor—but the eccentric, individual expressions, the one-of-a-kind homemade signs like those announcing the end of the world, and the elaborate figures made out of found objects, the flowers made from old springs and gears and bottle caps, the window shades that people painted with allegories of their dreams, the old tractors and farm machinery reminding people of the way that land once had been treated, everything showing how so-called ordinary people weren’t ordinary at all in their impulses to create, to pattern their worlds aesthetically and turn the most common objects into things that deserved witness.
     I must have blurted out something like that when the discussion of this grant proposal finally began. At any rate, I spoke in favor of it. Everyone else, except Pete, looked at me as if I were crazy. One of them said, quoting the old saw, “Yes, but is it Art?” A second person said that he didn't want to see a photo exhibit of junk cars and old lobster traps. Another was worried that the Endowment would become a public laughingstock when some Congressman intent destroying it pointed out that we had given someone a bunch of money to go around the country photographing Christmas lights.
    At that point Pete, who had been unusually attentive, cleared his throat. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I like this idea. Yard art is something lots of folks do. And it’s something lots of folks understand because they do it. And something lots of folks like. Maybe not the highfalutin’ folk who sit up here in the national endowments, the ones who have paintings on their walls that ordinary folks wouldn’t know which side was up. This yard art, or whatever you call it, is of the people, by the people, for the people—you know that. And we should celebrate it, and support it, not just by how it looks, but for what it is.”
    That was the longest speech Pete made to our group. I hope I remembered his words right. I think I got the gist of it, anyway. When he was done I was ready to applaud. But the others were like trees standing by the water, and they would not be moved. Pete and I were the only ones in favor of the proposal. We were outvoted. Majority vote ruled, and the proposal was not recommended for funding.
    Pete Seeger is gone now, but as I was saying to a friend two days ago, and to the radio man who interviewed me about Pete yesterday, he isn’t gone. Like Joe Hill, whom he often sang about, Pete Seeger lives on.
   

The US postal service — a tragedy of the commons?

    Today the US postal service announced it is raising the price of mailing a first-class mail letter to 49 cents, and a postal card to 34 cents. I am old enough to remember when it cost one cent to mail a postal card. It even had a name: the penny postcard. Good grief. Meanwhile, the postal service is losing billions of dollars. It’s tried and failed to get government approval to close to smaller post offices, and to halt Saturday mail delivery. What is wrong with the US postal service? What is wrong with us? Is our fate a tragedy of the commons?

     I’m prompted to ask the commons question not because of the price increases and threatened cutbacks, but because of a meeting I attended at my small nearby post office last week. The postal service had declared that its window hours were going to be cut back from 8 to 4 hours per day. We were surveyed about (a) whether we’d prefer that it be shut down entirely (no one chose that option), (b) whether we’d prefer that it be shut down and a stamp-selling operation be opened in a nearby retail shop (no one chose that option either), or (c) whether we’d prefer four hours of window operation instead, and if so, mornings or afternoons? It was like being mugged and offered a choice between a broken arm or a broken leg. As someone at the meeting pointed out, we were not given the option to vote for it to remain open 8 hours a day.    
     I wouldn’t normally think of the mail as a resource commons. True, it appears to be what these days is called an “entitlement,” a utility that government provides citizens in exchange for taxes. It became partly privatized back in the 1980s. It’s still a government agency, though, and it answers to Congress and, one would hope, to the citizens. But what made me think of it as a commons was something that came up at a citizen meeting last week.    
     In an effort to save money, the head of the postal service proposed closing the smaller post offices, which ones to be determined not only by their geographical distribution, but also by the amount of gross sales they make—that is, how much money they take in from the letters and packages that are mailed from their post office, how much money they make in selling stamps and postal supplies, etc. Citizens protested to their representatives at the state and federal levels, and the postal service decided that instead what they would do would be to cut back hours at those post offices, not eliminate them entirely—or at least, not yet. 
    What this did, though, was to put all of the post offices, and their postmasters, in competition with each other to do the most business so that they wouldn’t have to cut back hours. Those of us who regularly use the postal service weren’t informed about these criteria or the competition. The commons analogy appears here. Given a limited resource, if the post office were managed as a commons, the citizens would have been informed and decided which basket(s) to put their eggs into, and the postmasters would have been part of the discussion and gone along with those choices. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the postmasters of each of the smaller offices competed with one another, probably because they wanted to secure their own working hours. In my neck of the woods, what this meant, among other things, was that the postmaster in charge of the largest post office regularly withheld supplies (including stamps) from the postmasters of the smaller offices, forcing the customers to go to the largest post office to obtain them. Of course, they were given some stamps and supplies, but not so many as would meet the larger and more costly purchases of the customers. Predictably, the largest post office has kept its hours, while the one nearest me has been cut back to four, and another one not too far away has been cut back to two hours.
    As we pointed out when we met with the regional postmaster at our local post office, this is a slippery slope. The postal service will continue to evaluate based on sales volume. Now, a post office with its window open only four hours a day is at a disadvantage, and one open for two is doubly disadvantaged. The handwriting is on the wall. Soon they’ll be cut back further, and then cut out.
    The US postal service is not yet enacting a tragedy of the commons. That tragedy, as Garret Hardin famously wrote a few decades ago, supposedly occurs when individuals acting out of selfish interests overuse and deplete a resource commons, making everyone poorer as a result. True, the behavior of the postmasters in competition with one another might qualify as this kind of tragedy. But Hardin neglected to consider the possibility that those who used the commons could get together and discuss the problem and then attempt to manage it, by agreeing to follow self-imposed guidelines and regulations. In fact, that's what the lobster fishery off the Maine coast does, although the management is done by the government as well as by the fishing communities (and they don’t always agree).
    In the case of the postal service, citizens were not offered an opportunity to help manage the resource. Postmasters—who knows if they discussed among themselves the possibility of cooperation as well as competition? The result was the predictable tragedy anyway. The situation is made even more complex since the post office loses most of its money not because its own operations cost so much, but because the US government requires the postal service to pre-fund retirement health care for its employees. This is something no other business organization, to my knowledge, is required to do; and in fact very few do. My employer, Brown University, not only does not pre-fund health care for its retirees, it doesn’t fund retirees health care at all. They’re on their own, just as almost every other US retiree is, now. The result is that citizens are increasingly inconvenienced because Congress cannot agree on lifting the pre-funding requirement (let alone much anything else).
    Re-thinking and then managing the postal service as a resource commons might just help solve the problem. The tragedy that’s being enacted now was scripted by the US government; the postal service and the postmasters are the bad actors, and the citizens are the captive audience. Ticket prices are too high, and local theaters are going to be closing soon anyway. It can all be avoided. And there are analogies with music and sustainability to be made here, as well, particularly when considering such things as Internet neutrality, copyright legislation and monopolies.

The commonwealth of culture

    “The commonwealth of culture” was the title of the Fellows forum that I put together for the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, which took place in Providence in October, 2012. By  cultural commonwealth I refer to expressive culture as commons, as a shared resource—that kind of wealth, not material wealth. On that forum, as well as in my keynote at the cultural sustainability conference in Vermont last August, I spoke about expressive culture—that is, folklore—within the contemporary commons discourse, particularly the digital commons, copyright, and cultural rights.[1] Commons is a familiar topic for readers of this blog, but it is not familiar, yet, to folklorists even though they are now so occupied with cultural sustainability that they made it the official theme of their 2012 annual conference. The abstract I wrote for the forum on the commonwealth of culture read in part:
    “Although today we associate commonwealth with a political entity such as a state or nation, the original meaning was public welfare or general good. It has something in common with res communes, which in Roman law referred to those things which then could not be “captured” or owned, such as the oceans or air mantle. But in modern nations commonwealth has moved closer to res publicae, the Roman law term for a state-regulated public domain, such as fisheries and air travel flyways. Commonwealth is therefore allied with the notion of a cultural commons, the domain of ideas and performance which folklorists like to think of as a group’s expressive culture. Much in the air today are arguments over enclosures such as copyright that limit the free flow of ideas in the digital, cultural, and/or creative commons. Folklorists, who have a long history of considering culture as a common group possession, have a great deal to contribute to this discussion. Commons thinking is one means of theorizing folklore and cultural sustainability, and so each of the participants in this forum will address those issues briefly and in turn before we invite general discussion from the audience.”
    Altogether six folklorists, all Fellows of the American Folklore Society, spoke on the forum: Mary Hufford, Burt Feintuch, Dorothy Noyes, Nick Spitzer, Lee Haring, and myself. I won’t rehearse their presentations here, or my own. But I would like to expand a little on the idea of folklore, expressive culture, intangible cultural heritage—the competing synonyms today for that part of culture which folklorists claim to know something about—both in the context of the above abstract, and also in the context of what I said in my keynote at the Vermont conference on cultural sustainability.
    Folklorists, I told the group in Vermont, have had a longstanding concern with expressive culture as commons. The idea that folklore is a common resource goes back to very early conceptions of folklore as the expression of a group, not an individual. The author of a folksong, folktale, proverb was thought to be anonymous. The originator of folkways used in making barns, farm implements, crafts and decorative objects was unknown. Of course, someone must once have originated it, but over time the folklore was modified and improved as it passed from one person to the next and down through the generations until it became accepted as a common resource, “traditional” and rightfully shared.
    What folklorists can contribute to the discussion of a cultural commons, then, is based in part on this longstanding concern, where the advantages for a community of shared resources are plain: acceptance by, and accessibility to, anyone and everyone. Aesthetic satisfaction through community validation is yet another advantage. In my presentation for the AFS conference, I emphasized the legal aspects of cultural commonwealth, suggesting that the history of folklore studies lends weight to the argument that no one must “own” culture if we are going to be good stewards of it. Ironically, folklorists are very much involved today in international efforts (e.g., those by WIPO) to propertize culture in order to protect it. (See my blog entry on WIPO.) But thinking of culture as intellectual property, and thinking of groups as possessing cultural rights in this property, while it may seem attractive in the short run, is a losing strategy in the long term, for by putting a price on expressive culture it degrades and transforms it into commodity, thereby furthering the mistaken project of economic rationality.
    In my keynote at the Vermont conference I took the same position, exemplifying it through sound and “orality,” another longstanding concern of folklore studies. My plea that we manage the soundscape as an acoustic commons for all creatures derives in part from this concern with oral communication. But in folklore studies, orality has always been constructed in opposition to literacy, with the result that this distinction has shifted attention away from something I think is more fundamental, and that is how orality (or sound) is experienced as a medium in itself, directly through vibration linking one being to another. This model of sound communication, I argued in that keynote, as well as in the keynote talk I gave in May to the Association of Brazilian Ethnomusicologists, is a cornerstone in the construction of an environmental rationality that stands in opposition to neoliberalism.[2]
    I felt a proprietary interest at the AFS conference in their theme, for to my knowledge I was the first to apply the sustainability concept to folklore, delivering a paper on that topic with special reference to music cultures, at their 2006 conference, then organizing a panel on that subject there for the 2007 annual conference. The idea gained traction, and late in 2008 I received an invitation from Rory Turner to take part in a conference of folklorists and other culture workers at Goucher College, chiefly to advise him and other faculty and administrators about starting an MA program in cultural sustainability, something that they had begun work on earlier that year. In 2009 Goucher did establish the first degree program in that subject, with Turner as founder. Since 2010, when Goucher’s first class enrolled, their MA program has taken the lead in folklore’s commitment to cultural sustainability. Turner has worked effectively to promote the concept. As a result of all these efforts and the discipline’s receptivity to sustainability, its enshrinement as the theme of the 2012 AFS conference may be the first indication that cultural sustainability has become the new paradigm for public folklore.
    Cultural sustainability has come so far, so fast because public folklorists think it an improvement over the previous paradigm, cultural conservation, which ruled from the 1980s until now. Of course, sustainability and conservation have much in common, but they also are significantly different both in concept and history. I've been writing about those similarities and differences in an essay on music, sustainability, and resilience for the forthcoming Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, co-edited with Slovenian ethnomusicologist Svanibor Pettan, for Oxford University Press. This volume, with more than 20 contributors, has been inching along for the past five years and probably will not be published until 2015 at the earliest. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea of folklore as an expressive cultural commons also gained traction within the academic side of folklore studies.[3] As the anonymous proverb-turned-cliché puts it, time will tell.

[1] My keynote talk for the Vermont conference on cultural sustainability in August, 2012 may be downloaded as an mp3 file at http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/abstracts.php

[2] My keynote talk for ABET in May, 2012 on "The Nature of Ecomusicology" was published in their journal, Music E Cultura, and may be downloaded at http://musicaecultura.abetmusica.org.br/index.php/revista/issue/current

[3] Anthony McCann's pioneering work in commons and enclosure has important implications for folklorists. See https://independent.academia.edu/AnthonyMcCann 

The Nature of Ecomusicology

My May, 2013 ABET keynote address, "The Nature of Ecomusicology," has just been published in the Association of Brazilian Ethnomusicologists' annual journal, Music E Cultura, Vol. 8 (2013). The abstract:

     The new field of ecomusicology combines ecocriticism with (ethno)musicology. It is the study of music, culture, sound and nature in a period of environmental crisis. To date, most ecomusicologists have accepted nature as real, external, and objectively knowable. However, critical theory, the so-called science wars, and a changed paradigm within ecology have posed serious challenges to scientific realism, balanced ecosystems, and to the economic rationality which has caused environmental degradation. Going forward, ecomusicologists can meet these challenges by relying on an ecological construction of nature based in a relational epistemology of diversity, interconnectedness, and co-presence. In that way, ecomusicology can work meaningfully towards sustaining music within the soundscape of life on planet Earth.

A free pdf (in English) of the talk in its entirety may be downloaded from the journal's website, here.

Thanks to Carlos Sandroni, Alice Lumi Satomi, José Alberto Salgado e Silva, and the others in ABET who invited and sponsored my visit and who are responsible for this publication. 

Sound and sustainability at AASHE

     In early October, Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn and I spoke in a plenary session to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, or AASHE (pronounced HEY-she with the H silent), at their annual conference, in Nashville, Tennessee. Aaron Allen, the Academic Sustainability Coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, received the initial invitation, then asked Denise Von Glahn and me to join him. Plenaries are special events at conferences, and so our photos and bios were prominently placed in the program.[1] Von Glahn is a professor of musicology at Florida State University; she is very active in ecomusicology and the author of two books on American composers, nature, and place—her latter book is specifically on women composers.[2] Allen is also a professor of musicology and one of the leaders and guiding spirits behind the ecomusicology movement. It was Allen who convened a group of musicologists to write essays for a colloquy about ecomusicology in JAMS (the Journal of the Musicological Society), and who was asked to write an entry on ecomusicology for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.[3] Although I’m relatively new to the (relatively new itself) ecomusicology movement, Allen was aware of my recent research in ecomusicology via Thoreau, and of my longstanding interests in sustainability—hence the invitation.
     Our topic was sustainability and sound, while the conference theme was resiliency and adaptation, a theme which readers of this blog know has occupied me here for years in connection with ecological models for musical and cultural sustainability. We held forth at the plenary for 90 minutes with a mix of prepared statements (from Aaron, explaining ecomusicology and its relation to sustainability; and from Denise, tracing her interests in nature, sound, music, and listening) and an interview (Aaron interviewed me about my research in sound and sustainability, touching on my plea for thinking about the earth’s soundscape as an acoustic commons for all living creatures [4], and my research on the sacralization of place by sound, particularly in Appalachia.[5].
    Most college and university campuses today make an effort to “be green,” to involve their staff, students, and faculty in energy conservation and recycling, and to lower their campus’s carbon footprint. AASHE brings together the leaders from those campuses, so they can talk to each other about common concerns and their efforts to make their institutions more sustainable. According to its website, AASHE’s mission “is to empower higher education to lead the sustainability transformation. We do this by providing resources, professional development, and a support network. . . “ [6] Not only professional campus sustainability administrators, then, but also students engaged in various sustainability projects on campus, and faculty involved with sustainability and environmental studies, were present at this very large conference of nearly two thousand people. It was about three times the size of the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology or of the American Folklore Society, the two I’ve attended faithfully each year since the early 1970s in connection with my own research and teaching. Like the invitation I received two years ago when I spoke to the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Academy [7], this was an invitation where people involved with sustainability, chiefly from the perspectives of science and engineering, wanted to hear from humanists about their own involvement with sustainability—to bring the humanities into the discussion.
    Allen, who has thought about bridging those gaps for some years now, is convinced, as I am, that humanists do have something to say to scientists and engineers about sustainability. The reverse is also true, of course. Ecomusicology, as he presented it at the conference, builds on ecocriticism, which is a three decades-old movement in literary history and criticism that takes as its primary subject the interactions of people, culture, and nature within literature, at a time of environmental crisis; and it, too, involves some scientists. That is, ecocriticism is concerned with literature and the environment, broadly conceived. Ecomusicology, then, is the critical study of music and the environment: of music, culture, and nature at a time of environmental crisis.
    Many ecomusicologists, myself included, prefer an ecomusicology that goes beyond music to include the study of all sound, and its relation to all creatures in the environment. In moving from music to the broader concept, sound, we think that ecomusicology shares common ground with other fields that focus on sound, fields such as acoustic ecology, sound studies, and soundscape ecology. I will save for another time a description of the differences of emphasis in these allied fields; suffice to say that Allen, Von Glahn and I spoke to the AASHE conference not only about music and sustainability, but about sound and sustainability.
    By their questions afterwards, the audience seemed as interested in music as in sound. They wondered about the future of musical genres they like, whether classical, folk, hip-hop, etc. Indeed, the majority of entries on this blog have been about music, not sound and environmental policy. But in the past two years, as a result of my work with Thoreau, sound has become more important, as I continue with a line of thought I introduced more than twenty years ago, theorizing a phenomenology of sound, a way of taking listening to sound and music rather than reading and interpreting a text, as the paradigm case of being in the world, and one which leads to a relational epistemology based on fieldwork and friendship.[8]
    In my part of the plenary, I tried to make the point that colleges and universities ought to manage their soundscapes for the health of all the inhabitants, and that this should be part of campus sustainability initiatives. Campuses after all are unusual in the amount of planning that goes into their spaces (pathways, landscaping, architecture, etc.) and their upkeep. Campuses are managed landscapes, and like gardens and country houses they are managed to be pleasant (usually pastoral) retreats from the jumble of appearances characterizing people’s workaday lives. Why not manage the soundscapes as well? I mentioned studies that have shown that soundscape interference (noise) is unhealthy, causing both physical and psychological damage.[9] I asked them if they thought they had any stress on their campuses; when they laughed in agreement, I suggested some of that stress might result from the soundscape. They already manage, or try to manage, certain soundscapes, such as dormitories. Roommates have to agree on the soundscape of their living quarters at any given time, for example; and there are “quiet hours” in some dorms, and so forth. But there is no coordinated campus effort to manage the soundscape for health and general well-being; for curbing the sounds of leaf-blowers, for example, or for attracting birds and other wildlife specifically for their contributions to the soundscape. In many campus buildings, the sounds of ventilator fans, heating apparatus, and air conditioners are omnipresent and noticeable, causing a kind of background stress that most people aren’t aware of until they go outside, and maybe not even then.
    Here, then, Allen and Von Glahn and I were concerned about sound, sustainability, and health and well-being. Von Glahn teaches her students to listen to all sounds, not just music. Attentive listening is a skill that can be learned. Once it is learned, people will pay more attention to the soundscape and its effects on life, human and non-human alike. Allen’s task was more general, to act as interlocutor and to explain the relationship of ecomusicology to sustainability, which he did by saying, among other things, that it introduces an aesthetic dimension that might otherwise be missing if the conversation is confined to scientists and engineers.
    In a sea of presentations on various efforts at sustainability and their outcomes, on campus and in the community at large, mostly involving engineering projects and group activities meant to conserve energy, our plenary must have provided some relief (including comic relief). About 500 people attended it, one of the larger audiences I’ve spoken with. It was a great pleasure to make common cause with Aaron Allen and Denise Von Glahn in this effort to link sound to sustainability for environmentalists, and we may get a chance to do it again. Plans are afoot for a visit to the University of Minnesota, where some interested parties have applied for a small grant to bring us there to coordinate with their own campus environmental sustainability efforts. I’d like to go, to try to give something back to them; for it was at the University of Minnesota that my own graduate education in the humanities took place many years ago.

Notes
[1] For the bios, see http://conference.aashe.org/2013/content/sustainability-and-sound
[2] Denise Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Indiana University Press, 2013) and The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Northeastern University Press, 2003).
[3] Aaron Allen, “Ecomusicology,” The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2013), also available at http://www.ecomusicology.info; and Aaron Allen, Daniel Grimley, Alexander Rehding, Denise Von Glahn, and Holly Watkins, “Colloquy: Ecomusicology,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 391–424.
[4] Jeff Todd Titon, “A Sound Commons for All Living Creatures,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, 2012, at http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2012_fall_winter/sounding_off.aspx
[5] See http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2011/04/sound-sacralizes-space.html
[6] See http://www.aashe.org/about/aashe-mission-vision-goals
[7] http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound
[8] Jeff Todd Titon, “Knowing Fieldwork,” in Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp,. 87-100 and Jeff Todd Titon, “Knowing People Making Music: Toward a New Epistemology for Ethnomusicology.” Etnomusikologian vuosikirja, vol. 6, 1994. Helsinki: Suomen etnomusikologinen seura. [Yearbook of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology]

A dairy farmer and a forester in Vermont

A field trip to what had until the previous year been a dairy farm, about ten miles from Sterling College, concluded the cultural sustainability symposium last August in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. I won't call attention to the farmer by naming him, but he was there to greet us and tell us something about unsustainability. The land had been in his family for seven generations, and for most of the past 75 years it had been a dairy farm. He had added a bit of acreage and expanded his herd to fifty during the last ten years, an investment on a scale meant to produce more income. The way he explained it, the farmers sold their milk to a buying co-op which had a monopoly in that part of the state (the Northeast Kingdom) and therefore set the wholesale price per gallon that they'd pay the farmers. For the past five years or so, his income from sales of milk did not meet the expenses of running the farm; and rather than continue to lose money, a year ago he decided to sell his herd. He kept his land, but he had taken a job working at the Trapp Family Singers resort hotel. His wife also had a job, and so they would be able to keep their land, he thought. He didn’t want it to pass out of the family.
     Knowing a little about dairy farming in Maine, and also about the market for organic and upscale agricultural products in Maine and Vermont, among the tourists as well as the wealthier transplants, I asked him whether he had considered selling raw milk and bypassing the co-op. He said he had thought about it, but even though the laws about selling raw milk are not as strict in Vermont as they are in Maine, he didn’t think he could make a living that way either. As he explained the economics-driven unsustainability of his dairy enterprise, we looked out onto his pasture, and the land seemed better for agriculture than what I’m used to in my part of Maine. I supposed that a young couple, just starting out on that land, might have decided to grow organic vegetables here; but this was a dairy farmer in his 50s and it had been a dairy farm for three generations. He added that many other dairy farmers in that area were coming to the same conclusion, and that his kind of dairy farming, which was relatively small scale, was no longer sustainable in a state that is known as much for milk as maple syrup.

     As he told his story and answered our questions, we could look out from the top of his hillside farm to the ridge to the north, where wind turbines were slowly turning, killing birds and bats as they generated electricity—yet apparently not for the local area, but rather to a Canadian power company that owned the turbines. I pondered the paradox of renewable, sustainable nearby energy going out of state in the service of Canadian corporate capitalism, while the same economic forces had made dairy farming unsustainable here, at least on this scale and at the present time. And, of course, unsustainability extended to the culture of dairy farming as well.
     After we heard the farmer’s story, we took a walk along his woods road, led by a local forester, who told us about his own life and how he grew up in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State, and how after a series of unsatisfying jobs he eventually decided that he needed to work in the woods, and so he became a forester of the sort who hires himself out as a consultant, sometimes to timber harvesters, sometimes to local landowners who want to be good stewards. He was more satisfied working with the landowners, he said. He spoke about his interest in Thoreau, who toward the end of his life had written about preserving the Walden woods. Thoreau wrote that every town ought to preserve some forest land and, indeed, many towns in New England eventually did so. When I began college teaching many years ago, we lived in Reading, Massachusetts, right next to the town forest, where I spent many hours walking and gathering—not nuts and berries, but thoughts and ideas.
     The forester also mentioned some Europeans who had been interested in forest preservation during the late 18th and early 19th century. Thoreau himself was most familiar with the forest preserves in England that were managed as parks rather than set aside as wilderness. Thoreau would have contrasted these with wilderness such as he encountered in the most isolated parts of the Maine woods, where he took three trips in the mid-1800s with a Native American guide, Joe Polis, and wrote about his journeys. Thoreau, whose writing is usually classified as pastoral, that middle landscape between wilderness and civilization, placed the highest value on wildness—“in wildness is preservation of the world,” he wrote in his essay on “Walking.” And so we walked on through the farmer’s woods trail, a pastoral scene, learning from the forester about the trees and good forest management for the small landholder—thinning the stands, for example, and cutting paths, providing different habitats for all the creatures that dwell thereabouts; for the health of the forest, as culture, is in diversity.

Sound, Language, Community and Place

    Nancy Menning and Mary Hufford both spoke to the cultural sustainability symposium in Craftsbury Common, Vermont last August about the relation between language, place, and community. Conversational narratives enact a collective commitment to the land and its inhabitants. Putting this into my frame of reference, I’d want to add that the medium of story is sound (even in so-called silent reading, a story is sounded in the mind’s ear). And sound draws beings into co-presence.
    Both Menning and Hufford are working on civic engagement projects exploring place-knowledge and land commitments. Menning is a professor of religious studies at Ithaca College in New York. Her project is located in the state’s Finger Lakes Region. She explained that she planned to engage the public with a project involving blogging, mapping, and storytelling that would explore the history of the landscape and weave personal narratives into the spirit of the place, especially as informed by the religious imagination. For Menning, the religious imagination here does not represent religious doctrine, but rather a spiritual inclination that becomes a humanities resource and includes multiple ways of conceiving of relationships among beings and the land: those of the Native Americans that inhabited the region, the revivalists in the burned-over district, Mormons, and contemporary spiritual practices of many kinds, some no doubt to be discovered in that place. At the conference, Menning referenced a book by Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, in which Tall found her bearings and made a home in the Finger Lakes Region through the interactions of her personal story with the larger, spiritual narratives of that place that were inscribed there over time. In that sense, for Menning, cultural sustainability is about imagining and building a home and feeling at home in a particular place and community. She showed intriguing pages from a website that she is building to house this project. To date I haven’t been able to find it on the Internet, and I am uncertain if it has gone live yet; but when I do find it, I will post a link here.
    Menning’s insight itself forms a part of a larger narrative about topophilia, or love of place, which becomes a cultural imaginary. The first time I encountered this concept was in 1974, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s book, Topophila. Tuan, a cultural geographer, drew on his experiences of Chinese and Euro-American love of place, and in that book he mapped the territory, so to speak, for spiritual attachments to place, spirit being broadly conceived in all its possible meanings. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is plain that topophilia figures prominently: for the “promised land,” for the land of Canaan, and indeed for God’s creation itself (not merely the land but all its creatures). Tuan shows how topophilia animates other spiritual traditions as well as secular ones. I have written about topophilia myself from time to time, particularly in terms of the way sound binds people to places and to one another. For me, the exemplary moment of topophilia occurs in an old-time string band jam session when a fiddle tune is played and either before or afterward a story is told about the tune (which often evokes a particular geographic location by name, and a reference to a story surrounding it) and the generations of fiddlers who have played it.
    Hufford’s presentation is part of her ongoing project in understanding, valuing, and utilizing local knowledge of the land and natural environment in partnering with local groups to formulate a land stewardship strategy for particular places. She did much of her research in eastern forest areas, where she has examined such local uses of the land as ginseng and mushroom hunting, fox hunting and hound training, and the health of forests in the southern Appalachian mountains. This local knowledge is manifestly not the same as the “expert” knowledge of the forest conservationists, often working for the corporations or the government, who guide land and resource policy, usually taking into account the interests of those persons and corporations engaged in extracting coal, timber, and other resources from the land and region. Often the local and expert knowledge is at odds; but inevitably the government exercises its power to regulate land use through law, sometimes at the expense of traditional, local interactions with the land and environment. It is a fraught issue, and it has a history going back, in the United States, to the days in the 19th century when the government began enacting laws restricting hunting in the name of conservation. One result was that locals who hunted game chiefly to feed their families became poachers and outlaws when hunting out of season. James Fenimore Cooper was one of the first Americans to write about this (in his Leatherstocking Tales).
    Hufford’s presentation began with Aldo Leopold’s statement (introducing his A Sand County Almanac) that we habitually view land as a commodity, whereas we should view it instead as a community. She went on to ask how do people come to know land as a community? This is a question similar to the one I have been asking in my work with Thoreau's writings, namely, how does one come to respect the natural world and enter into a relationship with it of stewardship instead of ownership? Hufford’s talk tacked between the high theory of Bakhtin, Dewey, and Merleau-Ponty, and the vernacular conversations among rural inhabitants about the land they’re intimately acquainted with, as a way of explicating a dialogical relationship between humans and the land. Hufford finds in common conversational metaphors, such as “robbing the land,” the idea that the land itself has rights of possession in the sense that its inhabitants belong to the land.
    She went on to link this idea to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic communication (something that has been important for me in my ethnographic work ever since Dennis Tedlock introduced it to me in the late 1970s), and to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “common ground” (no pun intended) in dialogue, a relationship of reciprocity. This is similar to the concept of co-presence, Erving Goffman’s formulation from the 1950s, which I’ve been updating and working with in my recent public lectures and publications—particularly in the context of sound and its ability to enact co-presence. I also see a link to my earlier work in the way sound sacralizes space, especially uncommon sound (song, chant, and shifts from speech to one or the other). Hufford points out that this “communication” also exists in the land itself, in the soil, as organisms cooperate with one another; and she suggests (along with Merleau-Ponty) that this cooperation, both in the soil and in human conversation, creates a “third party” and brings “self and other into an identity-completing relationship.”
    Hufford describes the discourse of conservation experts in policy planning as top-down and monologic, whereas the discourse of local knowledge expressed in conversation among inhabitants of the land is dialogical, invoking community through place-names and ancestors. One person told her, “I don’t know where Williams come from, but I know where their grandma come from, cause she was my grandpa’s sister. Her name was Pliney. I’ve got a hollow up there that’s named for her: Pline’s Hollow.”
    As I wrote above, this kind of thing happens when a fiddler begins or ends a performance of a fiddle tune at a jam by saying something like, “That came from Shade Slone, who brought it back from Pike County," then names the tune: "The Brushy Fork of John’s Creek.” Then  another musician adds that this place marked the last battle of the Civil War in Kentucky, and references the oral tradition that the tune commemorated the battle and the war dead. Even though the musicians already know this, it must be enacted through conversation to animate for that moment of performance the links between the tune, its name, persons, places, events, and names on the land. Without those dialogical associations, the tune is just a series of sounds; with them, the tune invokes family (some in the region are named Slone and descend from Shade [nickname for Shadrack] Slone), place, and binds all in a community of musicians to land and family in that space. Hufford links these dialogues phenomenologically to organs of perception, sensation and embodiment, the living bodies of humans and the natural world. The monological pronouncements of the corporate state deny human being to those who know the land and the natural world in that region through hands-on experience. As one remarked, “A. T. Massey [the coal mining corporation] came in here and said, ‘You don’t exist.’” But Hufford insists that not only do those who inhabit the land exist, the land solicits the inhabitants’ attention and arouses their conversations about it, the kind of participatory dialogue that characterizes grass-roots democracy.
    It’s not entirely surprising how much Hufford’s work has in common with my own, although my emphasis is in music and sound as a bridge to community and the natural world, while her bridges involve dialogue and material culture with community and place. I’ve valued and learned from her work for more than two decades. Back in the late 1980s when she was working at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, and before I knew about her research, she took me aside to ask me about mine into the Appalachian forest ecology and economy that I’d been doing in connection with the Powerhouse for God project, which I had been presenting at conferences since the late 1970s and which in 1988 I finally published as chapter 2 of the Powerhouse book. I had titled that chapter “Land and Life,” with apologies to the cultural geographer Carl Sauer, who with Yi-Fu Tuan had strongly influenced my approach to the connections between the two; another debt, my idea that “husbandry” unified the realms of farming, family, and worldview, was the partly the result of my reading Wendell Berry’s fiction and essays about his home place in Henry County, Kentucky. Probably Hufford also was aware of the research of Chuck and Nan Perdue into the same forest area in Appalachia’s northern Blue Ridge, in connection with the population removals that took place in the 1920s to form the Shenandoah National Park.
    In the early 1990s, Hufford asked me to write an entry on this work in cultural geography and human ecology in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, for a section that she was editing; and she also asked me whether the people I’d gotten to know in Appalachia had observed a decline in forest health. In truth, by the mid-1970s when I began that research, most of the Powerhouse people were no longer living off the land, and the minority who were, were farmers of a more modern sort, no longer living in the mountains. A few still hunted but, as I recall, their discourse about the good old days when they were growing up on mountain farms expressed general nostalgia, not stories of specific incidents showing forest decline. That decline had occurred fairly abruptly from about 1890-1910, when the combination of commercial timber cutting and the chestnut blight had made it no longer possible for the mountain farm economy to continue utilizing forest resources, particularly summer pasture and chestnuts for their pigs. The final blow was the Shenandoah Park removals, in which much of that population of mountain farmers were thrown off their land, by the federal government, against their will, to make room for the Park. They were resettled in modern tract homes, where they languished. My research into land and life in that chapter was chiefly historical. Hufford was interested in what she, along with forest activist John Flynn, was calling “the falling forest”: an increase in the number of trees falling to the forest floor as a result of ecosystem changes and declining forest health. I did not have much information for her.
    But if the Powerhouse people were no longer living close to the land, many in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky were. For the Old Regular Baptists of that region, whom I began getting to know in 1990 when I started teaching at Berea College, a couple of hours by car to the west, the mountains remained a resource for hunting and gathering, as well as a kind of spiritual resource. They expressed a strong topophilia for the area, saying that the land (and their singing) had a “drawing power” that caused many of them to stay, despite worsening economic conditions; and to return later in life, if they had migrated out in order to earn more money for their families. They spoke often about the ways the sounds of their singing echoed in the coal mines, and up and down the hills and hollows of the mountains. I tape recorded many of these statements about sound and the land (and the built environment), and some were published on the two CDs that I produced of Old Regular Baptist singing, for Smithsonian Folkways, in 1997 and 2003. It is unusual to include such spoken statements in the grooves of music albums; but these were a kind of testimony to sound and its meaning, and were so important to them (and so strikingly articulate) that I was compelled to add them to the music. Here, for instance, is a statement about affecting sound and the natural world, from Charles Shepherd: “One time when I was about six years old we had a meeting at a cemetery and, hearing these songs ever since I’ve been born, we was setting up in a cemetery, and I heard my daddy singing “Amazing Grace.” I never heard a more beautiful sound in my life. Seemed like the trees was just carrying that sound up and down the valleys, and it did something to my heart.”    

Cemetery, s.e. KY. Photo by Jeff Titon.
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     I did speak to Hufford in the early 1990s about the Lilley Cornett Woods, which I'd learned about while visiting with the Old Regulars. This is the only old-growth, original growth forest in the state of Kentucky; and currently it is managed for sustainability by the University of Kentucky. It was set aside in the 1920s by Lilley Cornett, an eccentric and cantankerous mountain man who lived in the same part of southeastern Kentucky as the Old Regulars that I visited. Cornett stubbornly refused to sell the timber or mining rights to his land, as everyone else was doing, to the corporations who were coming in and paying good money for the privilege of damaging the mountain ecosystem. I’ve mentioned Mr. Cornett and his Woods in this blog before, saying that they deserve a separate entry; and they do. I will get to it in due course. It is not a stretch to link the Lilley Cornett Woods to our cultural sustainability symposium’s field trip, to the farm and woods of a former dairyman who had decided only the year before that dairy farming as he was practicing it was unsustainable. As the last scheduled event of the symposium, we heard him talk about this and explain his circumstances and his reasoning as we walked over what once had been his farm's cow pasture. Soon we were in the farm's woods. Now the conversation was led by a local forester who was helping the farmer manage his land and whose passion turned out to be for Thoreau. More about this soon.

Music, sustainability, and public radio

    Although we had little down-time at the cultural sustainability conference, early in the mornings before breakfast I listened to Vermont Public Radio, broadcasting NPR’s ubiquitous news program, Morning Edition. One of the flashpoints for music’s sustainability is its future on US public radio--what used to be called noncommercial radio, and now should be called brief commercial radio based on those 3-sentence announcements naming corporate underwriters, what they do, and how to contact them. Whereas music programming, particularly classical music, once dominated public radio, in the new millennium it’s gradually lost its hold, to the point that today most public radio stations broadcast news and talk shows over the air, having moved classical music to the Internet or to broadcast channels that conventional radios cannot receive. I've blogged here before about classical music's future, on radio and elsewhere. Meanwhile, music of many kinds still can be heard on several low-power, local community radio stations.
    In New England, I date the public radio all-talk trend from the 1990s, the decade when Boston-area WBUR-FM gradually removed music from prime time to its peripheral schedule, late at night and on weekends. In 1997, despite much protest, WBUR dropped music programming entirely, in favor of news and talk shows. WBUR’s award-winning and highly popular late night jazz show, hosted by Tony Cennamo, was among the programs eliminated. Boston’s WGBH-FM still provided much music programming, including the paradigmatic Morning Pro Musica, hosted by Robert J. Lurtsema, aired also by many other stations in New England, including Maine Public Radio. But in the new millennium, after the charismatic Lurtsema died in 2000, WGBH-FM also pushed music gradually to the side, and today it too is all-talk, all the time. What of Vermont?
    I didn’t hear enough public radio in Vermont to get an impression, but after returning to Maine I looked up its programming schedule. Not to my surprise, I found that Vermont had followed the trend, and was programming news and information almost exclusively. What did surprise me was that in some of the on-line articles I read about how Vermont made that transition, the man behind the trend was identified as Vermont Public Radio’s Mark Vogelsang. In 2012, Vogelsang left Vermont to become head of Maine Public Radio. Would Maine now follow Vermont? Most likely.
    Since Vogelsang took over, peripheral blocks once reserved for music have been replaced by talk shows. The 11 p.m. hour, once a haven for soothing music (“Echoes,” with John DiLiberto), is now punctuated by the noisy drumming that introduces segments of On Point, produced, incidentally, by WBUR, but on air there in the mornings when the drum-banging is a little less annoying. Maine weekend early mornings, once given over to classical music, now feature information shows: On Being, Living on Earth, Only a Game, and Bob Edwards Weekend. These shows do have their merits, but to music listeners, airing them on early weekend mornings is especially galling, as the classical music host, Jennifer Mitchell, used to start with Robert J. Lurtsema’s signature show-opener, a dawn-chorus of bird sounds, appropriate at that early hour—although not as rewarding as the real thing one could hear through an open window.
    Another ominous sign was the departure, last month, of Maine Public Radio’s morning classical music host, Suzanne Nance, for a position at a commercial, all-classical music station in Chicago. Morning classical music remains from 9 to noon on Maine Public Radio, but now with rotating local hosts while the station says it’s undertaking a national search for a replacement. Maine is the New England morning classical music holdout. If and when it goes, it will join Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, none of whose public radio networks broadcast classical music in the morning (or, for the most part, anytime else day or night).
    A word about Suzanne Nance is in order. For several years she not only hosted the morning program but also was a strong, public voice for classical music live performance in Maine. Herself a singer, she could be heard in concerts in Portland and elsewhere in the state; importantly, she hosted on her program visiting composers, conductors, soloists and chamber groups for a half hour, on average one day a week; and besides talking about their upcoming concerts in the state they sometimes played live music on her show. Not everyone liked her enthusiastic, up-front personality; and some thought she didn’t program enough music from before 1800; but no one doubted that her presence boosted classical music in Maine. Thus, her departure as radio host is an even greater loss for classical music in the state.
    By chance, a little after returning to Maine from Vermont, I met someone who until earlier this year had worked for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. I asked about Suzanne Nance’s departure. “Well,” the answer came, “I shouldn’t talk out of school. But since I am out of school, I will.” Having left the job at MPBN, the person (who will remain nameless here) told me that Suzanne “read the tea leaves and decided that she ought to move on. She’d been looking for another position, and when this came along, she decided to go.” I asked if this was a career move up for her. “More of a lateral move,” was the reply. “What did she see in the tea leaves?” I asked. “The new head, Vogelsang, wants to make it all news and talk radio. That’s what he did in Vermont. You can see he’s gradually doing it already.” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve noticed.”
    What prompts this blog entry is that Vogelsang himself spoke for nearly an hour today, on MPBN, in response to listeners’ questions. He confirmed that his plan for Maine Public Radio was to move towards two separate stations, one for news and information, and the other for classical music. Of course, this means no jazz, no folk music, no popular music; it means the end on Maine radio for shows like A Prairie Home Companion, for years arguably the largest fund-raiser for public radio; it means the end for other staples that the Maine audience likes, such as alternative music and singer-songwriters; and it’s already the end for shows like American Routes, hosted by folklorist Nick Spitzer out of New Orleans, which went off the MPBN air last spring.
    These programming changes are cause for a measured lament, and the lament goes beyond music programming on public radio: it is a lament for a generation and a way of life that included listening to music on radio, particularly classical music; it is a recognition of the passing of a segment of a generation for whom classical music on radio represented more than merely music, but also a set of values, values increasingly out of step in a contemporary, diverse global society. Vogelsang dropped the statistic that most people under 30 don’t even own radios, and don’t listen to them except perhaps in their automobiles; and we are hearing that this young generation doesn’t own nearly as many cars as past generations did. The automobile, once the symbol of freedom, is being replaced by the smartphone, the symbol of connectedness. Culture is rapidly changing; those who wish to address questions of musical sustainability will need to look elsewhere besides public radio.
    Radio executives like Vogelsang are consumed with other survival issues, not least the survival of public radio itself, as it moves in the digital direction and its Internet presence becomes more important than over-the-air. All programs need to be available on the Internet, he said; that will become our primary means of delivery. When news breaks, should it go immediately on the public radio website, or do we wait until it’s broadcast and only then put it on the website? This is the kind of nuts and bolts question that radio and television executives think about, not what they will do with their music programming. They already know the answer to that one. And when pressed on it, as he was by at least one listener this afternoon, Vogelsang said it wasn't going away: classical music would be available 24/7 on another MPBN station, as it is on the Internet right now. (MPBN streams it from its website.) And after all, music of all kinds is available elsewhere on the Internet. Indeed, with Internet services like Pandora and Spotify and now Apple’s iRadio along with iTunes, the under-30 generation is able to hear the artists and individual music tracks they want there. Most won't realize what they are missing: voices like Suzanne Nance’s, which helped sustain the live classical music performance community in the state of Maine, for example; or the history and biography and other context that once came in the liner or brochure notes that accompanied a record album or CD, now replaced by "album art."
    Measured lament behind us, the transition to news and talk on Maine Public Radio offers the chance for MPBN to become a conduit for civic dialogue in the state. Vogelsang understands this, and has initiated programs like Maine Calling, now expanded in prime time, the noon hour, to four days a week. People are invited to call in from all areas of the state to discuss issues of local, regional, and national importance. This was the show he appeared on today, and I was one of the callers. Rather than prolong the lament, I decided to focus on the possibility of a future in which MPBN became more of what local community radio in this area already is, on WERU-FM, a “voice of many voices.” I suggested they make an effort to get out of their regional news focus on Portland, Augusta, and Bangor (the three major Maine cities) and get their news and information teams out across the state to find out what is going on in the Maine forests, the blueberry lands, the fisheries, and rural life all over Maine. I suggested that there be more working-class voices heard on air (and Internet), adding that it could increase their contributor base enormously. (Vogelsang asked me, “How do you do that?” One answer: get those news teams out into the whole state, talk to the people, and record their voices.)
    The future of classical music on public radio—let alone the future of music on radio—let alone the future of radio itself—is debated within a larger context that involves globalization, unprecedented connectedness and decreasing privacy, changes in media and transformations in daily life and experience. In this discussion, sustainability cannot simply mean preservation of an older set of experiences--that is impossible--but, rather, reassessment, continuity, and possibilities previously unrealizeable.
   
       

Syrup and sustainability

    Maple syrup and milk, closely associated with Vermont in the public imaginary, add value to the region, just as Maine benefits more than economically from lobsters and blueberries. As Michael Lange, presenting at the cultural sustainability symposium in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, pointed out, sugaring from the sap of the sugar maple trees is paradigmatically associated with the state, both as product and symbol. As a natural resource-based product, maple syrup is an important part of the Vermont economy; and Vermont accounts for nearly 40% of the US maple syrup production. But its economic value goes well beyond the product itself, for sugaring conjures up images of old-fashioned, wholesome rural lifestyles that attract tourists to the state, images that over the years also have attracted in-migrants. In this way, the tourist dollar value of a heritage symbol is enmeshed in cultural as well as natural resource sustainability.
    Although most sugaring operations sell to the wholesale trade, some also offer a portion of their product to the general public in small shops attached to the sugarhouses. In the state of Maine, which accounts for 20% of the total amount of US maple syrup production, it’s not uncommon to see homemade signs along the road during late winter sugaring season, advertising a local sugar-maker’s product, which is sold out of the home. But Maine does not have the large sugar-making operations that not only serve the wholesale trade but market under their own name and at the same time create tourist stops where visitors to Vermont may see demonstrations of sugar making and taste the product, year round. A few of these are quite large, rivaling living history museums in size and attractiveness; they also are competitive, and each has its partisans. In fact, when Lange named a few of them, Vermonters in the room immediately spoke up in favor of this one or that one; and if Lange hadn’t stepped back in, a lively debate on whose syrup was best would have interrupted the presentation.
    Lange placed these large sugar making tourist attractions squarely within the cultural heritage industry, and with it the ongoing debate among culture workers over the hells and benefits of heritage tourism. Although he didn’t elaborate on it, sugaring (like lobstering) is dependent on an ongoing natural resource, which brings in sustainability issues, international trade and competition (for maple syrup, the competition is with Canada, which subsidizes its sugar makers), state and federal regulation, and so forth, often putting sugar makers at odds with regulators over best practices. The ongoing health of the sugar maples in the forests, just like the health of lobsters in the oceans, will depend in part on the effects of climate change. We don’t expect the Vermont forests to look like those south of the Mason-Dixon line anytime soon; rather, the warming climate brings changes to the ecosystem in the form of pests and predators that the sugar maples have not previously had to combat.
    Vermont prides itself on the quality of its syrup and, indeed, offers it in four grades: fancy, grade A medium amber, dark amber, and grade B. No other state makes such fine distinctions. But ironically, this grading system works against Vermont syrup outside of the state. Grade B is considered inferior because of the labeling, whereas outside the state much ungraded Canadian syrup that would be labeled grade B in Vermont doesn’t carry the same negative connotation. A further irony is that the fancy syrup, being the purest and most delicate-flavored, has the least amount of maple taste; those wanting a stronger taste of maple use the darker syrups. The state legislature this year debated whether to endorse grade inflation: all Vermont syrup would henceforth be labelled grade A, and the distinctions would be made on the basis of color and the degree of maple taste. A Boston Globe article concluded by quoting an eighth-generation sugar maker, Doug Bragg: “Most of our customers are asking, why do we have to do this [change in the grading system]? There’s a logic to it, no question about it. It’s still annoying, though.” (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/19/lawmakers-consider-streamlining-maple-syrup-labeling/au9YAbugZwBs0npLlUG4hL/story.html)
    As heritage tourism is a frequently-discussed topic on this blog, there’s no need to review it fully here. But maple sugar tourism differs from that revolving around much traditional music in the US in that sugaring is a viable industry and would remain one without heritage tourism, whereas heritage tourism often gives traditional music a second life, one that would not be viable without it. Like lobsters and blueberries, maple sugar tourism offers not just an education but a food reward at the end of the lecture. Forestry tourism doesn’t do that, which may be why in Maine, for example, it’s not as attractive as lobsters and blueberries. Nor has Maine capitalized on sugaring tourism anywhere to the extent that Vermont has done.
    Lange concluded his presentation by discussing a different kind of educational involvement with sugar making, a program at an elementary school in Fairfield, Vermont, where youngsters participate hands-on in sugar-making, presumably giving them a deeper involvement than the tourists get, and also a deeper understanding of what this symbolic state industry involves at the ground level. Such innovative programs could also involve field trips and nature-study, a curriculum that has gradually been disappearing from the schools in favor of the abstractions of modern science.
    In our own field trip, to a former dairy farm, we grappled with economic and cultural sustainability issues surrounding the other picture-book Vermont industry: dairy farming. I will have more to say about that shortly.

Seed saving and cultural sustainability

    An educational and cultural project involving home garden seed saving was the centerpiece of Rosann Kent’s presentation at the cultural sustainability symposium last month at Sterling College. Hers was one of the talks that engaged with my own work, for I’ve been an organic gardener and seed saver myself now for some thirty-plus years. After all, a university’s academic year calendar permits faculty time in the summer to do research, write, and in my case, also to tend an organic garden and orchard. Hand-work is complementary to head-work, and the easy pace of gardening frees me for creative daydreaming. If I had to make a living as a farmer, I’m sure that my mind would be full of worry about the year’s crops, the weather, and market prices; but growing for home use (with surplus for friends) involves a different kind of accounting.
    Rosann Kent’s school, re-named the University of North Georgia earlier this year, resulted from the merger of the North Georgia College & University, and Gainesville State College. Its website proclaims it “The Military College of Georgia,” and Kent was quick to state that one would not normally associate seed saving with a military college. Nonetheless, the university’s Georgia Appalachian Studies Center, where Kent serves as a faculty member and the director, recently completed a project entitled “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories,” which not only gained a good deal of local attention in this fastest-growing region of the state, but also was featured in a forum on local food systems and sustainable agriculture last year, sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Commission.
    Seed saving brings together culture and agriculture, a unity famously inscribed into the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s by Wendell Berry, whose words were prophetic then and whose voice remains essential today. Kent’s project was designed not just to inventory varieties of home garden seeds that had for years been saved and shared by local families, but also to collect and then present the stories that went along with the seeds. Stories connected with seeds may seem a little strange to anyone who either hasn’t either grown up in a family that keeps heirloom seeds, or hasn’t encountered the practice of storytelling surrounding the intersection of generations on the land through such things as names of places. Even the name of an old fiddle tune, when played in a circle of friends, if it names a place or person (or even if it doesn’t), often will draw forth a short story, or a reference to a known story, of the place or person named, or the fiddler from whom the player learned it, or an occasion on which it was played and something unusual occurred.
    In 1990 when I taught for the spring semester as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, in Kentucky, I spent most weekends in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky; and one of the things I did was ask the people I got to know, the ones who had home gardens, whether they saved seed. Among other things, as a seed saver myself, I was interested in trying new-to-me varieties of heirloom non-hybrid seeds, and swapping some I’d saved with theirs.

My garden bean field, 2013. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon

This is one of the things seed-savers do; we swap seeds. Every seed variety has a name; they are not just “bean seeds.” Otherwise we couldn’t keep track of their differences very well. When I asked them what they called these bean seeds, or those tomato seeds, the answer often was something like, “Oh, those are Joe beans.” “Joe beans?” I would reply. “No, I mean what variety of beans are they?” “Well,” the answer would come, “these are greasy beans, if that’s what you’re getting at. Lots of folks around here grow greasy beans. These are ones that go back to old Joe Caudill, whose home place used to be up here (points up higher on the creek bed) where he grew them, must have been one hundred years ago.” And then the lady would go on to tell a little story that revealed old Joe’s character, or maybe something about one of his descendants, or she might say she went to school with so-and-so who was old Joe’s nephew’s cousin’s niece, or something like that. In this way, the seeds, the land, and the families all were put into meaningful relation. Their “use-value,” so to speak, was cultural as well as agricultural. Saving seeds also meant saving culture.
    Kent’s presentation added another cultural layer. This part of north Georgia was being inundated by people “from away,” as we would say in Maine, contrasting them with “natives.” In Kent’s country, the same distinction was between “came heres” and “been heres.” As in Maine, each group had its own notions of what it wanted. The “came heres” wanted Starbucks and services they were used to in the big cities; they thought that the “been heres” were culturally deprived and they wanted to “help.” The “been heres,” of course, had a culture of their own; and seed saving was an unimaginable (to the came heres) part of it. Kent had her students go out into the community and talk to the been heres who had home gardens about the seeds they saved, and of course just as had happened to me nearly a quarter century earlier and in a different part of Appalachia, they not only got seeds but also stories. So the seed saving project, along with the oral histories and stories, was presented in the community, and the came heres began to understand something about the been heres, while the been heres were reassured about their own culture.
    In our cultural sustainability symposium, Kent not only talked about this project, but she got us all into a workshop where we told each other family stories, something that might have gone on all afternoon—but there were other presentations to hear, and besides, all this talk about food made us hungry for the farm supper that was only a couple of hours away.    

The language of avoidance

    All of the presentations at the recent cultural sustainability symposium at Sterling College interested me, but in this and the next few entries I’ll single out some of those that linked most directly to the kind of thinking that’s engaged me on this blog: those by William Westerman, Mary Hufford, Rosann Kent, Nancy Menning, Michael Lange, and the field session with Farley Brown and Ross Morgan that concluded the symposium.
    Westerman spoke about the need to understand, confront, reveal and undermine those social, political and economic forces whose actions “disrupt local cultures with destructive, sometimes even genocidal, impact.” As he pointed out, people make decisions that set those forces in motion. They often are hard to identify because the disruption is often chronicled in the passive voice—events just seem to occur, and causation is not assigned.
    Much of what Westerman said is congruent with my own argument that culture workers must consider economic and environmental threats to cultural continuity, rather than confine ourselves to helping communities promote and maintain their traditional and characteristic artistic expressions, be they music, ethnic foods, religious folklife, dance, and so forth. Culture workers, who are trained to identify and document tradition-bearers (folk artists), ought also to direct efforts at identifying and documenting those people who give agency to the disruptive and destructive economic and environmental forces, and to exposing them.
    But Westerman’s focus on the language in which these problems are addressed is absolutely critical (a theme, also, of Mary Hufford’s presentation). It isn't just about what we say but how we think and therefore how we know, and how we can know. (The technical term for this is epistemology.) When one says, “The New York and New Jersey Coast was devastated by Superstorm Sandy,” that is the passive voice: the Coast “was devastated.” The fact is stated but the cause is not identified. If, instead, one says “Climate change is causing violent storms like Superstorm Sandy that devastated the New York and New Jersey Coast,” we have the active voice, which identifies the actor (cause), in this case climate change. Examples like this are more useful than contrasting sentences such as "The ball was hit to center field by John" versus "John hit the ball to center field." Of course, it's possible to identify actors in the passive voice ("by John" in the above contrast); but often the actor is absent, and sometimes on purpose.
    Westerman’s concentration on the evasive language of the passive voice reminded me of “Strunk and White” (The Elements of Style) with its prescription to use the active voice, chiefly to make writing vigorous. Contemporary contrarians have delighted in pointing out grammatical errors in their examples of the passive voice. But Strunk and White isn’t about grammar: it’s about style. And using the active voice is about more than style; it’s about naming “whodunit.” The passive voice, as George Orwell pointed out more than sixty years ago in his essay, "Politics and the English Language," is the deadening language of government bureaucracy. It’s a language of avoidance; it’s “official language,” it’s what my own freshman English teacher, William E. Coles, Jr., back in the day, used to call “bulletproof language.”
    Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer understood the paralyzing consequences of Lyndon Johnson’s bulletproof language. In one of the finest analyses of the failures of the passive voice, Mailer critiqued Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign book, My Hope for America. Mailer's book, Cannibals and Christians (1966), contains that essay. In it, Mailer showed just how Johnson’s passive voice avoided naming and blaming, and in failing to say what were the causes of, say, poverty in America, Johnson’s language disabled him (and others) from thinking clearly about it and therefore from effectively addressing its causes.
     I was reminded, also, of a Cambridge Forum broadcast from October of 2011, featuring Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, in honor of Thoreau’s essay on "Civil Disobedience." In the midst of the discussion, someone asked Berry why he was still willing to talk to those coal barons responsible for mountaintop removal when it was obvious that they weren't listening. The gist of his reply was that good people can still do terrible things, and if they're good people we must talk to them and try to reach the good within them. They need to know that "they're in the house that they're burning down. . . . and maybe we can help them put the fire out.” (View Berry's entire response at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_o6lpXlMo).
     In other words, it's not enough simply to say that the house is burning down, or we're in ecological crisis, or that local cultures are disappearing. They are "being disappeared," as Tony Seeger reminded us at the symposium; and it's up to us culture workers to identify the people who hide behind the passive voice, and to try to keep a dialogue open with those powerful "good people who do terrible things." The language of avoidance blinds them to causation, keeps them from knowing that they are burning down the house that we all are in. But the spirit of non-violent resistance appeals to the good in them, in hopes that they will listen and we can put the fire out together.