Sons do Brasil
Music and the Tropics:
On Goals and Achievements of
Ethnomusicology in Brazil
Introduction
In 2005 the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary(1). On the occasion of this special anniversary, the society gave opportunity to the representatives from different countries to inform the assembly about their contribution to the discipline. The same year can also be considered the centenary of ethnomusicology as a whole (Oliveira Pinto, 2005). Considering that the first field sound recordings for research purposes were made in Amazonia by German ethnologist Wilhelm Kissenberth in 1908, Ethnomusicology can celebrate its jubilee in Brazil in 2008. Since jubilees are always a welcome opportunity to reflect about what is being celebrated, the following statements aim to reveal some remarks about ethnomusicology outside of North America and Europe, that are rarely made in recent history of this academic field. Paraphrasing Michael Weber (1990), who referred to ethnomusicology as “the other musicology”, the present paper will reveal some ethnomusicological landmarks in Brazil, which, on behalf of the “another ethnomusicology”, will present some examples extracted from the history of the discipline in Latin America in general (2). The history of an academic field of study, or discipline, within the humanities, is always related to the sum of several regional histories and developments, as there are little areas of scientific research that can belong exclusively to one country or region without relations to others. At the same time, history and reality of the discipline in Latin America reveal certain specificities, some of are addressed in this essay.
I .
The early stage of ethnomusicology in Brazil coincides with the beginnings of the discipline as a “neues Spezialgebiet der Wissenschaft” (specific field of musicological study), to quote Hornbostel, 1905. There are two strong connections that bind Brazilian ethnomusicology to the first phase of the discipline, known as comparative musicology: 1. Music anthropological research in Brazil has played an important role for the development of the beginning of the discipline, almost a century ago. The so-called “Berlin School of Comparative Musicology” under Erich M. von Hornbostel, benefited from the fieldwork and the first major sound recordings realized in Brazil by German ethnographers. Musical materials gathered in the Amazon (Brazil) were used as primary tools for building the universal theories of music as a cultural expression of mankind, defined among diffusionist ethnologists of that time (Schneider, 1976). 2. Shortly after, research and documentation of traditional and popular musics took place in Brazil, revealing new approaches that brought into mind of intellectuals, folklorists, music teachers and composers, the importance of the fieldwork in the country. It is pertinent to note, that the essence of what anthropology and comparative musicology in Europe and North America were focusing on within the first half of the 20th century—the quest for the “authentic” musical forms, were not necessarily always at the centre of attention of Brazilian music research.
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Hearing was the last of the European inhabitant’s five senses to gain experience from distant sensorial universes. When they returned to their countries of origin, those who traveled to the tropics brought back curious objects, images and sketches (later photography), from far-off regions. They also brought reports of fascinating destinations, smells, tastes and even material that offered new tactile experiences, but never included the respective sounds.
For this to take place, a technological invention was needed to preserve elements from an “ex-acoustic” universe (since “exotic” stems from ex-optic, “from a point of view”). Although the Edison phonograph was invented in 1877, it started to be used in field research only in 1890. The preservation of sounds (the possibility of transporting them and making them reecho outside their original contexts) afforded the Europeans the opportunity to substantially renew their knowledge of the “other” and also of themselves through the sense of hearing. Recorded sounds from the tropics were essential in this process of the acoustic recognition of human manifestations. Without a doubt, the longest of the processes of sensorial assimilation of the world, often painful and giving rise to countless controversies and debates ranging from the conceptual and the aesthetic to the prejudiced and the racial.
As a discipline ethnomusicology started to exist at the same time that Europeans became aware of different sound concepts from different parts of the world. To my knowledge, no other discipline from the humanities came into existence in the same period that its main subject was experienced. This experience being the result of the discipline’s first attempt to define its goals and aspirations. And Brazilian sounds were among the first to arrive in the centre of the beginning of the ethnomusicological thought, analysis and theory in Berlin. They contributed enormously, for instance, to Erich M. von Hornbostel’s “Blown Quint Circle Theory” in the 1920’s (Hornbostel, 1921). The first collection of Brazilian music recorded in the field was made between 1908 and 1913, by anthropologists Wilhelm Kissenberth (1878–1944) and Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872–1924). They conducted research and collected samples of indigenous culture for the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, then called the Königliches Völkerkundemuseum zu Berlin (The Royal Ethnological Museum of Berlin). In addition to the realized recordings of music among the Kayapó and Karajá and the gathering of valuable collection of dance masks, Kissenberth’s collection of wax phonograph cylinders remained practically unnoticed in the storage of the museum until very recently (cf. CD, 2006).
For his part, Theodor Koch-Grünberg visited Brazil in 1899 but conducted research from 1903 to 1905, from 1911 to 1913, and in 1924. Unlike his colleague Kissenberth, Koch-Grünberg published the results of his research, maintained contact with other researchers, and strove to make the largest possible number of phonographic recordings, especially after having been prepared for the second trip by comparative musicologist Erich M. Von Hornbostel.
Question can be raised here: was the research object –indigenous music– as attractive to the Latin-American scholars as it was to the Europeans? The Brazilian physician and ethnologist Edgar Roquette Pinto recorded indigenous music during his field research in Mato Grosso in 1912. During his visit to the Pareci and Nambikwara Indians, Roquette Pinto recorded the first field sound document by a Brazilian (Roquette Pinto, 1917). The Edison cylinders of this research trip are stored in the ethnological sector of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Although other sound documents have been collected in this institution since, indigenous music did not receive the minimum attention from Brazilian anthropologists until the 1950s. This becomes also evident with the first recordings by Roquette Pinto, as music was rather an offshoot activity conducted between his data collection; a completely different situation when compared with those of Kissenberth or Koch-Grünberg, who gave music a constitutive space in their research and documentation goals.
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In the 1920s, the Brazilian poet, cultural activist, ethnographer and musicologist Mário de Andrade became aware of the important work of Koch-Grünberg and requested copies of the recordings made in the Amazon from the Berlin collection. In addition to the recordings and their musical analyses, the ethnography published by Koch-Grünberg (1923) made another great contribution to the Brazilian culture with the myths that the anthropologist had registered. This was the Makuxi myth about the hero Maku-Naima, who in 1928 became the protagonist of Mário de Andrade’s great modernist novel, Macunaíma.
After obtaining copies of the Koch-Grünberg recordings, Mário de Andrade also asked the Berlin museum for a phonographic field-recording device. The equipment arrived in Brazil in 1938 and was placed into the hands of the singer and guitar player Olga Praguer Coelho, who recorded religious Afro-Brazilian Candomblé songs in Bahia. As far as is known, these are the first sound recordings ever made of this repertoire. To record Afro-Brazilian music instead of indigenous repertory led to what I am calling the “authenticity dispute” between Mário de Andrade and Marius Schneider, who succeeded Erich M. von Hornbostel in the position of head of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv in 1934. In a short exchange of letters in 1938 between Andrade and Schneider evinced different arguments about the nature of the authenticity in traditional music. These points of view stood for two basic ideological principles of comparative and of folklore music research of the period. While Schneider was interested only in the “veritable musique indienne et non pas du folklore brasilien” (true Indian music and not Brazilian folklore), Andrade showed little sensibility for this exclusive need of comparative musicology:
Je regrette, cher Monsieur, de ne pas pouvoir vous donner que ces quelques indications fort incomplète sur la bibliographie musicale des indigènes du Brésil. Mon domaine est tout autre; je suis restreint au folklore, et j’ose même vous envoyer ci-joint une monographie où j’ai essayé de présenter l’apport de négre d’Afrique, dans le Samba afrobrésilien (Mário de Andrade, São Paulo, June 23, 1938).
It is pertinent to note, that until 1938, the Phonogrammarchiv in Berlin did not have a single sample of Afro-American music from South-America. This situation was strange enough to the many sound-collections from this subcontinent that had already reached the institution (cf. Ziegler, 2006). This was probably due to the idea of “authenticity”. For the comparative musicology, Afro-American was neither African nor native of America. Therefore he was not really authentic. The candomblé-recordings made by Andrade were probably the first of this kind to enter the Berlin archives. This was significantly due to the effort of a Latin American, and not of a European scholar.
Among the early Brazilian intellectuals and artists, the quest for sounds meant challenge of discovering the cultural resources of the country. Driven by the hope of the existence of a musical eldorado, deep in its essence and unheard in other parts of the world, these scholars believed that manifestations of the descendants of African slaves or those of the different kind of mestizo population could also be included in this musical treasure. Brazilian scholars contemporary of Andrade were not primarily interested in the purity and the authenticity of possible origins of culture. Therefore, Mário de Andrade could not understand why the German musicologist had their eyes and ears for something he considered as pure and unpolluted. Few years prior to Andrade’s complaint about a German traveller he met in his trip to the Northeast, who said that “indio é mais brasileiro que mestiço [Indian is more a Brazilian than the mestizo] (Andrade, 1927). Compared to this European imperative on authenticity, Andrade’s study “Samba Rural Paulista” (Andrade, 1937) is more advanced in its anthropological approach than those of most of his contemporary European or North-American musicologists; since he had abandoned completely the idea of purity in favour of the focus on the musical performance as a phenomenon elevated by social meanings.
Whereas authenticity for the foreign researcher meant purity from an ethnic point of view, authenticity for Mário de Andrade represented genuineness of expression, i.e., music performance as practiced in a live and original contextual setting. The fact, that the expression itself may have had different origins, was not a problem as such, as long as the overall impression of the performance and its vivid interchange with the community were in the spotlight.
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The “authenticity dispute” discussed above proves once again the basic difference of expectation between the research conducted in Europe with the vision to the world, and the research realized at home, with a self observation focus. Each one of these positions would necessarily influenced any methodological mise au point to cultural research. Since the groundbreaking oeuvre of traveller and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in the first half of the 19th century, “Measuring of the World” (“Die Vermessung der Welt“) is a topos for almost any natural and geographical study in Europe. Exemplified by Humdoldt’s travels through South America, “measuring” by Europeans conflicted with the “discovering of the self” in the folklore research in Latin America from the turn to the 20th century on until its 2nd half. If “measuring of the world” was a fundamental motivation to natural and cultural sciences that became also important to comparative musicology of the beginning 20th century, Brazilian’s efforts during the same period were less engaged in the measuring, but more so in the discovering of the self in order to contribute to a higher ideal—the construction of a nation in terms of its (new) identity. Such a question was certainly not central to the foreign research. Instead, the over posed goal in comparative musicology had less local or national, and much larger universal ambitions:
(…) Unsere Wünsche fliegen noch höher: wir möchten die fernste, dunkelste Vergangenheit entschleiern und möchten aus der Fülle des Gegenwärtigen das Zeitlose, Allgemeine herausschälen; mit anderen Worten: wir wollen die entwicklungsgeschichtlichen und die allgemein-ästhetischen Grundlagen der Tonkunst kennen lernen (Hornbostel, 1905).
It is quite understandable therefore that Brazil did not have a Hornbostel, but instead a Mário de Andrade; Brazil never measured intervals, but attempted to listen carefully to them in their proper context. Brazil accomplished this in order, to discover itself for having remained unknown to its own population and to the rest of the world until the Word War II, and to contribute to the scientific methodology of a world discipline. How did Andrade proceed to discover his country through cultural research at in the beginning of the 20th century? He travelled in the search of specificities and originalities, without separating categories such as the genuine and the “less unique” in advance. He was open to find anything, regardless of its supposed origin. In its utmost final consequences, discovering native culture expressions would lead to a higher ideal, to the invention of a nation. This was Andrade’s and his contemporary modernist thinkers’ goal. The rise of a broad-based ethnomusicological research in Brazil came out of this general quest for the discovery and for the building of a nation by itself. At the same time there was the need to face a dilemma caused by modernity through the ongoing urbanization of the country. While the concern of Horbostel, first pronounced in 1905, regarded the danger of irrecoverable loss of musical manifestations around the world as a result of the contact with Western influences (Hornbostel, 1905), Andrade and his collaborators faced a more ambiguous situation: there was the need of documenting endangered manifestations of the country, although the final goal was not primarily to preserve them, but mainly to lay upon them in order to formulate cultural references of a new nation.
The 1930s and 1940s experienced the most impressive, multidisciplinary grounded research missions to the different corners of the country. Mario de Andrade himself, holding the position of the head of the Cultural Department of the municipality of São Paulo, organized a team under the designation of “Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas” that travelled through different states of the Northeast Brazil filming, sound recording, photographs and protocols the main popular and traditional musical manifestations of the region. Although he did not participate himself in this mission, Andrade had previously carried out research in the Northeast of the country (Andrade, 1927). He was able to advise the team members in detail about their itineraries (CD SESC, cf. bibliography). In technological terms, this mission inaugurated the era of magnetic field recordings in South America, by using the most advanced devices available at that time. From the musicological realm, the conceptual framework of the research was strongly centred on Constatin Brailoiu’s Esquisse d’un méthode de folklore musical from 1930. An aesthetical input to the research motivation came from Andrade himself, who in 1928, had published his Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, a literary account to Brazil’s musical traditions, and a manual not only for those who were interested to undertake musical research, but also to young composers as an aid to their search for a national art music.
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In the United States, the term “musicology” was widely discussed first in 1915 (Reese, 1972). Likewise, in Latin America, up until the 1930s, “musicologia” was the subject that included estudos musicais, historia da musica or estudos de folk-lore musical. Even though, musicology and especially ethnomusicological research, existed before the terms “musicologia” and “etnomusicologia” were introduced. The same happens to the term “música tradicional” which also did not appear until the 1940s. “Estudos de Folk-lore” was the main research task of the team from São Paulo, as commented in 1938 chronicles.
In this same year, an important institutional foundation for musicology in Latin America was created by Francisco Curt Lange of the “Istituto Inter-Americano de Musicologia” in Montevideo. Francisco Curt Lange, born 1903 in Eilenburg, near Leipzig, in Germany, adopted the Uruguayan citizenship, while he lived and worked in different Latin American countries since 1927 (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela). He was the only active musicologist on the subcontinent, who could be named among several prominent teachers as Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs (Bispo, 1984). Curt Lange did research in historical musicology. He is responsible for a monumental work that, for the first time, shed light on a vivid and highly expressive and original musical life in colonial Latin America, almost in straight connection to clerical traditions between the 17th and the 19th centuries. In spite of this accomplishment, Lange expressed his interest in the ethnomusicological research. As editor of several periodicals and collective editions, he encouraged and published numerous ethnomusicological texts by his colleagues, among them Mário de Andrade’s essay on the Calunga puppet in Maracatu music performance from Recife (Andrade, 1935). Lange was certainly one of the most prominent representatives of the 20th century musicological thinking in Latin America. In 1934, he gave lectures in São Paulo speaking with enthusiasm about his idea concerning an “Americanismo Musical”, a joint musicological initiative for the whole of Latin America,3 which he realized outside of the “Instituto Inter-Americano de Musicologia”. Throughout his life Lange carried out restless and incomparable fruitful research activities that resulted in plenty of spectacular musicological discoveries.
Different premises for research in Latin America have to do with those who do ethnomusicology, but those who do ethnomusicology are not always ethnomusicologists in an official definition. The term arises only rather hesitantly in the 1970s. Musicians, especially composers where among the first to document and analyse orally transmitted music in Latin America. It becomes evident, that composition and ethnomusicology always related one to another in different countries and diverse stylistic phases of music history in 20th century Latin America. Ana M. Ochoa refers to a large group of “sonic transculturators” in Latin America, among them musicians, folklorists and composers (Ochoa, 2005). Composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos or Mozart Camargo Guarnieri devoted themselves at least as students to the search of traditional sounds, both to study unknown materials as well as to get inspiration for own creative work; but also scholars that later became rather prominent in ethnomusicology often started as composers, like Argentinian born Isabel Aretz or her Venezuelan husband Luis Felipe Ramón y Rivera.
In the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s, ethnomusicological research was mainly carried out within the framework of folklore studies, and the upcoming studies in popular music remained in the domain of historians, musical journalists, and even historical musicologists. Within this panorama, one name among Brazilian scholars must be mentioned. Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo (1905-1992) was this man gave the main impetus to the study of regional musical manifestations. As the head of the Unesco music department in Paris, he oversaw the music related matter in the entire Latin America. The Rio de Janeiro born Azevedo studied music in his hometown. As a young man, he wrote music reviews for the local newspapers. His interest also included the analysis of ethnographic documents from the National Museum; writing of an academic thesis on the scale of indigenous music (based on the 1937 field recordings of previously mentioned by Roquette Pinto. His discussion of the interchange nature of the Brazilian Indians culture and musical traditions, points to a conceptual dilemma that some decades later, would become again a concern in Lévi-Strauss “Le cru et le cuit” (1963). In 1941 Azevedo spent a sojourn in the US, where he met Alan Lomax. In 1943 Azevedo founded the “Centro de Pesquisas Folclóricas” at the Music School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In the same year he conducted a documentation field research trip intending to continue the efforts initiated by the “Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas” before. Field recordings where made between 1942 and 1943 and (cf. CD edition by Library of Congress). Mário de Andrade and Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo are the most important scholars of early phase of ethnomusicology in Brazil. Whereas Mario de Andrade, the elder of the two, was an accomplished poet and cultural activist who never really invested in an academic carrier, was not a musicologist or ethnomusicologist, but the position of lecturer in music history at the “Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo”. Luiz Heitro Corea de Azevedo, on the other hand, was more than a scholar devoted to the academy. His main interests were in the academically based musical science. He conducted musical analysis, based on field research methods, later named ethnomusicology.
Fig. 1: Mário de Andrade & Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo
II .
In this section I will comment some approaches and orientations in Brazilian and Latin American ethnomusicology after the Andrade era, which is from 1945 on. The following brief remarks, which could easily be expanded to several more, will be limited to the following ten issues:
Music education
Musical anthropology
Afro-Brazilian specificities
Debate on ethnicity
Local hearing
Tropical sounds
World music
Cognitive questions
Applied ethnomusicology
Academic presence of ethnomusicology
Research orientation and goals addressed below can be distinct, behave antagonised, or combine in several ways. A number of the modi operandi and approaches discussed occur at the same time in different works or places, or get even together in the work and brain of a single researcher. Certain approaches can be abandoned, or be overtaken again somewhere else. Similar to the early phase of ethnomusicology in Brazil, also New Brazilian ethnomusicology – from the end of the 1970s on – is not characterized by unified methods or objects of study, not even represented only by ethnomusicologists in a narrow sense. Brazilian and also other music researcher in Latin American in general, belong to different and diverse fields of knowledge and have their own multiple backgrounds.
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The educational concern- The worry with educational matters is as old as is musicology as academic discipline. In the first academic proposals on the goals of musicology by Guido Adler, musical education is also included (Adler, 1884). Besides the search for music as national expression, composers too dealt with music education. The composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was one of the main music educators in Latin America, responsible for large efforts in the formalization and the music education practice maintained by the State. With the support of the nationalist government of Getúlio Vargas, Villa-Lobos built up a national program for children education based on collective chant, which probably has no other parallel in the Americas (Lange, 1935). The composer was convinced that similar to the acquisition of language, children can only learn music in a lively way. They should sing and listen to music, before learning to read musical scores and music theory. Villa-Lobos was persuaded that musical education of Brazilian children would succeed best with musical folklore, their creative conscience to be trained musically with this traditional repertoire. Such a requirement would necessarily encourage research in traditional music from all over the country. In fact, music teacher in schools were among those who helped in collecting folklore for educational purposes. Villa-Lobos’ enthusiasm for his program filled up soccer stadiums with up to thirty thousand school children, who sang in honour of the President or to commemorate the independence day (Oliveira Pinto, 1987). Despite its enormous repercussion, Villa-Lobos’ “canto orfeônico” soon lost importance after his dead in 1959.
While Villa-Lobos’ music education is originally found on the collection of orally transmitted music, arranged by the composer for children’s choir, a completely differently organized program has become visibility in Rio de Janeiro in recent years through applied ethnomusicological research, where the goal of specific communities is to learn more about culture and society through research measures in with the own community (Araújo, 2006). The importance of ethnomusicology in connection to music education in Brazil has more and more become evident at the annual meetings of the music educators association (ABEM) but also at the meetings of the national association for post-graduate studies in music (ANPPOM), where a significant portion of the presented papers from the 1990s on dealt with ethnomusicological matters. The very first concrete effort of creating a Brazilian Society for Ethnomusicology was articulated in such a meeting of music educators by the end of the 1990s and could finally come to concretion at the 38th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in Rio de Janeiro, July, 2001.
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The anthropological challenge– While musical folklore studies en vogue until the 1970s focussed the local view, different from the musicological approach that could get beyond the country, envisaging also a larger historical contexts –like for instance Curt Lange’s research in an “Inter-American” comprehended music history– anthropology soon managed to cover both, the global and the local. This might be one of anthropology’s main strategically contributions to ethnomusicology, which adopting its methods also became able to face local manifestations and to simultaneously set them in a broader context, at the same time that it contributed to the understanding of the transformations caused by global processes (see Erlman’s [(1999] discussion about “global imagination”, and for Latinamerica cf. Ochoa [2003]).
Social Anthropology in Brazil has a remarkable trajectory. The first department for anthropology was established in 1935 at the University of São Paulo and its curriculum was advised by Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the first scholars to teach the subject in Brazil (Lévi-Strauss, 1953). Together with the institute for anthropology at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, anthropology from São Paulo has been responsible for the high quality training on post-graduate level of at least 75% of Brazilian social anthropologists. The field of Brazilian anthropologists is mainly inside the country. Anthropologists play an important advisory role in the government, orienting questions regarding Indian land and minority matters; but also in the countries actual socio-cultural debate, anthropology has a strong voice. It is significant, that the first three monographs with a new ethnomusicological approach on Brazilian music appeared in the biennium 1978/79, having anthropologists as authors. The first is Rafael José de Menezes Bastos’ A Musicologica Kamayurá (Menezes Bastos, 1978), an absolutely original account on the musical thinking of an Amazonian people. The second “breathtaking” study in this end of the 70s is Gerhard Kubik’s Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil (Kubik, 1979). Both studies, although different in approach and focus one from the other, entered the scene with completely new insights, and remained this past three decades far from loosing their importance and actuality. African elements in the musical interaction across the Southern Atlantic is also the subject of Kazadi wa Mukuna’s Contribuição Bantu na Música Popular Brasileira (Kazadi, 1979). Different from the two previous, here aspects of popular music productions are also in the core of the authors’ interest. Whereas books by Menezes Bastos and Kazadi are based on their theses in Social Anthropology, Kubik’s book, published in Portugal, represents the first account of the author regarding his field research in Brazil in 1974, done under the perspective of his almost fifteen years of research experience in Africa.
The term ethnomusicology is not mentioned in these oeuvres. Bastos’ book has the subtitle: “A contribution to the anthropology of communication” (and not “ethnomusicology”!). Kubik always maintained a certain distance to the term, on the other side, to speak publicly of ethnomusicology was rare and would evoke question marks in Brazil of those days. In one of the initial chapters Bastos discusses ethnomusicology, defining it as an item belonging to anthropology, arguing this field should more precisely be understood as a musical anthropology (Menezes Bastos, 1978). Soon after the three mentioned books, another anthropologist who was teaching at the Museu Nacional in Rio, Anthony Seeger, published his first book Os Indios e Nós (The Indians and Us) in 1980. In the only chapter on music no reference is made to ethnomusicological methods or to the field as such (Seeger, 1980).
It is truly hard to find a book publication in Brazil discussing term and signification of ethnomusicology in the period until the end of the 1970s. One of it is João Baptista Siqueira’s Os Cariris do Nordeste (Siqueira, 1978), a research on local culture of the Northeastern cariri people, with some incursions into music. For Siqueira, ethnomusicology is clearly the term for studies in primitive music (Siqueira, 1978). As we can see, the terminus was gaining space rather cautiously. Another two interesting articles on the tonal system of Xavante Indian traditional music by the anthropologist Desidério Aytai where published making explicit emphasis on ethnomusicological transcription and analysis. Aytai’s research presents some influence from Northamerican ethnomusicology of the 1960s and 1970s (Aytai, 1976, 1979).
The main innovation in methodological approach in the three mentioned music centred anthropological studies is the dissociation from merely sound descriptions as such, to the search for broader structural connections and to the cognitive level of musical manifestations. The surface level of tone production was abandoned in favour of the deepness of native musical theories and of intra and intercultural musical thinking, exemplarily demonstrated in Kubik’s African pattern discussion as appearing in a new –the Brazilian– environment, or Bastos’ discernment of a native sound concept that goes far beyond physical sound itself, when analysed within its different semantics and in connection to its social embeddings. The knowledge of linguistics and the conviction that language is the bearer of theory is common to the three of the above mentioned works. This might be responsible for the large step ethnomusicology did in Brazil in this phase, conveying really new insight to the plan and into discussion. This large stride forward was an important way for ethnomusicology in Brazil to start getting more visibility among the other human sciences.
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The transatlantic connection– Under new perspectives the mentioned books of Kubik and Kazadi deal with the transatlantic connection between Brazil and Bantu-speaking Africa, but they were not the first to address this issue. After the pioneer studies on Afro-Brazilian religions by Nina Rodrigues (1903) and Arthur Ramos (1934) –with a few remarks on music and musical instruments– studies of the transatlantic connection where introduced by Herskovits in Surinam (1936) and later in Brazil (1941) and by Fernando Ortiz in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba (1950). Among Brazilian folklorists Luiz da Camara Cascudo and Renato Almeida where the first to address questions and to formulate proposals for the interpretation of the presence of African music and dance elements in Brazil. Both scholars have also been to Africa, a fact that granted them distinction among other folklorists of their time (Cascudo, 1961; Almeida, 1962). While social sciences have long remained flanked by the antagonist concepts of cultural contribution on one side and cultural resistance on the other to characterize the presence of African cultural heritage, or “roots”, on Brazilian ground, Kubik proposes an entirely innovative argumentation, suggesting with reference to his in dept knowledge of African music, especially from Angola, that the presence of Africa in Brazil could rather be imagined as cultural “extensions”:
In my own approach I am unable to perceive African music merely as the “roots” of something else. I consider African music/dance forms as the products of people living in various African cultures which have changed continuously in history, absorbing and processing elements from inside and outside the continent, creating new styles and fashions all the time. Afro-American music then appears as a consequent and creative extension overseas of African musical cultures that have existed in the period between the 16th and 20th centuries. From this perspective Afro-American music cannot be described adequately in terms of “retentions” and “survivals”, as if African cultures in the Americas were doomed from the outset and perhaps only by some act of mercy to “retain” certain elements (Kubik, 1979:8).
Gerhard Kubik is the first scholar to present solid examples from selected music genres, dance performances and organology, where African cultural “extensions” can be perceived in Brazil. His time-line-pattern concept for Brazilian samba opens the opportunity on behalf of an entirely reinterpreted view on the subject, since nothing comparable had been done in Brazil by folklorists or music historians regarding common pattern perceptions, music processes and common instrumental skills between Africa and Brazil. Kubik’s main contribution was to demonstrate, that African cultural traits regarded as stable in their original settings, have been maintained in Brazil in their structural composition, but where reinterpreted according to the new environment in the New World (Kubik 1979, 1986, 1991). An example for this can be observed in the use of different African time-line-pattern in Brazil (cf. Oliveira Pinto, 1999).
Comprehended in this way, studies on samba and Afro-Brazilian performance would clearly deal with Brazilian expression, even if a number of components recall African structures, concepts, and instrumental proficiency, as they have been incorporated and re-signified. Going further, we can comprehend a coca-cola tin filled with rice as a “genuine” Afro-Brazilian musical instrument, from the moment on that it is used with the respective mental musical conception and struck according to specific performance patterns, a mental process that can occur in similar ways also in Africa (Oliveira Pinto, 1991). Research under this heading has been continued and substantially enlarged in the 1980s and 1990s (Kazadi & Oliveira Pinto, 1994; Oliveira Pinto, 1999; Kazadi, 1999).
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The ethnicity / identity debate– The old debate on ethnicity and, related to it, on identity have experienced a phase of relative importance in Latin America, in different ways and forms. It is sufficient to note, that music, musical performance and its related genres have frequently been used to explain ethnic origins or ethnic identities. As a composer, devoted to the search for specificities in Brazilian musical forms from all social groups or from the most diverse parts of the country, Villa-Lobos is the one who tried to systematize ethnic affiliations in Brazil, in order to gain a better image of the whole of the nation’s cultural identity. This experience, of course, didn’t prospect, but it reflected a real concern from the 1930s to the 1950s. With his diagram on the different ethnic influences, Villa-Lobos aimed to stress “universal” roots of the music in Brazil (Villa-Lobos, 1939).
Fig. 2 Scheme of Villa Lobos: “Legenda do gráfico planisférico etnológico da origem da música no Brasil”
Today ethnicity as terminus is less in use than a few decades ago. It became complicated to detect ethnic filiations, even in connection to expressive culture. In Brazil anthropology moved towards to accept ethnic identities on the ground of the auto-identification of a group, and of the identification through the wider social context of this very group (Carneiro da Cunha, 1986). This has become particularly important for the recognition of land to indigenous groups, or to quilombos – the villages of descendents of escaped African slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries – and to any other auto-defined ethnic minorities. These processes always require the expertise of national anthropologists. The efforts of a determined social group, applying for a proper ethnic identity, are often enough emphasized by musical practices (cf. CD Encontro dos Tambores). While in these cases credit is given to difference, the lack of precisely defined so called ethnic boundaries induces concepts regarding miscegenation or evokes hypotheses on cultural hybridism, Africanisms, etc. Fact is, although, that the music in the Brazilian and other Latin American tropics most seldom evince a total blending of its different cultural elements. Vestiges of its origins remain intact as in few other domains of culture; no amount of mixing is able to completely dilute the marks and structures of the origin of the styles. Thanks to its own methodological approach, ethnomusicology is able to demonstrate to cultural studies in Latin America that music manages to be a manifestation of the present while continuing to simultaneously evince its past.
* * *
The Anthropology of Hearing– Hearing is allotted cultural importance in determined societies more than in others. The auditory perception that the indigenous people of the lowlands of South America have developed in relation to their natural and supernatural worlds is certainly very keen and highly refined. Based on his experience with the Marubo people from Rondonia, Guilherme Werlang stated that:
… for certain indigenous peoples of Amazonia, music has a higher epistemological density than that of a structural-linguistic sign, i.e. the arbitrary designation of something that is beyond itself. The Amazonian Marubo, with whom I worked, designate their "music" as saiti, referring specifically to a festival where they perform myths in a specific musical form: their saiti "mythchants", he form that establishes the ontological origins of these peoples and those of the world where they live(Werlang, 2001).
Also among the Kamayurá from Upper Xingu, whose musical culture has been studied by Rafael José de Menezes Bastos since 1968, the notion of ihu is a general category that means “all the sounds,” among which are found all the possible forms of perceiving and producing the universe by means of sound, from the breaking of a branch in the forest to the voices of rattles (maraka). These sounds occupy a predominant position in the sensorial culture of this Amazonian people. Bastos shows in his work that the Kamayurá people from the Xingu river in Amazonia perceive sound as a category which is sofisticately differentiated in various levels. While ihu means the totally flow of sounds, this overal sound is the sum of many diverse sound and noise categories, where to be find also music by singing or by instrumental practice (Fig. 3). The author’s main interest is to understand the “musico-logic” of this people.
Fig. 3: Native classification of Kamayura musical instruments (R. Menezes Bastos, 1978)
Inhabitants of the tropical forests really seem to hear in a different manner from the urban man. Raoni, a Kaiapó leader whom I accompanied traveling by boat down the Xingu River in the 1970s, could hear from far away when a capybara plunged from the riverbank into the water. The sound of the splash told him that it was this species, and not another kind of animal. Distinguishing sounds that convey something within an auditory spectrum seems indeed to be a special skill of the indigenous cultures of Amazonia. I could experience this from 1996 to 1998 while engaged with a cultural reconstruction project among the Apalai from northern state of Para (Oliveira Pinto, 1996). When a group of young people from Apalai Village, of the Upper Parú gathered around a small transistor radio, all I could hear was a static noise, as though it were tuned to some station less point on the dial. However, the concentration of these Apalai youths piqued my interest, and I finally noted that there was a weak, almost unrecognizable signal, from a distant radio broadcaster. When asked what they were listening to, the Apalai youths explained, “it’s Roberto Carlos”. Untouched by the bad and almost unrecognizable noise from the little radio, the young man had recognized the voice of this old and popular Brazilian singer. I myself would not have been able to do the same.
* * *
Tropical sounds and the World Music wave– After centuries of European projection concerning the tropics in Asia, Africa and Latin America, of expectations couched in the imaginary of what the exotic was or could be, there is a perceptible return to the auditory diversity committed with the sounds of nature, of the forest, the coastline, the mangroves, the strange timbres and the microtonalities, added to the fragments of speech, the noise of machines, of cities and airplanes. Many composers and intellectuals like Villa Lobos have already expressed the close relationship of their ouvre to the tropical nature. The sociologist from Recife, Gilberto Freyre, initiated an academic curriculum he called “tropicologia”, believing that the Luso-African encounter in the Brazilian tropical environment had produced a specific, entirely new society (Freyre, 1936). In fact, the strongest impact of a Brazilian cultural movement around tropics was a musical one: “Tropicália” in 1968. Here the tropic makes itself heard through electric guitars, keyboards, loudspeakers, colors, rhythms and silence. These are sound and ideas, that arose metaphorically from the clichés of the past, irreverently assuming that everything within modernity’s wide auditory spectrum, coupled with the sounds of the tropics, would be used for a musical response to the world. This movement characterized by manifestoes and appropriations of sounds has become one of the most innovating cultural and artistic movements not only in Brazil, but in all the tropics, for being founded in the idea of tropicality as a wide-ranging aesthetic expression. Reverting the worldwide tendency for the standardization of the sound of pop music, while significantly widening the diversity of sound, structure, style and timbre, has been Tropicália’s great contribution. More than this, the free incorporation of elements alien to the pop repertoire, from vanguard, traditional, African and Oriental music anticipated World Music, which was to arise officially in Europe fifteen years later. With the great advantage of incorporating the timbres of other cultures, World Music follows the process laid out by Tropicália – from the tropics to the world – but in the opposite direction.
Although the listening to Brazilian musics, as done from abroad, was not always in tune with that of the few specialists in the country – remember the dispute between Mário de Andrade in Brazil and Marius Schneider in Europe– the believe in the pure and “natural” power of Brazilian sounds remained all over the 20th century. After being explored by comparative musicology in order to sustain universal scientific questions – questions never rose in Brazil – several musical styles of the country were expected as ideal natural resources to be used (and misused) for World Music purposes in the last decades of this very same century. This is why another form of “interest” in the music of Brazil has appeared at least since the end of the 2nd World War. Obviously, the fact that there is a place where musical “natural resources” are so varied and abundant as in Brazil, makes the country an interesting one for the music industry and for international artists as well. In exactly this sense Paul Simons “Rhythm of the Saints” is based on bloco-afro rhythms that the artist himself recorded in a live performance in the streets of Salvador. Another popular music star, Sting, has appeared in the early 90s in the Amazon rain forest, side by side with Kaiapó-Indians (amongst them also with my friend and former travel companion Raoni). Or remember the images of one of the latest video-clips of Michael Jackson captured in Rocinha, the biggest favela slum of Rio de Janeiro. They all benefited of this “natural music resources” Brazil has to offer.
Initially imprisoned in the wax cylinders of Edison’s phonograph and in magnetic tapes, to be confined to collections, the sounds of Brazil and other tropical countries gained more and more space with the advance of the 20th century, finally abandoning the collections and hallowed halls of study to inhabit vinyl records, audio CDs and – marking the turn of the new millennium – MP3 players or down load files. Twentieth-century worldwide pop music would be unthinkable without the African offbeat, introduced to the globe through North American jazz and Latin American popular music. Since sound is the main feature that determines world music (as a music industry category alone), this new development around world music is finally being detected and accompanied by an ethnomusicology in Brazil, through its own methods of listening and research.
* * *
The electronic era and the power of loudness– More than any other region, the tropics are characterized by discriminatory uses of the musical sounds. This is another challenge to local ethnomusicology. The difference for the 21st century is that globalization and the democratization of access to the means of mass communication has brought those who were once dominated, into positions of dominance, where they incorporate the ethnocentric prejudices of the former dominators; they impose tempered scales, harmonies of the most tonic-dominant elementary functionality through the oppressive acoustic resource of loudness, thanks to electronic technology, a strong ally of this process of domination. The tape recorder, and later the radio and other equipment made sound more mobile, bringing it at close range; even when it originated in faraway places, the mobility of the sounds and noises became local. The “ghetto blaster” – the mobile sound equipment of the young people of the slums – brought the rap or funk music of one house, corner or block to another; mobile sound trucks blast advertisements for political candidates along the streets, and even private automobiles with their doors swung open, parked in the public squares of small towns and cities of the interior, with their volume turned up to the max, prove that in the tropics whoever has the loudest sound wields the power. This becomes especially evident through political propaganda short before elections, whereas sound is much more effective than other sensitive means:
Fig. 4: Sound car for political propaganda, as seen in Recife, 2006
Suggesting an “ethnomusicology of loudness”, I have argued elsewhere, that one of the main differences between the regions of tropics and of the poles don’t rest alone in the temperatures but also in the opposite noise propagation:
There are elements such as the relation between sound and silence, which can also be essentially different from one region of the globe to another. Thus, the auditory continuum of the regions near the poles is precisely the opposite of that of the tropics: while here the silence breaks the nearly constant noisy flow, there it is the noise – of an avalanche of snow, for example – which interrupts the silence(Oliveira Pinto, 2008).
* * *
The cognitive question– Despite its insistent and noisy propagation, through the mentioned domination of loudness, the tonal system of the Old World is resisted in the Southern American tropics, for instance in the Brazilian Northeast or in Colombia. Several examples of this resistance to the diatonic scales include the interval of the neutral third used in northeast Brazil (located between the minor and major third), an “irrational” interval played by fife-and-drum bands, the so-called bandas de pífanos, and also in the sung cattle-herding calls of the cowboys in the hinterlands of Pernambuco. This principle has persisted despite modernization, and, oddly enough, it is not isolated – it lives together with a tonal repertoire as when, for example, a fife is accompanied by an accordion, or when in a local radio studio a fife band plays together with an electronic keyboard. One of the many questions which are being studied in recent years in regard to this phenomena, points out that not “bi-musicality”, in the sense given to the term by Mantle Hood (1971), is in the focus of investigation, but rather the phenomenon of “by-musicality”, or “co-musicality” (Eira, 2006).
* * *
Applied ethnomusicology and research– Ethnomusicologists are often confronted with situations in which their social responsibility is requested. In this cases research means to help solving existing problems, extending as such the usual academic paradigms, by acting both inside and ahead of usual institutional frameworks. Ethnomusicological knowledge can be used to influence social interaction. Practical results of the research and documentation work is based on the common efforts by the academic researcher and members of the community whose music is being documented. Not only a final result, but also the focus of the research, a proper development and involvement by people outside the academia is intended. The goals of the project are formulated together and in close agreement by all parts involved. At a more advanced stage of the research project the ethnomusicologist can even become dispensable, since the community might overtake the research by its own. Community based ethnomusicological projects are coming more and more into evidence in Brazil in this new century. In Bahia, Francisca Marques (2005) is already carrying out documentation together with local community members from Cachoeira since 2001, who jointly built up a studio to mix and to make editions of sounds and programs for educational purposes and for the local radio broadcast. Theses efforts have gained recognition by UNESCO’s educational program. Another important endeavour in the sense to support citizenship to youths in peripheral communities in Rio de Janeiro with a high percentage mainly of drugs criminality has proved to be enormously efficient by encouraging self reflection and practical research (Araujo, 2006). These are only two of many examples, where ethnomusicology gives back at least some of its knowledge production to the interested communities.
* * *
The rise of national ethnomusicology and its academic presence– In quantitative matters the most important development of the past two decades undoubtedly refer to programs devoted to ethnomusicology at different universities in the country, what also fosters a stronger presence of ethnomusicology within the humanities and in the media. Also in qualitative matters we are much further. Without the increase of serious programs of ethnomusicology one would not explain the presentation of approximately 200 papers delivered at the 3rd Conference of the “Brazilian Ethnomusicological Association” (ABET) in São Paulo, in November 2006. At least 90% of the presented topics dealt with music in Brazil, delivered by scholars and students living, studying and researching in the country (4). But not only universities contribute to 21st ethnomusicology in Brazil. Other institutions like NGO’S and private archives, studios, broadcasting stations, dance houses, sedes de agremiações, or even Lan houses are occupying the “ethnomusiological space”. Even indigenous villages in Amazonia or local festivals such as in quilombos, can nowadays quite obviously be transformed in ethnomusicological settings. The new information I got, is that the Xavante Indians from Pimentel Barbosa, Mato Grosso, opened their village for cultural tourism. In this very special case, musical performances will certainly play an important role, but under entirely redefined settings.
* * *
Many other approaches could have been listed and discussed, as, for instance, the linguistic contributions, the historiography of music, or the popular music studies, with a long tradition and a huge output in Latin America. Far from having come to a final conclusion, or to have numbered all important aspects in the history and in the present state of ethnomusicology in Latin America – especially stressed in this essay ethnomusicology in Brazil – I will end this section by summing up some relevant features that have become of prominent importance to ethnomusicological research in the Subcontinent:
1. First of all, not “what is music” is an important question, but what it is made for, what is the purpose behind its performance.
2. Instead of the objective analytical deconstruction of expression, the overall impression of the same comes mainly into the focus. Therefore, specific contexts evince that it makes more sense to get an impression of the broad meaning of the manifestation, than to stress the exclusive look to single elements it expresses.
3. Of interest is rather the authenticity of occasions than the singularity of the musical form per se. Questions deal first with the mix, caring less with the authenticity of single elements of this mix.
4. Instead of leaving behind the structures to look after their meanings, like in recent ethnomusicology abroad, the equal look on both aspects becomes important in Latin American ethnomusicology.
5. Folklore studies and, simultaneously, popular music interpretations are on the plan from the very beginnings of music research in Latin America.
6. Research: From the discovery of the own, to the contribution to the global.
7. Practitioners (composers, musicians etc): the appropriation of the global to the improvement of the own.
8. Recent ethnomusicological work brings the social dimension into a closer plan; therefore the research on communal musics is replaced by community based projects where, instead of scholarly rhetoric’s, communal speeches gain new significance.
9. The practical use of documentation build up privately, or by different kinds of institutions, is as important as growing archives which stay mainly devoted to scholars and to academic research.
Outlook
One final aspect that can be mentioned, differentiating Brazil from many other countries, resides in the relation of its people to music. In a recent inquiry campaign published by the magazin Isto É we learn, that 66% of Brazilians are of the opinion that their music is the main subject to be proud of fascia the international community (Isto É, September, 2005). This percentage is even higher than the overall opinion about Brazilian soccer as a national argument for pride. But the most important fact about the inquiry on music is that it expresses an absolutely democratic view, since it reflects a consensus in all social classes, regions and among all age groups and genders. Here we certainly can recognize the most recent demand Brazilian ethnomusicologists face in their country, despite all the difficulties5 that have overcome in the past one hundred years: because of the national esteem of music, our activities are becoming more and more acknowledged by a broader community of non-specialists, suggesting that we are far away from doing an exotic job, like, for instance, our colleagues in European countries, whose field of study is sometimes regarded to belong to the so-called “Orchideenfächer”.
On the occasion of different jubilees – the 100 years of ethnomusicology in 2005, the 50th anniversary meeting of SEM on local developments of ethnomusicology, also in 2005, or the beginning of ethnomusicological fieldwork in Brazil one century ago in 1908 – my final statement is that work and thinking which differ from those from Anglo-American or European branches, must get more visibility in the scope of present day ethnomusicology, both from the content of a rich variety of expressions, as well as from the adopted approaches and gained insights of local, national, and even sub- continental “other ethnomusicologies”. The richness of our discipline is also the richness of different approaches, realized projects of documentation, goals and academic output. This is to say, that the history of ethnomusicology can not be less than the sum of many histories, one of them definitely to be found in South America. After having listened for almost a century to exotic – or “ex-acoustic” – sounds, it certainly remains one of the “world ethnomusicology’s” main tasks in this dawn of the 21st century, to listen with a better care to echoes which resound from the sayings of those who live in midst and think about the soundscapes from afar.
Notes
1 In 2005 we were confronted with several jubilees. Bruno Nettl reminded in the SEM Newsletter from May that year, that besides the 50 years of SEM, we have to comemorate 120 years since the break through article of John Alexander Ellis “On the musical scales of various nations” as a pioneer study for ethnomusicological thought. Timothy Rice, president of SEM in 2005, considered the issues that where important 25 years before for his society and how research improved from that time on. In my opinion we have also to consider that our field of research, ethnomusicology, as a discipline, has completed 100 years of existence this year. I show the arguments and sugest this completely neglected aniversary in an article I wrote recently for the Brazilian Ethnomusicological Association – ABET (Oliveira Pinto, 2005).
2 To give just an example: not even under the sub-title “other ethnomusicologies” in the entry “ethnomusicology” of Grove Dictionary of Musics and Musicians (Sadie, 2001) a single mention regarding Latin American ethnomusicology is made. Different from Africa and Asia as regions within this paragraph on “other ethnomusicologies”, Brazilian or Latin American scholars simply are “not on the map” (Nettl, 2005) of an officially understood ethnomusicology.
3 In a report in the Diário de São Paulo from November, 1934, Mário de Andrade informs about a lecture given by Curt Lange in the Conservatory. For him the 30 years old speaker belonged at that time already to “the most interesting figures of the American musicology” (Andrade, 1993:262).
4 As a comparison, at the SEM 45th meeting in Toronto in 2000, approximately 200 papers were delivered.
5 Speaking for Brazil, we have to consider some important aspects which brought difficulty to the ethnomusicological labour: twice a totalitarian regime in the 20th century, the language barrier (not only for us, but for the international scholar community who had no access to our writings), different mentality and diversity of acting fields; last but not least also the lack of possibilities for earning a living through “pure” ethnomusicology.
Acknowledgements
I wish to expresses my gratitude to Kazadi wa Mukuna, who kindly read a previous version of this paper, making valuable comments. Thanks are also due to Samuel Araújo and Flavia Camargo Toni, who shared the session on Brazilian ethnomusicology at the 50th Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Atlanta, November 2005.
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Monday, December 29, 2008
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www.cpalanka.org
Mission:
The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), founded in 1996, is an independent, nonpartisan public-policy research and advocacy organization that focuses on issues of governance and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka. The Centre seeks not only to contribute its own inputs to the policy-making process but to strengthen the role of other civil-society actors in policy development and implementation. CPA receives support from international and bilateral funding agencies and foundations. Its research programs include units on legal and constitutional studies, conflict and peace analysis, media monitoring, opinion polling, and monitoring election violence.
Activities include:
conducting policy research and disseminating the findings through publications, seminars, conferences, and the print and electronic media
advocating constructive policy alternatives, lobbying decision makers, and shaping public opinion to strengthen and safeguard democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, human rights, and social justice
monitoring the executive, legislature, and judicial branches of government, as well as the media and other public institutions
provision of consultancy services to political parties and other organizations involved in the field of public policy and engaging them in dialogue on the issues identified above
forging linkages with local and foreign institutions with similar aims and objectives
Publication Information: For a list of publications visit www.cpalanka.org/publications.html.
About
Member Institutes
Democracy Research News
Member Institutes
The institutional profiles below provide contact information, program descriptions, and research and publication highlights for current members of the Network. Most institutions provide more detailed information, including full texts of selected publications, on their own Web sites. Unless otherwise noted, all Network member Web sites listed herein contain information in English.
Network of Democracy Research Institutes
About
Member Institutes
Democracy Research News
Member Institutes
The institutional profiles below provide contact information, program descriptions, and research and publication highlights for current members of the Network. Most institutions provide more detailed information, including full texts of selected publications, on their own Web sites. Unless otherwise noted, all Network member Web sites listed herein contain information in English.
Mission:
The Academy of Political Education is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization whose primary objective is to support and strengthen a social order based on solidarity, rule of law, and a democratic state that respects individual human rights and liberties. The Academy's goals include spreading the ideas of human rights and liberties, creating an open society based on pluralism, implementing the democratic rule of law, encouraging parliamentarism and a multiparty system, and supporting good governance and the decentralization of power.
Activities include:
organizing and providing informal educational programs in democracy, human rights, civic education, and the media
conducting independent and joint research projects in political science, economics, and law and justice, including those that involve both domestic and international organizations, institutions, and individuals
publishing periodicals, brochures, and textbooks
participating as a country partner in the East Asia Barometer research project
Publication Information: Please visit the Academy's Web site for a list of publications.
Centre for Policy Alternatives
Contact: Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director
24/2, 28th Lane, Off Flower Road
Colombo 7
Sri Lanka
Phone: +94-11-2565306
+94-11-5552746 Ext. 102
Fax: 94-11-4714460
sara@cpalanka.org
www.cpalanka.org
Mission:
The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), founded in 1996, is an independent, nonpartisan public-policy research and advocacy organization that focuses on issues of governance and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka. The Centre seeks not only to contribute its own inputs to the policy-making process but to strengthen the role of other civil-society actors in policy development and implementation. CPA receives support from international and bilateral funding agencies and foundations. Its research programs include units on legal and constitutional studies, conflict and peace analysis, media monitoring, opinion polling, and monitoring election violence.
Activities include:
conducting policy research and disseminating the findings through publications, seminars, conferences, and the print and electronic media
advocating constructive policy alternatives, lobbying decision makers, and shaping public opinion to strengthen and safeguard democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, human rights, and social justice
monitoring the executive, legislature, and judicial branches of government, as well as the media and other public institutions
provision of consultancy services to political parties and other organizations involved in the field of public policy and engaging them in dialogue on the issues identified above
forging linkages with local and foreign institutions with similar aims and objectives
Publication Information: For a list of publications visit www.cpalanka.org/publications.html.
Early Modern European Nations and Empire
North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002)
North American Journal of Welsh Studies Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002) © North American Association for
the Study of Welsh Culture and History 2001. All Rights Reserved.
The Plight of Pygmy Nations;
Wales in Early Modern Europe
Philip Jenkins, Pennsylvania State University
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
His books include The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge 1983)
and A History of Wales 1530-1990 (Longman's 1992).
“The Welsh were never subject to any but God and the King, and that none
showed their allegiance more than the Welsh.”- Sir William Williams.
Once upon a time, historical writing on early modern Wales reflected a kind of imperial
optimism, and the story told was one of benevolent absorption into a greater British entity.
In reaction, a grimmer narrative portrayed the 250 years after the Act of Union as a time of
betrayal, when the elites were seduced into imperial loyalties, while the older culture was
scorned and trampled, to be saved only by the fierce loyalty of the common people. Clearly,
Wales occupied a special place in early modern Britain, in that it avoided the religious,
political and ethnic catastrophe which befell its Celtic neighbor Ireland, yet failed to emulate
Scotland by preserving any kind of legal or political identity, however vestigial. Though it
never faced the near genocidal conditions of Ireland, yet it conspicuously failed to be a
nation in its own right. In a Greater British perspective, therefore, we see Wales more in
terms of what it failed to become rather than what it actually was. I want to suggest though
that if we consider the situation of Wales against a wider European canvas, then the Welsh
experience emerges as a remarkable success story, as something rich and strange. In no
other comparable nation or sub-nation was official policy anything like as favorable to the
minority culture as in Wales, nor were local elites so enthusiastically integrated into the
national whole while keeping so large a sense of national identity and cultural pride. In
Wales, too, the official state religion served to bolster rather than suppress local identity.
There were many reasons for this distinctness, but above all, I want to stress the thoroughly
successful use of royal institutions and ideology to provide a political focus for Welsh elites.
I. Incorporating Wales
Being a Welsh historian can pose the danger of parochialism - you may know the
cutting remark about the poet who was “world famous, in Wales.” On the positive side, to
understand Welsh history is to be sensitized to some currently pressing historical and
cultural issues, about the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood, between language,
class and religion. These problems are as unresolved in the contemporary Balkans as they
are, perhaps, in Quebec or California. A Welsh standpoint also makes one suspicious about
the way in which the major nations of Europe construct their fundamental historical
narratives. These are usually teleological tales in which such irrelevancies as Wales,
Languedoc, Bavaria, and Catalonia ultimately attain their proper position as units within
Jenkins, Plight of Pygmy Nations
2
“true” or “real” national units, acquiring thereby the appropriate language and class
structure.
Wales offers a splendid case-study of exactly how one of these smaller units was
incorporated within a larger British whole, and it was a remarkably strange process, which in
a European framework, emerges as far odder than Welsh historians often suggest. Wales
was radically different from England, above all in language, far more so than say Languedoc
from France, and these differences absolutely did not diminish following the political union
of the sixteenth century. And yet there was no nationalist reaction, which might strike us as
bizarre from our post-Enlightenment perspective: we know intuitively that a Volk with its
Sprach should have national consciousness, and a tendency to seek national selfdetermination.
In the seventeenth century however, this equation was far from obvious.
Though ethnic identity was defined in terms of language, political self-consciousness could
easily be satisfied through the structures of dynastic kingship, and a concurrent ideological
system expounded with triumphant success through the pageantry, propaganda and
mythology of the Renaissance monarchy. Wales in fact became the first region of the British
Isles to develop an ideology of “British” unity based on loyalty to the monarchy and the
Protestant cause. It was the “Ancient Britons” who thus pioneered “Britishness,” and the
Stuarts exploited this synthesis brilliantly for their own ends.
To illustrate this theme, I’d like to use a specific incident which occurred in October
1642 at the Marquess of Worcester's castle at Raglan, in Monmouthshire, when the twelve
year old Charles, Prince of Wales, arrived to muster support and money for the king's cause
from his principality. Now, Raglan at this point was a remarkable place, where the Marquis
was probably the richest man in Britain. His son and heir was experimenting with steam
engines and hydraulics, which he used to power amazing special effects in the gardens, and
also in spectacular pageants. His wonders included “a garden ornament which opened its
mouth and replied to questions in several languages” - I am sure that Welsh was one of
them! He also used his special effects deliberately to terrify local Puritans: when they came
to search the castle for arms in 1641, he arranged for spectacular rumbling and echoing
effects, while servants ran around yelling “Look to yourselves my masters, for the lions are
got loose. ” The Parliamentarians never stopped running, and did not turn their heads until
the castle was out of sight.
I have no exact idea what he laid on for his royal visitors some months later, but I
assume it was stunning. Surrounded by Worcester's tapestries "full of lively figures and
ancient British stories," the courtiers were presented with the traditional Welsh drink
metheglin. Bardic poetry and Welsh prophecy undoubtedly formed part of the entertainment,
as both were especially cultivated in the Somerset family. It would be noted after the castle's
fall in 1646 to Parliamentary forces that "Never was there an old house so pulled down by
prophecies, ushered into its ruin by predictions, and so laid hold upon by signs and tokens."
In this ultra-patriotic atmosphere, Charles heard "loving and loyal" speeches, asserting that
the Britons were "the true remaining and only one people of this land." They would
therefore do their patriotic duty to help "upon any lawful design to the maintenance of
justice, piety and religion, and defend their persons from all malignants and enemies."
North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002)
3
Now, I’d suggest that what is happening here is rather remarkable. The ideology
being invoked looks as if it should be nationalist, and that to us suggests separatism, but the
conclusion is resolutely unionist. In this thought-world, the more fiercely one asserts local
values, local culture and local particularism, the more one is declaring loyalty for Crown and
nation. Moreover, I wonder where else in Europe at this time one could so proudly assert
the value of a local and, to be frank, a fringe language, as a symbol of national unity?
Perhaps no political system has ever been as successful as Renaissance monarchy in
overcoming the difficulties of persuading a diverse group of races and nations to live
together in one state. Absolute kings tended also to be cosmopolitan kings. Now, that
praise of monarchy will sound like a very bad joke from the perspective of Ireland, where
the same period that witnessed the happy merger of Wales also saw some of the bloodiest
civil warfare anywhere in Europe, especially in the 1590s, and where ethnic tensions were
notorious. The key variable, however, was religious. In the sixteenth or seventeenth
centuries, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states were perfectly viable and even flourishing
entities, except and unless political mistakes allowed an equation to be drawn between
ethnicity, language, and dissident religion, at which point God and King were at odds, and
catastrophe was likely. Ireland was the best-known example of this, but Europe in these
years offers some examples of both the benevolent Welsh pattern, and far more of the
venomous Irish model.
We might discuss this in terms of what was a familiar cliche in Victorian England,
namely the idealized harmony of “cottage, throne and altar.” However saccharine it sounds,
it could work in the sense that when throne and altar clearly represented the interests and the
cultural aspirations of the common people, the “cottage,” the resulting alliance was very
difficult to overcome, and highly resilient against any upstart elite. In early modern Wales,
the three, miraculously, held together. In Ireland, and in much of Europe, they did not.
North American Journal of Welsh Studies Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002) © North American Association for
the Study of Welsh Culture and History 2001. All Rights Reserved.
The Plight of Pygmy Nations;
Wales in Early Modern Europe
Philip Jenkins, Pennsylvania State University
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
His books include The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge 1983)
and A History of Wales 1530-1990 (Longman's 1992).
“The Welsh were never subject to any but God and the King, and that none
showed their allegiance more than the Welsh.”- Sir William Williams.
Once upon a time, historical writing on early modern Wales reflected a kind of imperial
optimism, and the story told was one of benevolent absorption into a greater British entity.
In reaction, a grimmer narrative portrayed the 250 years after the Act of Union as a time of
betrayal, when the elites were seduced into imperial loyalties, while the older culture was
scorned and trampled, to be saved only by the fierce loyalty of the common people. Clearly,
Wales occupied a special place in early modern Britain, in that it avoided the religious,
political and ethnic catastrophe which befell its Celtic neighbor Ireland, yet failed to emulate
Scotland by preserving any kind of legal or political identity, however vestigial. Though it
never faced the near genocidal conditions of Ireland, yet it conspicuously failed to be a
nation in its own right. In a Greater British perspective, therefore, we see Wales more in
terms of what it failed to become rather than what it actually was. I want to suggest though
that if we consider the situation of Wales against a wider European canvas, then the Welsh
experience emerges as a remarkable success story, as something rich and strange. In no
other comparable nation or sub-nation was official policy anything like as favorable to the
minority culture as in Wales, nor were local elites so enthusiastically integrated into the
national whole while keeping so large a sense of national identity and cultural pride. In
Wales, too, the official state religion served to bolster rather than suppress local identity.
There were many reasons for this distinctness, but above all, I want to stress the thoroughly
successful use of royal institutions and ideology to provide a political focus for Welsh elites.
I. Incorporating Wales
Being a Welsh historian can pose the danger of parochialism - you may know the
cutting remark about the poet who was “world famous, in Wales.” On the positive side, to
understand Welsh history is to be sensitized to some currently pressing historical and
cultural issues, about the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood, between language,
class and religion. These problems are as unresolved in the contemporary Balkans as they
are, perhaps, in Quebec or California. A Welsh standpoint also makes one suspicious about
the way in which the major nations of Europe construct their fundamental historical
narratives. These are usually teleological tales in which such irrelevancies as Wales,
Languedoc, Bavaria, and Catalonia ultimately attain their proper position as units within
Jenkins, Plight of Pygmy Nations
2
“true” or “real” national units, acquiring thereby the appropriate language and class
structure.
Wales offers a splendid case-study of exactly how one of these smaller units was
incorporated within a larger British whole, and it was a remarkably strange process, which in
a European framework, emerges as far odder than Welsh historians often suggest. Wales
was radically different from England, above all in language, far more so than say Languedoc
from France, and these differences absolutely did not diminish following the political union
of the sixteenth century. And yet there was no nationalist reaction, which might strike us as
bizarre from our post-Enlightenment perspective: we know intuitively that a Volk with its
Sprach should have national consciousness, and a tendency to seek national selfdetermination.
In the seventeenth century however, this equation was far from obvious.
Though ethnic identity was defined in terms of language, political self-consciousness could
easily be satisfied through the structures of dynastic kingship, and a concurrent ideological
system expounded with triumphant success through the pageantry, propaganda and
mythology of the Renaissance monarchy. Wales in fact became the first region of the British
Isles to develop an ideology of “British” unity based on loyalty to the monarchy and the
Protestant cause. It was the “Ancient Britons” who thus pioneered “Britishness,” and the
Stuarts exploited this synthesis brilliantly for their own ends.
To illustrate this theme, I’d like to use a specific incident which occurred in October
1642 at the Marquess of Worcester's castle at Raglan, in Monmouthshire, when the twelve
year old Charles, Prince of Wales, arrived to muster support and money for the king's cause
from his principality. Now, Raglan at this point was a remarkable place, where the Marquis
was probably the richest man in Britain. His son and heir was experimenting with steam
engines and hydraulics, which he used to power amazing special effects in the gardens, and
also in spectacular pageants. His wonders included “a garden ornament which opened its
mouth and replied to questions in several languages” - I am sure that Welsh was one of
them! He also used his special effects deliberately to terrify local Puritans: when they came
to search the castle for arms in 1641, he arranged for spectacular rumbling and echoing
effects, while servants ran around yelling “Look to yourselves my masters, for the lions are
got loose. ” The Parliamentarians never stopped running, and did not turn their heads until
the castle was out of sight.
I have no exact idea what he laid on for his royal visitors some months later, but I
assume it was stunning. Surrounded by Worcester's tapestries "full of lively figures and
ancient British stories," the courtiers were presented with the traditional Welsh drink
metheglin. Bardic poetry and Welsh prophecy undoubtedly formed part of the entertainment,
as both were especially cultivated in the Somerset family. It would be noted after the castle's
fall in 1646 to Parliamentary forces that "Never was there an old house so pulled down by
prophecies, ushered into its ruin by predictions, and so laid hold upon by signs and tokens."
In this ultra-patriotic atmosphere, Charles heard "loving and loyal" speeches, asserting that
the Britons were "the true remaining and only one people of this land." They would
therefore do their patriotic duty to help "upon any lawful design to the maintenance of
justice, piety and religion, and defend their persons from all malignants and enemies."
North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol. 2, 1 (Winter 2002)
3
Now, I’d suggest that what is happening here is rather remarkable. The ideology
being invoked looks as if it should be nationalist, and that to us suggests separatism, but the
conclusion is resolutely unionist. In this thought-world, the more fiercely one asserts local
values, local culture and local particularism, the more one is declaring loyalty for Crown and
nation. Moreover, I wonder where else in Europe at this time one could so proudly assert
the value of a local and, to be frank, a fringe language, as a symbol of national unity?
Perhaps no political system has ever been as successful as Renaissance monarchy in
overcoming the difficulties of persuading a diverse group of races and nations to live
together in one state. Absolute kings tended also to be cosmopolitan kings. Now, that
praise of monarchy will sound like a very bad joke from the perspective of Ireland, where
the same period that witnessed the happy merger of Wales also saw some of the bloodiest
civil warfare anywhere in Europe, especially in the 1590s, and where ethnic tensions were
notorious. The key variable, however, was religious. In the sixteenth or seventeenth
centuries, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic states were perfectly viable and even flourishing
entities, except and unless political mistakes allowed an equation to be drawn between
ethnicity, language, and dissident religion, at which point God and King were at odds, and
catastrophe was likely. Ireland was the best-known example of this, but Europe in these
years offers some examples of both the benevolent Welsh pattern, and far more of the
venomous Irish model.
We might discuss this in terms of what was a familiar cliche in Victorian England,
namely the idealized harmony of “cottage, throne and altar.” However saccharine it sounds,
it could work in the sense that when throne and altar clearly represented the interests and the
cultural aspirations of the common people, the “cottage,” the resulting alliance was very
difficult to overcome, and highly resilient against any upstart elite. In early modern Wales,
the three, miraculously, held together. In Ireland, and in much of Europe, they did not.
Continental Philosophy
Existentialism
Existentialism, as originally presented by Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus (1913–1960), emphasized the importance of individual existence, choice, and personal responsibility. It was opposed to impersonal systems of thought and to modern mass society. Partially rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith, existentialism has also been influenced by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), Nietzsche, and by Husserl and Heidegger. Kierkegaard's ethical-religious works impacted many twentieth-century religious existentialists such as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Gabriel-Honoré Marcel, and Emmanuel Lévinas, while Nietzsche's supposed nihilism and atheism ("God is dead') deeply influenced Karl Theodor Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray.
Sartre was a philosopher, playwright, social critic, and political activist who became famous with his work L'existentialism est un humanism (1946; Existentialism Is a Humanism) and his phrase "Existence is prior to essence." In the late 1950s, he supplemented this individualistic, existential humanism with social and critical Marxism as expressed in his book Critique de la raison dialectique (1976, 1985; Critique of Dialectical Reason). In his early work L'être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness), influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre described the tension between human consciousness ("beingfor-itself," pour soi), which is "not a thing" but an activity, and the brute existence of things ("being-in-itself," en soi). According to Sartre, man has absolute freedom, even in the most constrained situations as exemplified by Sartre's own experiences in the French resistance movement and his imprisonment in Germany. For Sartre, the self is always an embodied, situated self. Sartre also talked about "bad faith," which he defined as "inauthentic" flight from the anguished burden of choice and responsibility.
Sartre's lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir, who had a great influence upon Sartre, especially upon his later socially oriented work, wrote the famous early feminist work The Second Sex (1949), which described the historical and existential situation of women. According to de Beauvoir, women continue to be defined within a masculine worldview, which assumes an "eternal feminine," an unchanging biological destiny, and a feminine "essence." Men assume that women are "the other," a designation limiting women's freedom and autonomy. De Beauvoir insisted that femaleness is a social construct: "One is not born but rather becomes a woman." De Beauvior proposed the way for the first philosophical discussion of "sexual difference" within the context of the structures of powers, and forces of desire in later feminist writers.
Camus, like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, one of the famous representatives of the post-war existentialist movement in France, is known for his notion of the "absurd" as expressed in his poetic writings such as The Plague (1947). According to Camus, the absurdity of existence provokes the question of the meaning of life and the act of suicide as "the only truly serious philosophical problem" (Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 1). The human being must engage in an ongoing "revolt" against absurdity: "I rebel—therefore we exist" (L'homme révolté, 1951; The Rebel, p. 22).
Jaspers (1883–1969), similar to the early Heidegger, saw the historically situated freedom of the individual within certain "boundary situations" such as guilt, suffering, anxiety, and death. Existence can only be realized in communication. He considered existences a gift of Being, which he called Transcendence, God, or the "Encompassing."
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who had studied under Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers, emigrated to the United States and became a renowned political philosopher despite her sometimes controversial involvement with the Jewish cause. In her works on totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism she took a stance against National Socialism and Heidegger's involvement with it, and against Marxism. She favored political freedom, constitutional democracy, and pluralism in her adopted country, the United States. In addition to Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis (b. 1932), and Habermas, Arendt is the best known political philosopher in the continental tradition.
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
Existentialism, as originally presented by Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus (1913–1960), emphasized the importance of individual existence, choice, and personal responsibility. It was opposed to impersonal systems of thought and to modern mass society. Partially rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith, existentialism has also been influenced by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), Nietzsche, and by Husserl and Heidegger. Kierkegaard's ethical-religious works impacted many twentieth-century religious existentialists such as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Gabriel-Honoré Marcel, and Emmanuel Lévinas, while Nietzsche's supposed nihilism and atheism ("God is dead') deeply influenced Karl Theodor Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray.
Sartre was a philosopher, playwright, social critic, and political activist who became famous with his work L'existentialism est un humanism (1946; Existentialism Is a Humanism) and his phrase "Existence is prior to essence." In the late 1950s, he supplemented this individualistic, existential humanism with social and critical Marxism as expressed in his book Critique de la raison dialectique (1976, 1985; Critique of Dialectical Reason). In his early work L'être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness), influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre described the tension between human consciousness ("beingfor-itself," pour soi), which is "not a thing" but an activity, and the brute existence of things ("being-in-itself," en soi). According to Sartre, man has absolute freedom, even in the most constrained situations as exemplified by Sartre's own experiences in the French resistance movement and his imprisonment in Germany. For Sartre, the self is always an embodied, situated self. Sartre also talked about "bad faith," which he defined as "inauthentic" flight from the anguished burden of choice and responsibility.
Sartre's lifelong companion Simone de Beauvoir, who had a great influence upon Sartre, especially upon his later socially oriented work, wrote the famous early feminist work The Second Sex (1949), which described the historical and existential situation of women. According to de Beauvoir, women continue to be defined within a masculine worldview, which assumes an "eternal feminine," an unchanging biological destiny, and a feminine "essence." Men assume that women are "the other," a designation limiting women's freedom and autonomy. De Beauvoir insisted that femaleness is a social construct: "One is not born but rather becomes a woman." De Beauvior proposed the way for the first philosophical discussion of "sexual difference" within the context of the structures of powers, and forces of desire in later feminist writers.
Camus, like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, one of the famous representatives of the post-war existentialist movement in France, is known for his notion of the "absurd" as expressed in his poetic writings such as The Plague (1947). According to Camus, the absurdity of existence provokes the question of the meaning of life and the act of suicide as "the only truly serious philosophical problem" (Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 1). The human being must engage in an ongoing "revolt" against absurdity: "I rebel—therefore we exist" (L'homme révolté, 1951; The Rebel, p. 22).
Jaspers (1883–1969), similar to the early Heidegger, saw the historically situated freedom of the individual within certain "boundary situations" such as guilt, suffering, anxiety, and death. Existence can only be realized in communication. He considered existences a gift of Being, which he called Transcendence, God, or the "Encompassing."
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who had studied under Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers, emigrated to the United States and became a renowned political philosopher despite her sometimes controversial involvement with the Jewish cause. In her works on totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and imperialism she took a stance against National Socialism and Heidegger's involvement with it, and against Marxism. She favored political freedom, constitutional democracy, and pluralism in her adopted country, the United States. In addition to Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis (b. 1932), and Habermas, Arendt is the best known political philosopher in the continental tradition.
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
Contemporary Philosophy
Martin Heidegger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Jump to: navigation, search
Martin Heidegger Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Martin Heidegger
Birth 26 September 1889
Meßkirch, Germany
Death 26 May 1976 (aged 86)
Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
School/tradition Phenomenology · Hermeneutics · Existentialism · Deconstruction
Main interests Ontology · Metaphysics · Art · Greek philosophy · Technology · Language · Poetry · Thinking
Notable ideas Dasein · Gestell · Heideggerian terminology
Influenced by[show]
Anaximander · Parmenides · Heraclitus · Plato · Aristotle · Duns Scotus · Kant · Hölderlin · Schelling · Hegel · Kierkegaard · Nietzsche · Dilthey · Brentano · Husserl · Rilke · Trakl · Jünger
Influenced[show]
Strauss · Sartre · Kuki · Merleau-Ponty · Gadamer · Arendt · Marcuse · Foucault · Nancy · Ricoeur · Derrida · Agamben · Vattimo · Borgmann · Stiegler · Lacan · Benoist
Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) (pronounced [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛgɐ]) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's work remains controversial due to his involvement with National Socialism.
Introduction
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be," tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood," or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place.[1] But since philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.
Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, commencing from Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense," is susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—reality, logic, God, consciousness, presence, et cetera. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.
Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Major philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.
Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism and was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from May 1933 until May 1945[2]. His defenders, notably Hannah Arendt, see this support as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics.)[3] Defenders think this error was largely irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics, such as his former students Emmanuel Lévinas[4] and Karl Löwith[5], hold that Heidegger's support for National Socialism was immoral and revealed flaws inherent in his thought.
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
The Mesmerhaus in Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up.Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary. After studying theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909 to 1911, he switched to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, and in 1916 finished his venia legendi with a thesis on Duns Scotus.[6] In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent, then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I, working behind a desk and never leaving Germany. After the war, he served as a salaried senior assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg until 1923.
[edit] Marburg years
In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Friedländer, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Gunther (Stern) Anders, and Hans Jonas.
[edit] Freiburg years
When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers including one from Berlin, the most prestigious German university of the day. Among his students at Freiburg were Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928.
[edit] Engagement with National Socialism
In late 1932 Heidegger stood for election as Rector of the University of Freiburg. He took office on April 21, 1933, joining the Nazi party on May 1, 1933[7]. Heidegger's inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede, and other proclamations during this period are notorious for their endorsements of Nazism. In a November 1933 article in the Freiburg student newspaper, Heidegger wrote:
The German people must choose its future, and this future is bound to the Fuhrer...There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people[8].
Heidegger resigned his position on April 23, 1934 after his superiors in the German Education Ministry did not answer his telegrams [9] and the faculty opposed his innovations, which included compulsory hiking for students and a reduction in lecture time. A more detailed account of the personal and philosophical relations between Heidegger and National Socialism is given below.
[edit] Postwar years
After leaving the Nazi Party in May 1945, Heidegger did not again participate in any other political organizations. However, he never repudiated his prior statements praising Hitler and National Socialism. Citing his Nazi ties during the years 1933 to 1945, the French Occupation Authority ruled that Heidegger had been a "fellow traveller" with the Nazis and banned him from teaching in Germany. Authorities later rescinded this decision in 1951, when Heidegger became Professor emeritus with all privileges. He then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.
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Martin Heidegger Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Full name Martin Heidegger
Birth 26 September 1889
Meßkirch, Germany
Death 26 May 1976 (aged 86)
Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
School/tradition Phenomenology · Hermeneutics · Existentialism · Deconstruction
Main interests Ontology · Metaphysics · Art · Greek philosophy · Technology · Language · Poetry · Thinking
Notable ideas Dasein · Gestell · Heideggerian terminology
Influenced by[show]
Anaximander · Parmenides · Heraclitus · Plato · Aristotle · Duns Scotus · Kant · Hölderlin · Schelling · Hegel · Kierkegaard · Nietzsche · Dilthey · Brentano · Husserl · Rilke · Trakl · Jünger
Influenced[show]
Strauss · Sartre · Kuki · Merleau-Ponty · Gadamer · Arendt · Marcuse · Foucault · Nancy · Ricoeur · Derrida · Agamben · Vattimo · Borgmann · Stiegler · Lacan · Benoist
Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) (pronounced [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛgɐ]) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's work remains controversial due to his involvement with National Socialism.
Introduction
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be," tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood," or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place.[1] But since philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.
Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, commencing from Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we speak to our notions of "common sense," is susceptible to error, to fundamental mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—reality, logic, God, consciousness, presence, et cetera. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.
Heidegger's work has strongly influenced philosophy, theology and the humanities. Within philosophy it played a crucial role in the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Major philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida have all analyzed Heidegger's work.
Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism and was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from May 1933 until May 1945[2]. His defenders, notably Hannah Arendt, see this support as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics.)[3] Defenders think this error was largely irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics, such as his former students Emmanuel Lévinas[4] and Karl Löwith[5], hold that Heidegger's support for National Socialism was immoral and revealed flaws inherent in his thought.
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
The Mesmerhaus in Meßkirch, where Heidegger grew up.Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary. After studying theology at the University of Freiburg from 1909 to 1911, he switched to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, and in 1916 finished his venia legendi with a thesis on Duns Scotus.[6] In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent, then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I, working behind a desk and never leaving Germany. After the war, he served as a salaried senior assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg until 1923.
[edit] Marburg years
In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Friedländer, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Gunther (Stern) Anders, and Hans Jonas.
[edit] Freiburg years
When Husserl retired in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers including one from Berlin, the most prestigious German university of the day. Among his students at Freiburg were Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928.
[edit] Engagement with National Socialism
In late 1932 Heidegger stood for election as Rector of the University of Freiburg. He took office on April 21, 1933, joining the Nazi party on May 1, 1933[7]. Heidegger's inaugural address, the Rektoratsrede, and other proclamations during this period are notorious for their endorsements of Nazism. In a November 1933 article in the Freiburg student newspaper, Heidegger wrote:
The German people must choose its future, and this future is bound to the Fuhrer...There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Fuhrer has awakened this will in the entire people[8].
Heidegger resigned his position on April 23, 1934 after his superiors in the German Education Ministry did not answer his telegrams [9] and the faculty opposed his innovations, which included compulsory hiking for students and a reduction in lecture time. A more detailed account of the personal and philosophical relations between Heidegger and National Socialism is given below.
[edit] Postwar years
After leaving the Nazi Party in May 1945, Heidegger did not again participate in any other political organizations. However, he never repudiated his prior statements praising Hitler and National Socialism. Citing his Nazi ties during the years 1933 to 1945, the French Occupation Authority ruled that Heidegger had been a "fellow traveller" with the Nazis and banned him from teaching in Germany. Authorities later rescinded this decision in 1951, when Heidegger became Professor emeritus with all privileges. He then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.
British and Romantic Victorian Cultures
2009 Conference Information
Midwest Victorian Studies Association
Theme: Tipping Points: Pivotal Moments in Victorian Culture
2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In commemoration of that epochal event, MVSA's 2009 annual meeting will explore events or works that signal profound shifts—“tipping points”—in one or more elements of the artistic, literary, musical, political, social, religious, or intellectual life of Britain and its empire during the long nineteenth century.
Keynote speakers:
Jonathan Smith is Professor of English at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge UP). He is also guest editor of a forthcoming 2009 special issue of Victorian Studies titled “Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies"
Ivan Kreilkamp is Associate Professor of English at University of Indiana-Bloomington. He is co-editor of Victorian Studies and the inaugural winner of the MVSA First Book Prize for Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP).
How to submit:
By October 31, 2008, please email a 500-word (max.) abstract and 1-page c.v. to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org. Please include your own name, title, institution, email and snail mail addresses, a phone number, and the abstract itself in the text and/or attachment. If you do not receive an email confirmation of receipt, please re-submit. For a complete copy of the call for papers, click here.
Location:
The 2009 conference will be held in Richmond, Indiana. Founded in 1806 and situated along the historic “Old National Road,” Richmond was pivotal in the nineteenth-century American expansion to the west. Part of the conference will be held in a nineteenth-century Quaker meeting house (now a historical museum), the rest on the campus of Indiana University East, the newest regional campus of IU. Richmond is situated along I-70 near the Ohio border and therefore accessible to most Midwestern car travelers, as well as convenient to the Dayton, Ohio, airport 36 miles away.
Midwest Victorian Studies Association
Theme: Tipping Points: Pivotal Moments in Victorian Culture
2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In commemoration of that epochal event, MVSA's 2009 annual meeting will explore events or works that signal profound shifts—“tipping points”—in one or more elements of the artistic, literary, musical, political, social, religious, or intellectual life of Britain and its empire during the long nineteenth century.
Keynote speakers:
Jonathan Smith is Professor of English at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge UP). He is also guest editor of a forthcoming 2009 special issue of Victorian Studies titled “Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies"
Ivan Kreilkamp is Associate Professor of English at University of Indiana-Bloomington. He is co-editor of Victorian Studies and the inaugural winner of the MVSA First Book Prize for Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge UP).
How to submit:
By October 31, 2008, please email a 500-word (max.) abstract and 1-page c.v. to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org. Please include your own name, title, institution, email and snail mail addresses, a phone number, and the abstract itself in the text and/or attachment. If you do not receive an email confirmation of receipt, please re-submit. For a complete copy of the call for papers, click here.
Location:
The 2009 conference will be held in Richmond, Indiana. Founded in 1806 and situated along the historic “Old National Road,” Richmond was pivotal in the nineteenth-century American expansion to the west. Part of the conference will be held in a nineteenth-century Quaker meeting house (now a historical museum), the rest on the campus of Indiana University East, the newest regional campus of IU. Richmond is situated along I-70 near the Ohio border and therefore accessible to most Midwestern car travelers, as well as convenient to the Dayton, Ohio, airport 36 miles away.
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