Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:43:10.521Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making Culture Coherent: Nomadism, “Open Agenda” and Music in Wichi Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Miguel A. García
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This work is an attempt to find relations between ecological conditions, adaptive systems and musical practices. I examine the hypothesis that the Wichi aborigines of the centre of the Province of Formosa, Argentina, have adopted a common policy to handle their survival resources, their symbolic resources and their musical resources. The aim is to gather evidence to support the notion that policies applying to several aspects of Wichi life, such as everyday subsistence chores, mobility, religious activities, and so on, also apply to their musical practices. They use an active strategy to approach and solve situations on the spot, a predisposition to base their behaviour on an open agenda. At the level of their musical practices, such strategy becomes evident both in the succession of actions conforming the events, and in the structuring of their songs. This open agenda strategy became, while I stayed in the Wichi settlements, one of the clearest conditionings of the ethnographic experience. On one hand, my anxiety to minimise uncertainty and “maximise” the field work yield led me to seek, with little success, a predictable working context in terms of planned actions and temporal organisation. This clashed head on with the attitude of my Wichi collaborators. On the other hand, though the levels of anxiety decreased after a year's experience, the problem persisted now in the form of a number of questions that became more and more important as my research progressed. Gradually, the upset caused by the impossibility to control the time of the appointed interviews, and of knowing whether next morning the person I was to see to, for instance, tape the songs he/she remembered from youth, was still in the settlement or had ‘up and gone’ several miles away to visit some relative, gave way to a series of questions. How pervasive was this open agenda strategy in the Wichi world? Were musical practices also imprinted by this strategy? Could this explain the cultural coherence of the Wichi society? Finally, was it possible to imagine and/or understand human groups in terms of cultural coherence? In an attempt to answer these questions, I examine the concept of cultural coherence, provide a brief description of the Wichi ecological conditions and adaptive system, and then explain their open agenda strategy and how it also applies to some musical practices.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 34 , 2002 , pp. 47 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 By The International Council for Traditional Music

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This paper is a more detailed version of my presentation at the 36th ICTM World Conference held in Rio de Janeiro, 4-11 July 2001. It was originally called “Making culture coherent. Nomadism, contingency and music in Wichi society”. My heartfelt thanks to Irma Ruiz, from the University of Buenos Aires, for her helpful comments.

References

References Cited

Appadurai, Arjun 2001 La modernidad desbordada. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica.Google Scholar
Barúa, Guadalupe 1986 Principios de organización en la sociedad Mataco. Suplemento Antropológico 21 (1): 73–129.Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory 1958 Naven. A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view. Stanford, California: Standford University Press.Google Scholar
1991 Una teoria del juego y de la fantasia. Pasos hacia una ecología de la mente, 205–21. Buenos Aires: Planeta.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard 1975 Verbal art as performance. American Anthropologist 77:290–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, Harris 1997 The practice of perception: Multi-functionality and time in the musical experience of a heavy metal drummer. Ethnomusicology 41 (3):464–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blacking, John 1981 Ethnography of musical performance. In Report of the twelfth congress, International Musicological Society, Berkely, 1977, Heartz Daniel and Bonnnie C. Wade eds, 383–85. Kassel, Basel, London: Bërenreiter.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz 1966 Kwakiutl ethnography. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Braunstein, José 1978-1979 Las bandas matacas, gentilicios. Scripta Ethnologica 5:82–90.Google Scholar
1989-1990 Tribus de los matacos. Hacia una nueva carta étnica del Gran Chaco 1:1–6.Google Scholar
Braunstein, José and Garcia, Miguel A. 1996 Estabilidad y cambio de la musica ritual en el este de la cadena cultural mataca. Scripta Ethnologica 18:143–55.Google Scholar
Bruner, Edward 1986 Experience and its expressions. In The anthropology of experience, Victor Turner and Edward Bruner eds. Urban and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
García, Miguel A. 1997 De la diversidad del presente a la narratión del pasado. Disenso y consenso en las prácticas musicales wichí. Música en Investigación 1:25–40.Google Scholar
1998a Mundos imaginarios y experiencias perceptivas. La música ritual de los wichí. Resonancias 3:60–74.Google Scholar
1998b Conversión religiosa y cambio musical. Latin American Music Review 19 (2):203–17.Google Scholar
2000 De cómo los pilagá y wichí cambiaron los sueños por la Biblia. Reflexiones en torno al origen y transmisión de los cantos en el nuevo contexto religioso. Paper presented at 50th International Congress of Americanists, Warsawa, 10-14 July 2000.Google Scholar
2001 Ser evangélico de uno y otro lado del limite ètnico. El caso de los aborígenes wichí de Argentina. Paper presented at XI Jornadas sobre alternativas religiosas en America Latina, Santiago de Chile, 3-5 October 2001.Google Scholar
In press La politica de la inmediatez en la estructuración del tiempo, la acción y las prácticas musicales. Suplemento Antropológico, Paraguay.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford 1983 From the native's point of view. In Local knowledge. Further essays in interpretative anthropology, chap.3. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson, James 1997 Culture, power, place: Ethnography at the end of an era. In Culture, power, place. Explorations in critical anthropology, Gupta Akhil and James Ferguson eds. Durham and London :Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman and Waugh, Linda R. 1987 La forma sonora de la lengua. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1964 El pensamiento salvaje. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.Google Scholar
Malinowski, Bronislaw 1986 Los argonautas del Pacifico occidental. Barcelona: Planeta Agostini.Google Scholar
Messineo, Cristina 1988 El lenguaje del éxtasis: practica de la glosolalia entre los Mataco de Carboncito (Pcia. de Salta). Scripta Ethnologica, Supplementa 7: 113–20.Google Scholar
Miller, Elmer 1979 Los tobas argentinos. Armonia y disonacia en una sociedad. México: Siglo 21.Google Scholar
Seeger, Anthony 1987 Why Suyá Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shore, Bradd 1996 Culture in mind. Cognition, culture and the problem of meaning. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Turino, Thomas 1999 Signs of imagination, identity, and experience: A Peircian semiotic theory of music. Ethnomusicology 43 (2):221–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Victor 1980 La selva de los simbolos. Madrid: Siglo 21.Google Scholar