Step 4A - Describe the event/genre(s) as a whole Flashcards
Relate 7 anthropological lenses to…
forms of artistic communication
4 additional categories relate to how arts fit into culture
- apparent purpose of event
- emotions (how feel about? what expressed during?)
- community values shown
- communal investment (what, to what extent, etc.)
Take a first glance questions
WWWWWH
what, why, who, to whom, where, when, with what connotations, how are new instances created?
Take a first glance questions (source)
Seeger (2004)
Seeger, Anthony. 2004. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. University of Illinois Press.
(who, what, why, etc.) list modified from his suggestion to start with journalistic questions for broad strokes
“Suyá people from Mato Grosso, Brazil
“This book has discussed the total organization of the production of Suyá song, from its relationship to other verbal genres to its integral association with economic production and social reproduction. The study of musical performance contributes to anthropology an understanding of performative processes in general.” (Seeger 2004:139)
Music is a performance genre, and the anthropological study of music emphasizes the importance of social process as performed, constantly reformulated in creative yet patterned ways.” (Seeger 2004:139)
• Study of music and role of music in social process (xiii)
• Musical anthropology study of society from the perspective of musical performance (xiii)
• Questions (xiii)
o “Why is the music performed in that way rather than another?”
o “Why perform music at all in a given situation in a society?”
• Field research and reflexive anthropology – general social and political process (138)
• The Mouse Ceremony – rite of passage for young boys beginning initiation into male-oriented activities of the village plaza (2)
Rising pitch musical analysis of unison songs (Ch 5: 88-103)
• Suyá didn’t talk about melodic features of their music (93)
• Clues
o Aural cues with force (97)
o Vocal tension could relate to rise in pitch, intentional or not (97)
o Deep throat or ‘big throat’ aesthetics of Suyá song (100)
o Age (young vs old), pitch rise when young men join after older (101)
Aesthetics of ‘big throat’ and identity of singers important (100)
Absolute or rising pitch is important to Seeger, not to Suyá”
For 7 lenses, give
- basic description
- research questions
- research activities
- artistic domain connections
- meaning connections (basically just relates each one to Step C—broader cultural themes)
Space (special notes)
includes the people responsible for the space; INCLUDE BROADER PHYSICAL CONTEXT (national/regional/local)
Participant organization
includes everyone involved, whether present at the event or not (e.g., creators of a script)
shape through time
shortest segment in which we’re interested is the motif (smallest meaningful collection of performance features); INCLUDE BROADER TEMPORAL CONTEXT (year, month, day, time)
performance features
observable, patterned/conventional; anything that can be transcribed
• produced by participants
• choosing embodied actions (within acceptable variation; based on source material)
• derived from formal systems (according to genre expectations)
• and temporal patterns
• experienced (1) by participants (2) through communication channels
• feature production
• similarities/contrasts
communication channels
what can you perceive through each of the 5 (hear? see? smell? feel? taste?)
communication channels (source)
Finnegan, Ruth. 2002. Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection. London: Routledge.
Finnegan (2002)
feature production
what do participants do with voices, bodies, words, objects?
similarities/contrasts
how they express intensity, weight, flow? how organize time?
performance features: look especially for
o repeated actions
o actions that provoke a strong reaction
o heavy contrasts between sets of bundled features
o where participants focus their attention
o what other people have told you is important
