How Beautiful Is Small?

Music, Globalization and the Aesthetics of the Local Author(s): Veit Erlmann Source: Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 30 (1998), pp. 12-21 Published by: International Council for Traditional Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/768551 . Accessed: 24/06/2011 04:43
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HOW BEAUTIFUL IS SMALL? MUSIC, GLOBALIZATION AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE LOCAL
by VeitErlmann Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the "hope," as Kant puts it in Critiqueof Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape. Kant's notion of the aesthetic community is still very much with us today. It is a particularly prophetic and astute description, it seems to me, of the consumer societies of the West. Seen in this way, this present-day meaning of the aesthetic is not limited to the arts. Key to this broadened concept of aesthetics is the idea that it is no longer the rules of cognition and ethical conduct that form the basis of good, truthful living, but the realm of the sublime, of apperception and of the sensory. Aesthetics become the ethics of modern human existence in which subjects and communities model themselves on an epistemology of Erscheinungrather than Wesen,on a play of forms instead of the actualization of some existential truth. The desire for community, then, for the aesthetic foundation of human existence, has to do with more than the so called postmodern infatuation with design and surfaces. It is the hallmark of a world without synthesis, of an age of contingence and ambiguity, and of societies without the security of tradition, but also without the claims to universal truth of former eras. In short, aesthetic communities are all those social formations - the loose affiliations, groupings, neo-tribes, and cult groups of free-floating individuals - that are not anchored in rigid structures of control, habitus and filiation. Kant's notion also articulates well with a great deal of current thinking about the cultural politics of the local and of our attempts to remap the global village both immediately before and after the fall of the Wall. The ethnographic project in particular has been complicit with the production of locality in rather ambiguous ways, lending itself both to schemes of domination putting places on the imperial map - and to alternative strategies of resistance - uncovering other, more localized forms of knowledge. The same could of course be said of ethnomusicology and, in a sense, one might even argue that music is particularly suited to constructions of local communities because it is itself one of the most powerful and yet most poorly understood means of producing a sense of locality and local identity. But again, I would

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argue here, it is essentially a Western notion of the aesthetic foundations of society that frequently underlies our thinking about the construction of local communities in performance outside the West. Or, put another way, the unity and very existence of local communities is but a mere function of the relative density of present crouds of communities that Westerners and Western intellectuals, in particular - happen to live in. Examining these ethnographic constructions of aesthetic communities, I am going to make four contentions. First, it is obvious that locality in any given social world cannot be taken for granted. It is a highly fragile social achievement, a social form or a structure of feeling produced in the interaction between numerous material, environmental and cultural factors (Appadurai 1996:179). Second, I argue that the current concern with the local, the microdynamics of culture, and the communal often emerges from a rather problematic projection of contemporary Western notions of locality and community onto social processes elsewhere in the world - projections that are rooted, I believe, in current Western concerns with aesthetics as the quintessential, late modern form of ethics. Third, I maintain that different people have different notions of what is local and how that space is reproduced, maintained and imagined. The processes through which locality and local communities are formed and the ideologies in which they are represented and legitimized entail practices, knowledges, and power relations that differ vastly from those underlying the production of aesthetic communities in late modern consumer societies. Finally, the fact that there are significant differences in the forms and constructions of locality around the world does not mean that these are unrelated. Quite to the contrary, such localities and the various practices and ideologies associated with them often emerge only in critical response to forces posing a threat to communities, spaces, territories and identities that do not easily yield to the pressures of the nation-state or global market flows. As my ethnographic evidence, I am limiting myself to an example from an area and a tradition that I am particularly familiar with: the music of Zulu-speaking migrant workers in South Africa known as isicathamiya,made internationally popular by Ladysmith Black Mambazo (see also Erlmann 1996). A performance genre such as isicathamiya is useful for the kind of argument I want to make, not because it is aesthetics or music per se that I am concerned with here, but because music, style, popular constructions of worldbeat, and the realm of the arts in general easily lend themselves to the sort of assumptions about small-scale societies, community-building, and utopia that underlie the anti-capitalist politics of localism in the West. Like other black South African performance genres that have recently received increased scholarly attention, isicathamiyais deeply interwoven with the overall process of urbanization and labor migration in South Africa. An element of the local cultures of Zulu-speaking migrant workers for more than half a century, isicathamiyais currently being performed throughout the year during weekly all-night competitions in township halls, hostel recreation halls, and similar venues in Durban, Johannesburg, and other industrial centers. Although in recent years the popularity of these weekend events has somewhat lessened, the competitions still involve up to twenty or more choirs and attract audiences of fifty to several hundred spectators.

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The genre isicathamiya emerged at the turn of the century out of the experiences and struggles of Zulu-speaking migrant workers in Natal. Fleeing desperate living conditions in the countryside, growing numbers of males were pushed into South Africa's burgeoning industrial economy to work in the harbor and railway yards of Durban or in the white households and embryonic manufacturing industry of the Witwatersrand. Isicathamiyawas born of the encounter between these two worlds: the world of rural homesteads, warfare, ancestor spirits and wedding ceremonials on the one hand, and the realm of factories and urban popular culture on the other hand. But these worlds not only rested on two vastly different sets of images of personal identity, sociability and aesthetic value. During the formative period of isicathamiya- a period that stretches from around the first world war to the mid-1930s - both spheres were also associated with and constructed through specific performance genres. Thus, social relations in the countryside centered around a body of danced song and sung dance that celebrated and ritually constituted the lineage as the quintessential unit of meaningful social and human existence, both for itself and in relation to other lineages. A significant portion of isicathamiyasongs either directly derives from wedding songs or otherwise elaborates on gender issues, problems of parental authority, and other such questions that arise from the profound transformations affecting rural households in modern South African society. South Africa's cities, for their part, provided an equally rich body of genres for migrants to draw upon. By far the most potent urban influence on early isicathamiya were the songs and dances associated with the minstrel and vaudeville theater of the nineteenth century. Up until the turn of the century, minstrel shows had been without doubt the most popular form of stage entertainment in South Africa, and although essentially a grossly racist genre pandering to white colonial anxieties, blackface minstrelsy met with no small degree of enthusiasm among the country's black population. What attracted these audiences to songs such as "Susanna," ragtime dancing, and the figure of the "coon," besides the novelty and hilarious drama embodied in these core symbols of the minstrel stage, were two things. Minstrelsy, and here especially the "coon," provided images of urban sophistication and modernization, and at the same time, by deriding black elite idiosyncrasies, it offered a means of distancing oneself from modernity's discontents. Black audiences knew that not all black people were boisterous and mischievous, but they also knew that some were. And thus the image of the "coon," once it was wrested from the exclusive domain of white supremacist discourse, became a tool of intra-communal criticism, a way of dealing with an increasingly differentiated social environment. Wedding songs, regimental war songs, and the minstrel repertoire in the beginning may have arisen from two diametrically opposed worlds, but by the turn of the century such forms of popular performance had long become entangled with one another. In fact, one of the most striking historical lessons to be learned from the rise of a performance tradition like isicathamiyais just how intermeshed different social worlds and forms of imagination already were in the early history of modern South Africa, and how the expressive genres that emerged from this intermixture were anything but primordial, undiluted, or ancient.

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The hybridity and intertextuality of styles and cultural traditions in isicathamiya also highlight a number of interlocking themes that are fundamental to an understanding of the cultural politics of localism in South Africa. These themes are an expression of the complex dialectic between migrants' experiences of broader realities such as the city and the apartheid state, notions of locality, and ideas about the ideal social order. The first of these themes is the troubling feeling of rupture pervading the genre, a rupture not just of all established social ties - of high and low, male and female, the home and the world - but a desperate sense of the radical discontinuity of time as such. At least, this is what appears to be the meaning of such a desolately taciturn song such as "Anginamali," by the Empangeni Home Tigers: Namhlanje kimi, kukudeemuva, kukudephambili. Today, for me, the past is far and the future is far. What migrant workers seem to register in verses such as these as well as in the angered, mournful sounds of isicathamiya generally is not just the condition of migrancy. It is above all their growing loss of agency. Thus, something more is at stake in these songs than placelessness, something more existential and so utterly disquieting that it must inevitably belie any Western fantasies about an Africa at one with itself and with the inner sources of human existence. It is this deep sense of alienation which Homi Bhabha (1992), discussing recent South African literature, must have in mind when he speaks of the "unhomely" as a paradigmatic experience typical of a wide range of historical conditions and social settings. To be unhomely, he writes, does not simply mean to be homeless. Unhomeliness is a condition in which the border between home and world becomes confused, in which the private and the public become part of each other. The home no longer remains the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its counterpart. The unhomely, Bhabha (1992:141) concludes, "is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world." The unhomely, then, in a wider sense, could be taken as that condition in which the making of an individual experience may well happen in one place, while its actual coordinates lie in a reality beyond the limited, local space and often beyond the conceptual capacity of any one individual. The result of this strange dialetic of the private and the public, the near and the far, the local and the global is, to use Fredric Jameson's phrase, a "new play of absence and presence" (Jameson 1991:411). Isicathamiya performance, I would argue, like all forms of performance located at this particular juncture of the world-in-the-home and the home-in-the-world, not only captures this moment, it is also inconceivable without this figurative play. To understand this, we have to turn to the ways the experience of the unhomely is mediated, metaphorically configured and embodied in two further themes, two key tropes in isicathamiyaperformers' imagination of place: the crowd and the machine. Both these tropes stand for the profound distinctions labor migrants perceive between the social worlds and types of locality they inhabit simultaneously. To begin with the first trope, the crowd, the first observation that will strike even the most uninitiated listener is that there is in isicathamiyawhat Walter

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Benjamin (1973:122) calls "the secret presence of a crowd." Like in Baudelaire's poetry, in isicathamiyasongs the crowd is rarely named. And yet, it is through the crowd that migrant workers see the city, as though through an "agitated veil." The words of "Eloff Street," a song by the Dundee Wandering Singers released in 1940 about Johannesburg's elegant main shopping street, illustrates this well. Safika eGoli. We arrived in Johannesburg. Safika eGoli kwandongaziyashunga We arrived in Johannesburg, in the heat-chamber, kwantaba zikhala amanzi. where the mountains pour out water. esahamba. Ngangihamba noMogothukanwele I was accompanied by "Bald-headed," when he was still alive. Awukhalime wethu awele man damn it! Give direction, brother, cross, man, damn it! Safika eGoli sabona intombi nensizwa zehla ngo Eloff Street. We arrived in Johannesburg and saw ladies and men walking down Eloff Street. Sanibona siyanibingelela. Greetings, we are greeting you. The urban space that is figuratively mapped in this and other songs like it, ordered as it may appear at first glance, is in fact the epitome of disorder: a space hinging on the experience of shock. For not only does the song articulate a fascination with the strolling crowds, it also registers the rough and truncated mode of communication - ambiguously couched in English, the language of the colonial city - corresponding to the shock experienced in urban traffic: "man, damn it." Perhaps the most telling expression of the sort of urban movement - the strolling and crossing - hinted at in a song like "Eloff Street" is istep, the earliest form of isicathamiyachoreography. Istep is unlike any other form of men's traditional dances that usually feature powerful vertical stamping movements. Instead, istep consists of a simple walking gait, executed in such a manner that two steps forward are followed by two steps backwards and so on. This is done with a lot of vigor but without the rigidity of a fast pacing person. A variation of this basic step is a rapidly sliding, forward-movement of one foot which is then kept suspended in the air, slightly crossed in front of the other leg. The meaning of these patterns can only be appreciated when seen in relation to the reconfiguration of space and movement engineered by the industrial city. In his brilliant reflections on "Walking in the City," Michel de Certeau (1954:91-110) has argued that the city produces its own "urbanizing" language of power. In the South African city, that most disciplinary and disciplined space of spaces, the normativity and rigidity of the spatial order imposes severe restrictions on its black inhabitants' everyday choices of organized space. A black person encountering a white pedestrian on a sidewalk has to step aside and use the street. Curfew regulations that were in effect in many South African cities until the late 1980s prevented black

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people from walking certain sections of the city at night. To socialize with their fellow domestic workers next door, the "maids" of the white suburbs could only use the sidewalks - and so on. Clearly, a black person has virtually none of the means at his disposal to actualize and create spaces. He or she lives in no space at all, and does not, in practice, constitute a near and a far, a "here" and a "there." Inevitably, this lack of choice, this absence of a place - the primordial black experience of the white man's city - sheds a rather ambiguous light on a type of dancing such as istep. Although dancing might be fruitfully conceptualized as a bodily rhetoric, in which "turns" and "figures" operate on culturally codified systems of bodily communication, it does not always manipulate hegemonic spatial organizations in the same way that the "turns of phrase" of a speaker create metamorphoses of grammar and order. Istep, I argue, in its basic form, celebrates the body finding its proper place in the normative space of the engineers of the apartheid city. The walking of istep, as the most condensed rhetorical figure in isicathamiyadancing, does not constitute a displaced, wandering semantic. The to and fro does not, like the evocations of the rural "home" in the wedding dance styles incorporated into isicathamiya,counterpose its own spatial enunciation against the rigid grid of the segregated city. Istep is the omnipresent sign of the city itself. It is walking in the neutral, and thus ratifies the absence of a place and the continuous search for a proper place that propels the mobile individual in capitalism. As de Certeau (1984:103) aptly writes, "The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place." Symbolically akin to the crowd as the most archetypal figure of urban locality and its opposition to rural space is the second trope: the machine. As is well known, in his work on Baudelaire and Paris, Walter Benjamin linked the experience of the city and the shock in the crowd with the experience of the worker at the machine. The pedestrians in the street, he writes (1973:133), "act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically." But like the crowd, the machine and industrial technology for the most part are hardly ever present in isicathamiya songs, with two exceptions. One is the train that carries migrant workers to the city and that becomes the theme of numerous songs; the other is the enactment, indeed the very mode of performance itself, prevalent during the 1940s and 1950s called isikambula. gambling. What does performance have in common with gambling, machines and urban spaces? Most isicathamiyaveterans thought isikambulareflected the way in which choirs "took chances" by shuttling between different venues and by participating in different competitions during a single night. What resonates through this interpretation of the term is a deep sense of frustration, not so much about life being, as in an analogy, like a game of chance, but about the impossibility of desire as such. And it is here again that Benjamin's work on Baudelaire reminds us of an important parallel. In the section in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" that follows his reflections on the machine, Benjamin explores one further extension of factory and machine work: gambling. Briefly, Benjamin's argument is that gambling shares with wage labor in the factory a sense of futility, emptiness. The gambler no less than

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the factory worker is unable to complete something. Starting all over again is the regulative idea of the game and of wage labor. Both are devoid of substance; they are only a matter of reflex action. Enslaved to a relentless mechanism, a drudgery that makes them start all over again, and to a time that reaches only as far as the next card or the next operation at the machine, the gambler and the wage laborer "cannot make much use of experience" (1973:136). What we have seen so far in the two tropes of the crowd and the machine is the quintessentially ambiguous nature of the migrants' perspectives on urban space and how the unhomely enters into isicathamiya's very performance practice and syntax. At the same time, as we have seen, the feeling resonating through these verbal and embodied figurations of the modern urban spaces speaks of disorientation, uncertainty and ambiguity. But far from submitting to the shock of the world-in-the-home and the home-in-the-world, isicathamiya performers also tell of a past and a future in which a truthful existence and an ordered social universe are anchored in and thus mutually enabled by the homely - a firmly framed world of local rootedness, tradition, and of sexual and collective identity. The alternative that isicathamiyaperformers pose against the unhomely is to harness the instability of social forms and meanings in capitalist society, to bring to a standstill the restless re-location and re-definition of people, things, and meanings. By far the most crucial theme here, the root image if you will, of this vastly idealized, fictitious world is that of the home. It is present in countless songs. For instance, a typical isicathamiya song text would run as follows: Bhekani baba wami nawe mama wami, sekunzima lapho ngikhona. Look, my father and mother, I am now in trouble. Ngiyalivuma icala lami, yebo ngonile. I confess, I did wrong. Ngihlulekile, sehlulekilethina. I have failed, we have failed. Kungconomasiphindekwelakithi eMphumulo. We'd better return to Mphumulo, our home. The Zulu term for "home" that is used in this and most other songs is khaya. Khaya, in the Zulu lexicon, is a fairly elastic term covering a wide range of meanings. It denotes a dwelling, an inhabited place, a place to which one belongs, or even the members of a family. In the broadest sense, then, the sense in which it is most commonly understood, khayadenotes the home, the place of origin. But whatever the implied meaning, khayais not a thing, an entity or substance. Rather it entails a view of locality as a practiced place, a set of relationships in space and time, a domain of social practice engendered and integrated by rules of moral conduct and material production, by images of shape and process. In short, the meaning of khaya is not a matter of conceptual definition, of the signified alone. It is above all a question of practice: performance practice, social practice, and historical practice. Isicathamiyaperformance reflects and at the same time enacts migrants' nostalgia for the "home" in a variety of ways. Thus, apart from the fact that most choirs consist of a combination of men from the same kin group and/or the same rural area, isicathamiyasongs and dances, through their association

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with wedding dances, evoke potent images of domestic unity and, by celebrating basically iniquitous gender relationships, of social control. Another method of reconstructing the "home" that I would like to dwell on are the competitions in which isicathamiyaperformance takes place. We owe a trenchant analysis of some of these strategies to Jonathan Clegg (1981) whose work on ingomadance teams has revealed striking correspondences between urban migration, farm labor, pre-colonial lineage and district organization, and the ritualization of conflict in competitive dancing. Basically, Clegg's argument goes as follows: precolonial Zulu society rested on a territorial division into what was called "cheeks" - political units uniting several patrilineal homesteads under the authority of a headman. Such "cheeks" had clear boundaries - rivers, mountains, valleys. After the conquest of the Zulu kingdom by the British in 1879 and after the ancestral lands had been carved up by white farms, competition between different cheeks, once a source of social cohesion, could no longer be controlled by conventional, legitimate means such as mock stick-fighting. What had formerly been a playful contest between youths from different districts increasingly turned into serious confrontations between people competing for employment and other resources on white farms overlaying two or more precolonial "cheeks." In an attempt to mitigate such violent conflicts, Clegg claims, migrant workers around the 1920s began to organize dance competitions that translated the rural antagonisms and local alliances into the language of the urban environment. By staging these competitions, dancers provided a form in which the tensions of migrant existence could be dealt with in less harmful ways than by armed "faction fights." But even these dance competitions never quite managed to evade the ethos of power, physical strength and violence sporadically stirring even the most placid-minded performers to agitated expressions of local pride. Thus, ingoma dance events in Durban in the 1920s routinely pitted against each other different segments of the migrant workforce. Not surprisingly, such fights frequently led to serious bloodshed and eventually provided the justification for a harsh and lasting clampdown in 1931 on certain forms of dancing and other somewhat rustic leisure activities popular with migrant workers (Erlmann 1991:95-111). It is out of this juncture of white "reformist" urban choral politics and militant African opposition, I would claim, that isicathamiya competitions emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, satisfying the need among South Africa's most urbanized migrant population for the legitimate expression of regional and group identity. Or, as "Intselelo," a song by the Empangeni Home Tigers, puts it: Nants' intsele lo. Here is a challenge. Awuviki! Shield yourself! Asigadli ngazagela baba. We are not attacking with assegais, father. Asigadli ngazagila, sigadla ngengoma. We are not attacking with assegais, but with song.

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Several conclusions can be drawn from my reading of Clegg's analysis and from my discussion of such tropes of locality as the crowd and the machine. First, the sense of locality that expresses itself in the songs and dances is not given from time immemorial. It is the result of complex and decidedly modern processes involving national regimes, capitalist relations of production, apartheid legislation, and specific forms of rural nostalgia, emerging in the city and in response to urban forms of social and spatial order. Second, the localities and communities of choirs and fans symbolically figured through these performances differ from Western notions in several regards, but perhaps most notably in the way sociality, solidarity, communality - in other words the things that hold communities together - emerge not from the free, aesthetic interplay of detached, self-enclosed and vaguely emplaced individuals, but from violence. The imagined local communities celebrated in isicathamiyaperformance arise from the antagonisms resulting from the competing claims of firmly positioned groups of individuals and from the attempt to translate these antagonisms into ritualized displays of local opposition and allegiance. In a sense, one might argue, aesthetics here is only an afterthought, an expression of community, not the foundation of it. Finally, the specifically aesthetic underpinnings of current Western constructions of locality and community and the way they interact with other definitions of locality elsewhere in the world raise a number of questions about locality as a valid category in a critical theory of contemporary global culture. One of these questions, in my view, concerns the legitimacy of practices and ideologies of local identity basing themselves in what I consider to be questionable notions of the authentic, essential, traditional or fundamental. It is clearly out of a critical reaction to such notions that some authors in the West - I am thinking here of Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Rorty and others - have argued for the necessity of a politics of contingency, irony, and aesthetic play; a politics that disrupts the ironclad arrogance of modern thought and opens up the possibility for a truly postmodern order of freedom, difference and tolerance. While I am essentially in agreement with such a project and while I do believe that such a politics may provide some of the answers to the problems facing late modern societies in the West, I am wary of the way anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and other scholars working in embattled communities outside the West have tended to equate the cultural practices and expressive forms of such communities with anti-hegemonic resistance per se. Remapping the global village, to me, does not only mean that we have to persist in our attempts to problematize the politics of ethnicity, nationalism and Western cultural hegemony. We also need to get a better understanding of the ways in which counterforces - the politics and culture of local communities and movements - are derivative of the very discourses they seek to interrogate. At the very least, a reflection such as my discussion of specific South African forms of localism in performance should aim to sound a warning against the tendency to hypostatize Western notions of the aesthetic community in contexts where the local quite frequently serves the contrary project of re-anchoring the subject in a world of fixities, certainties and dependence.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter 1973 CharlesBaudelaire:A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: NLB. Bhabha, Homi 1992 "The World and the Home." Social Text31/32:141-53. Clegg, Jonathan 1981 "Ukubuyisa isidumbu - Bringing back the Body: An Examination into the Ideology of Vengeance in the Msinga and Mpofana Rural AfricanStudies, ed. Locations, 1892-1944." In Working Papersin Southern Philip Bonner, vol. II. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. de Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice Everyday of Life. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press. Erlmann, Veit 1991 African Stars. Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996 Nightsong. Performance,Power and Practice in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric 1991 Postmodernism The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke Or, University Press.