How Beautiful Is Small

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
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HOW BEAUTIFUL IS SMALL?
MUSIC, GLOBALIZATION AND THE AESTHETICS
OF THE LOCAL
by Veit Erlmann
Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of

community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the b
Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, ma
Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, th
out of the "hope," as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for
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 Erscheinung rather 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 contin-
gence 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, group-
ings, 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 ethno-
graphic 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 resis-
tance - 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
ERLMANN HOW BEAUTIFUL IS SMALL? / 13
argue here, it is essentially a Western

of society that frequently underlies ou
local communities in performance outs
the unity and very existence of local c
of the relative density of present crou
and Western intellectuals, in particu
Examining these ethnographic constr
am going to make four contentions. Fi
given social world cannot be taken for
achievement, a social form or a structure
between numerous material, environm
1996:179). Second, I argue that the c
microdynamics of culture, and the com
problematic projection of contempor
community onto social processes elsew
are rooted, I believe, in current Wes
quintessential, late modern form of et
people have different notions of w
reproduced, maintained and imagined.
and local communities are formed an
represented and legitimized entail pract
that differ vastly from those underly
munities in late modern consumer soci
significant differences in the forms an
world does not mean that these are un
localities and the various practices and
emerge only in critical response to for
spaces, territories and identities that d
the nation-state or global market flow
As my ethnographic evidence, I am li
an area and a tradition that I am partic
Zulu-speaking migrant workers in Sout
internationally popular by Ladysmit
1996). A performance genre such as isi
argument I want to make, not because
I am concerned with here, but because
of worldbeat, and the realm of the art
the sort of assumptions about small-sca
utopia that underlie the anti-capitalist
Like other black South African perfo
received increased scholarly attention, i
the overall process of urbanization and
element of the local cultures of Zulu-sp
half a century, isicathamiya is currently
during weekly all-night competitions in
and similar venues in Durban, Johanne
Although in recent years the popularity
lessened, the competitions still involve u
audiences of fifty to several hundred
14 / 1998 YEARBOOK FOR TRADITIONAL MUSIC
The genre isicathamiya emerged at the turn of the century out

experiences and struggles of Zulu-speaking migrant workers in Nat
desperate living conditions in the countryside, growing numbers
were pushed into South Africa's burgeoning industrial economy t
the harbor and railway yards of Durban or in the white hous
embryonic manufacturing industry of the Witwatersrand. Isicath
born of the encounter between these two worlds: the world of rural home-
steads, 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 signi-
ficant portion of isicathamiya songs 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 modern-
ization, 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 isicathamiya is 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.
The hybridity and intertextuality of st

amiya also highlight a number of inte
to an understanding of the cultural pol
themes are an expression of the co
experiences of broader realities such
notions of locality, and ideas about th
themes is the troubling feeling of rup
not just of all established social ties
the home and the world - but a desper
of time as such. At least, this is wha
a desolately taciturn song such as "Ang
Tigers:
Namhlanje kimi, kukude emuva, kukude phambili.
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 Bhabh
(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 recognitio
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 pla
of absence and presence" (Jameson 1991:411). Isicathamiya performance, I
would argue, like all forms of performance located at this particular junctur
of the world-in-the-home and the home-in-the-world, not only captures thi
moment, it is also inconceivable without this figurative play. To understan
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 isicathamiya performers' imagination of place: the crowd and the
machine. Both these tropes stand for the profound distinctions labor migrant
perceive between the social worlds and types of locality they inhabit simul
taneously.
To begin with the first trope, the crowd, the first observation that will strike
even the most uninitiated listener is that there is in isicathamiya what Walter
Benjamin (1973:122) calls "the secret presence of a crowd." Li

Baudelaire's poetry, in isicathamiya songs the crowd is rarely named
it is through the crowd that migrant workers see the city, as thoug
an "agitated veil." The words of "Eloff Street," a song by th
Wandering Singers released in 1940 about Johannesburg's eleg
shopping street, illustrates this well.
Safika eGoli.
We arrived in Johannesburg.
Safika eGoli kwandonga ziyashunga
We arrived in Johannesburg, in the heat-chamber,
kwantaba zikhala amanzi.
where the mountains pour out water.
Ngangihamba noMogothukanwele esahamba.
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 isicathamiya choreography. 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 "urban-
izing" 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
people from walking certain sections o

their fellow domestic workers next do
could only use the sidewalks - and so on
none of the means at his disposal to ac
lives in no space at all, and does not,
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 isicathamiya dancing, 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 incor-
porated 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 isicathamiya veterans thought isikambula reflected 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
the factory worker is unable to complete something. Starting all

is the regulative idea of the game and of wage labor. Both are
substance; they are only a matter of reflex action. Enslaved to a r
mechanism, a drudgery that makes them start all over again, and
that reaches only as far as the next card or the next operation at th
the gambler and the wage laborer "cannot make much use of expe
(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 isicathamiya performers
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.
Ng~yalivuma icala lami, yebo ngonile.
I confess, I did wrong.
Ngihlulekile, sehlulekile thina.
I have failed, we have failed.
Kungcono masiphinde kwelakithi 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, khaya denotes the home,
the place of origin. But whatever the implied meaning, khaya is 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.
Isicathamiya performance 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, isicathamiya songs and dances, through their association
with wedding dances, evoke poten

celebrating basically iniquitous gen
Another method of reconstructing th
on are the competitions in which isic
We owe a trenchant analysis of some
(1981) whose work on ingoma dance t
ences between urban migration, farm
organization, and the ritualization
Basically, Clegg's argument goes as fo
on a territorial division into what was
several patrilineal homesteads unde
"cheeks" had clear boundaries - riv
conquest of the Zulu kingdom by the
lands had been carved up by white fa
cheeks, once a source of social cohesio
conventional, legitimate means suc
formerly been a playful contest betw
increasingly turned into serious conf
for employment and other resources o
precolonial "cheeks." In an attempt to
claims, migrant workers around the
titions that translated the rural an
language of the urban environment. B
provided a form in which the tension
with in less harmful ways than by ar
But even these dance competitions ne
of power, physical strength and violen
placid-minded performers to agitated
dance events in Durban in the 1920
different segments of the migrant wo
frequently led to serious bloodshed an
for a harsh and lasting clampdown in
other somewhat rustic leisure activ
(Erlmann 1991:95-111). It is out of th
politics and militant African opposition
competitions emerged in the 1930s an
South Africa's most urbanized migran
sion of regional and group identit
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.
Several conclusions can be drawn from my reading of Clegg's ana

from my discussion of such tropes of locality as the crowd and the
First, the sense of locality that expresses itself in the songs and
not given from time immemorial. It is the result of complex and
modern processes involving national regimes, capitalist relations o
tion, apartheid legislation, and specific forms of rural nostalgia,
in the city and in response to urban forms of social and spatial or
Second, the localities and communities of choirs and fans symbo
figured through these performances differ from Western notions
regards, but perhaps most notably in the way sociality, solidarity,
ality - in other words the things that hold communities together
not from the free, aesthetic interplay of detached, self-enclosed an
emplaced individuals, but from violence. The imagined local comm
celebrated in isicathamiya performance arise from the antagonisms
from the competing claims of firmly positioned groups of indivi
from the attempt to translate these antagonisms into ritualized d
local opposition and allegiance. In a sense, one might argue, aesthe
is only an afterthought, an expression of community, not the foundat
Finally, the specifically aesthetic underpinnings of current Wes
structions of locality and community and the way they interact w
definitions of locality elsewhere in the world raise a number of q
about locality as a valid category in a critical theory of contempora
culture. One of these questions, in my view, concerns the legi
practices and ideologies of local identity basing themselves in what
to be questionable notions of the authentic, essential, traditional o
mental. It is clearly out of a critical reaction to such notions that so
in the West - I am thinking here of Zygmunt Bauman, Richard R
others - have argued for the necessity of a politics of contingenc
and aesthetic play; a politics that disrupts the ironclad arrogance of
thought and opens up the possibility for a truly postmodern order of
difference and tolerance. While I am essentially in agreement wit
project and while I do believe that such a politics may provide som
answers to the problems facing late modern societies in the West,
of the way anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and other scholar
in embattled communities outside the West have tended to equate th
practices and expressive forms of such communities with anti-he
resistance per se. Remapping the global village, to me, does not on
that we have to persist in our attempts to problematize the politics of
nationalism and Western cultural hegemony. We also need to get
understanding of the ways in which counterforces - the politics an
of local communities and movements - are derivative of the very d
they seek to interrogate. At the very least, a reflection such as my
of specific South African forms of localism in performance shoul
sound a warning against the tendency to hypostatize Western notio
aesthetic community in contexts where the local quite frequently s
contrary project of re-anchoring the subject in a world of fixities,
and dependence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appadurai, Arjun
1996 Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalizatio
University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, Walter
1973 Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capit
NLB.
Bhabha, Homi
1992 "The World and the Home." Social Text 31/32:141-53.
Clegg, Jonathan
1981 "Ukubuyisa isidumbu - Bringing back the Body: An Examination
into the Ideology of Vengeance in the Msinga and Mpofana Rural
Locations, 1892-1944." In Working Papers in Southern African Studies, ed.
Philip Bonner, vol. II. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
de Certeau, Michel
1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University
of California Press.
Erlmann, Veit
1991 African Stars. Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: Uni
versity of Chicago Press.
1996 Nightsong. Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa. Chicago
University of Chicago Press.
Jameson, Fredric
1991 Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duk
University Press.

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How Beautiful Is Small?

Music, Globalization and the Aesthetics of the Local

Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of

argue here, it is essentially a Western

The genre isicathamiya emerged at the turn of the century out

The hybridity and intertextuality of st

Benjamin (1973:122) calls "the secret presence of a crowd." Li

people from walking certain sections o

the factory worker is unable to complete something. Starting all

with wedding dances, evoke poten

Several conclusions can be drawn from my reading of Clegg's ana

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