Affect (Ency. of Cult and soc Anthro)
- -the pre-discursive forces that condition the body, consciousness and the senses – sound, songs, light, images, the physical presence of bodies, the presence of the natural elements and much more.
- -not mediated by language or consciousness in a conventional fashion.
- -1990s reaction against Foucauldian approach to discursive and disciplinary paradigms
Affect (Spinoza)
- -from idea of human nature set against religious arguments about a unique human nature enabled by the divine spirit.
- -affects are constants in the human world – love, hate, hope, desire, fear.
- -inadvertent relations between people (to be overcome by reason) (e.g. tempering passions through reason/intellect)
- -argument against religious passions.
Affect (Deleuze)
- -a form of spontaneous, almost inadvertent, action of love, desire, resentment, etc. versus the mediated action guided by an ‘idea’, a mental construct.
- -uses Spinoza to toy with categories of human action that are not mediated by language or consciousness in a conventional fashion.
- -Deleuze interpreters: created a form of ‘reverse Cartesianism’ where the body and the affects become the new protagonists as pre-discursive actors
Affect (Massumi)
- -post Deleuze
- -distills “autonomy of affect”: a set of forces that condition and flow through the body, only to materialize as emotion. ‘Emotion is a contamination of empirical space by affect which belongs to the body without an image’ (Massumi 2002: 61).
- -primarily interested in affect mediated through the visual, spectacles and technology
Affect (Bennett)
attributes the powers of affect to the sublime forces of nature, sound and ‘imperceptible’ forms of presence of other beings
Symbolic Anthropology key figures
Geertz
Victor Turner
David Schneider
Symbolic Anthropology (def)
- -1960s-70s tendency
- culture as a relatively autonomous entity
- -culture as system of meaning
- -decoding or interpretation of key symbols and rituals
- -resistance to scientific methodologies
- -emphasis on cultural particularism (roots to Boas–>Ruth Benedict)
Clifford Geertz
–interpretive revolution across disciplines
–shifted the focus of anthropological study from
structure –> meaning.
–hermeneutic exercise based on “thick description”
–not an experimental science searching comparative structural laws but “faction”: imaginative writing about the culture of real people in real places.
–(so pushing against structuralism, universal comparisons, etc.)
Meaning
- -Geertz
- -Culture as accumulated totality of symbol systems (religion, ideology, common sense, economics, sport…) in terms of which people both make sense of themselves and their world, and represent themselves to themselves and to others.
- -members use symbols as a language to read and interpret, to express and share MEANING.
- -human existence is always reading and interpreting meaning
- -culture as symbolic document
Culture as meaning
as accumulated totality of symbol systems (religion, ideology, common sense, economics, sport…) in terms of which people both make sense of themselves and their world, and represent themselves to themselves and to others.
phenomenology
- -the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.
- -central structure of an experience is its intentionality
- -intentionality: its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.
- -An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
temporality
- -human’s perception of time
- -social organization of time.
- -e.g. The perception of time undergoes significant change in the three hundred years between the Middle Ages and Modernity
- -alt: The quality or condition of being temporal or temporary; temporariness
- -relation to time.
Ethnomusicology definitions (Merriam, Nettl, Helser)
- -Merriam: “the study of music as culture”
- -Nettl: comparative study of musical cultures”
- -Helser (Elizabeth): “the hermeneutic science of human musical behavior”
Alexander Ellis
- -English physicist and phonetician
- -developed CENTS SYSTEM of pitch measurement
- -divides octave into 1200 equal unites
- -made possible objective measurement of non-Western scales.
- -destabilized notions of superiority of Western tempered tuning
- -allowed “open-minded cross-cultural comparison of tonal systems” (Myers 4)
“On the Musical Scales of Various Nations” (1885), Ellis
“the Musical Scale is not one not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious” (526)
Carl Stumpf and Eric M. von Hornbostel
- -at Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv
- -studied cylinders collected from German ethnologists in colonial territories
- -analyzed, and posited ambitious theories, such as
* evolutionary schemes
* “school of culture circles” (Kulturkreislehre)
* little fieldwork, little import for cultural manifestation
NATIONALISM in 19th Century Ethnomusicology
- Hungary
* Bela Vikar, recording in field 1896.
* Bela Bartok, notated folk songs (1904)
* collaborated with Zoltan Kolady
* Bartok used phonograph in Hungary, Romania, Transylvania
* Cecil Sharp (England): traditional English folk song
* searched for authentic material in USA (w assistant Maud Karpeles)—discovering 1600 English tunes and variants.
* fought for English folk music in schools
* Percy Grainger: Australian emigrated to England
* recorded Lincolnshire folk song on wax cylinders in 1906
* first commercial recording of folk song 1908
Guido Adler (1885) “Umfang, Methode and Ziel der Musikwissenschaft”
- -Breaks “systematic musicology” into —>
* music theory,
* aesthetics
* psychology of music
* comparative musicology
Adler: “Comparative musicology has as its task the comparison of the musical works—especially the folksongs—of the various peoples of the earth for ethnographical purposes, and the classification of them according to their various forms (p. 14, trans. Merriam 1977 199)
Japp Kunst on “ethnomusicology”
“ethnomusicology” should replace “comparative musicology” bc “comparison is not the principal distinguishing feature of this work.”
2 Technological innovations spurring comparative musicology
Cents system (Ellis): made objective measurement possible; destabilized notions of Western superiority; allows for cross-cultural comparison
Phonograph Recording: (1877) Edison, wax cylinders
Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Dictionnaire de musique
1768-9: spirit of the age: samples of European folk, North American Indian, Chinese music
–colonial
metaphysics
–projects is to devise a theory of the nature or structure of reality, or of the world as a whole
culture and personality (“school”)
an approach (especially within CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY in the US in the 1930s and 1940s) which involved the application of psychological and psychoanalytical theory within ethnographic accounts. A central assumption of the school was that personality types, including differences in national character, were formed by SOCIALIZATION (e.g. distinctive patterns of feeding and toilet training). A classic account in this vein is Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) which portrayed what were seen as the two sides of Japanese national character. Although controversial, the writings of the school reached a wide audience and influenced popular conceptions of socialization and cross-cultural differences, especially in the USA.
–SAPIR!!!
See also BATESON, BENEDICT, Margaret MEAD.
ontology (oxford dict. of sociology)
Any way of understanding the world, or some part of it, must make assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist in that domain, and what might be their conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of being and their relations is an ontology. In this sense, each special science, including sociology, may be said to have its own ontology (for example, persons, institutions, relations, norms, practices, structures, roles, or whatever, depending on the particular sociological theory under consideration). The core of the philosophical project of metaphysics is to provide an ontology of the world as a whole. In some versions of metaphysics this takes the form of an attempt systematically to order the relations between the ontologies of the special sciences.
