Another way of looking at the meaning of tribal:
THE MAGIC CIRCLE An American Chamber Opera Ensemble What kind of culture and art will we leave to our children? Culture is the process of identity. With the culture we leave behind, we create the identity of tomorrow. Culture is a group act. A path of learning, that the group, organization, family, or government takes, that creates a oneness, a center within the group. One might say that the "ensemble" concept is essentially tribal in nature. Like the great world performing arts organizations, theaters, orchestras and chamber ensembles, my impulse has been that growth happens more quickly and deeper when developed in a circle of individual talents. As the artist matures, the development of a common critical language becomes necessary. Although individual discipline and technique is essential in the beginning of artistry. An evolving and growing ensemble, allows each member to focus on their unique artistic qualities through dialogue. Each helping the other in defining and rehearsing the solutions to artistic problems. I call this "learning" ensemble, a Magic Circle. Musical ensemble is always about the right person being in the right spot and doing the right thing in a uniquely imaginative fashion within a circle of artists. The tribal structure on the reservation taught me that being out of place musically or otherwise was an intolerable artistic situation. Singing, as an undergraduate, on the stage of Tulsa Opera in the early sixties, placed me on the stage next to the greatest solo artists of the day. Experiencing such incredible singers up close and on stage created an experience of the art that was immediate and visceral. An experience that I have rarely experienced in the Grand Opera Halls of today's opera world. Too much is missed. This has reinforced the truth that great art unobserved is art that didn't happen at all. I have concerned myself as a singer; teacher, director and conductor with the problem of making the composer's intent and artistic form as clear as possible to the audience. For that reason I have dedicated my work both to the development of a unique artist capable of using their entire physical and emotional instrument in a natural fashion, and to working in venues where the audience can live for a time in the "Magic Circle" and experience the whole art of the performer. That is our reason for dedicating our work and lives to the chamber opera form. Once, all art was immediate and engaging. Once all performing art was chamber music and drama. Grand ceremonies were reserved for singular occasions in the midst of thousands of personal and intimate artistic experiences. The Magic Circle is dedicated to a return to such an immediate and relevant cultural heritage. Now, America would do well to pay attention to that great pre-Columbian poet Nezahualcoytl who sang simply: "My life is a flower, My art is a song Finally I understand it Grandfather The flowers will wither But the song endures forever." It is time for us to come home, and continue our development of the Eternal Center." Ray Evans Harrell From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 2:43 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Ray Harrell Subject: RE: [Futurework] The tribal imagination Ray, You misunderstand me. I wasn't writing of tribes in any pejorative way, anymore than any of the other stages of the social/governance ratchet, but only of their size and structure. Cultures, institutions, tribes, cliques, single leaderships are all equally valid at the right time and in their appropriate context. KSH At 18:57 21/06/2011, REH wrote: When President Kennedy had the same situation as Obama, they did not, call it a "tribal" thing but a group pathology called "Groupthink." Over the years, the "White" part of the American population has downgraded the Indian Nations to "Tribes" in order to escape the Supreme Court's ruling of us as "Dependent Nations." (It reminds one of the Turkish response to the Armenians or the Iranians and the Bahais.) However, it has been much worse for African culture. African culture has simply not been allowed and demeaned almost as badly as the Europeans have the Romany. (For a good description of this I would recommend the works on the Gypsies by the bible salesman George Burrows which formed the research basis for the opera Carmen, followed by the excellent current volume by Yale Historian Ben Kiernan "Blood and Soil, A World History of Genocide and Extermination frpom Sparta to Darfur." Yale. The are plenty of books on the cant of slavery. Especially the terrible scientific justification put forth by the early Anthropological scientists. (Too many books on this to mention them all.) Tribal was just one of the many pejorative terms used to justify theft and murder. Keith, I mention this knowing full well that you are a civilized and compassionate human being. I just don't understand this reflex to such language. It's really a problem here where the diversity is so rich and we have our first black President. Today it has become a right and left wing issue although it wasn't originally. As the conservative right wing has cut back on funding for Native education and expanded the propaganda, some Indian Nations have even gone along with the designation and now call themselves tribes. However, it's historically inaccurate and is a bastardization of the translation of what Native Nations called themselves into the English language. In our communities that has been a great problem in the unification of our peoples as modern day Americans. Sadly to say, many of my own people, (the ones connected to the government through enrollment,) now use that term interchangeably with nation. The Cherokee nation was once the size of France and had a population that was comparable to the France of that day (although you can't get anyone to admit that now). What American citizen preaching "American specialness" wants to know that they "downsized" a nation to 150,000 official Cherokees over the past four hundred years? There are now millions of descendants of the original 69 Mayflower Puritans but our people have been deliberately forced to do the opposite. Calling us a Tribe or Tribal is a part of that strategy by the dominant society. (Note the Bryan Fischer argument I published a couple of days ago on Blacks and Indians. ) http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-gop-s-favorite-hate-monger-how-the-repu blican-party-came-to-embrace-bryan-fischer#racism Do you really want to be connected to such thinking? In Brazil, they use the Environmental changes and the sophisticated ritual structures to project the true sizes of the pre-Columbian Amazon Nations. They call the groups "Remnant Nations" because they were clearly urban structures that were consonant with what the first explorers spoke of, but were later doubted, since they had no understanding of what their germs did to the people they encountered. They saw it simply as the economics of exploration and conquest. They came to trade and "conquer" not to wipe out. There are many histories here where colonists would enter an Indian town to trade only to find that a few days later the entire population sickened and died from the germs. Cortez couldn't believe that the Aztecs fought to the last man and destroyed their city rather than having the "eternal city" model of the Romans. No one wants to see themselves as the evil person. Everyone uses the terms that basically mean "bringer of culture." In that context, "tribe" become a perjorative and a weapon in the hands of those who seek to win rather than to understand. As for "winners" for the Stalins, Hitlers, etc. they are more consonant with what Joseph Campbell called "The Hero's Journey" that had its roots in Odysseus and Alexander. The only difference here is that they "lost." The losers don't get to write the histories. I'm reminded of the advertising campaigns during the Cold War that painted Russian women as fat and ugly. That is of course what we all think of Anna Netrebko right? And the urbane Siberian Dimitri Hvorostovsky. The best example of this "Hero's Journey" is found in the massive Kazantzakis poem study of Odysseus that he titled simply The "Odyssey, a 20th Century Sequel." I know of no better analysis of the Western traditions that extend from family, through tribe to nation that the Kazantzakis poem. I cannot agree with you about Obama's "tribe", however, anymore than I would call the Harvard centered "Groupthink" of Kennedy "Tribal" or even "Irish." You do realize that Obama was the son of a Harvard trained economist who worked for the Kenyan government? And that his mother was an anthropologist scholar. After all of that time we still are stupid when it comes to knowing the underlying artistic and spiritual culture of the African Peoples. I am literally stunned daily by what I learn of the sophistication of their musical traditions and the complexity of their virtuosity. Evidently Picasso agreed with me when speaking of the visual arts as well. Today, there is a whole new division of Anthropology called "Sensorium Anthropology" that has sprung out of Western Anthropology becoming sophisticated enough to see what Sir Herbert Read called "The Sensory Minds" of the African cultures in his magnificent "Education Through Art." (Except he was speaking of Greece!) Unfortunately, Sir Herbert was ignored on that until Howard Gardener came along and rebranded it as "Frames of Mind" and Steven Pinker was so outrageous as to stir people up to debunk his silliness around the "sensorium" and the Arts which he termed "evolutionary cheesecake." Hence we get a whole new way of looking at Africa called "Sensorium Anthropology." (Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community; Kathryn Linn Geurts, Univ of Cal press) John Warfield created two other categories of group pathology. One was called "Clanthink" and the other was "Spreadthink." What you describe is actually closer to "Clanthink" in that context. John walked awfully close to the edge around the "clan" as well since the "clan" type governments are quite sophisticated politically. What we think of today as "clan" is the Klu Klux Klan, not a real clan at all. Genuine clan structures are actually closer to what Warfield called Interactive Management than the KKK which is "Klanthink." I think you will be on much safer territory if you don't use terms that are as loaded with Western chauvinism as the word "tribe" is and is still being used here by the likes of Newt Gingrich and company as a way of stealing. Better to be more accurate and create a new way of analyzing the management problems of a brilliant President who, like JFK, suffers from the same issues that the Ivy League folks here have when considering the rest of the country. (Although Harvard was originally an Indian school for missionizing, I don't think they would refer themselves as "tribal" today.) Originally the term "savage" referred to "non-domestic" people of the forest, (in some cases even farmers and blacksmiths working in the "wild" woods were called savage) and is in contrast to the "Civilized" city folks. (See Balee below) A lot of this bias can be traced to the different methods of forestry found in Europe versus the "cultivated" forests that the Europeans found here as a result of native uses of fire and planting methods. It can also be traced to the interaction with this New World where their images of themselves as human beings were severely tested with the massive die off from disease. What person wants to believe that their very breath destroys a whole world? You come up with all kinds of rationalizations that are essentially useless except as defense against your own fears. The problem of the city (civilized) folks today, is that they know almost nothing of the management patterns of the original "Savage" and are unconscious to the connection in their own roots where they elected to leave the "garden" in what they termed the "quest for real knowledge" encouraged by a snake and a woman. The metaphors don't translate and no one speaks the other's language well enough to be able to stop the carnage. But the use of trigger words that in most contexts are pejoratives is outrageous at the very least and duplicitous at worst. REH savage c.1300, "wild, undomesticated, untamed" (of animals and places), from O.Fr. sauvage, salvage "wild, savage, untamed," from L.L. salvaticus, alteration of silvaticus "wild," lit. "of the woods," from silva "forest, grove." Of persons, the meaning "reckless, ungovernable" is attested from c.140l earlier in sense "indomitable, valiant" (c.1300). Implications of ferocity are attested from 1579, earlier of animals (1407). The noun meaning "wild person" is from 1588; the verb meaning "to tear with the teeth, maul" is from 1880. Online Etymology Dictionary, C 2010 Douglas Harper For a discussion on the European Forestry Methods as a metaphor, there are good references in the internet as to both methods of use but the best I've seen is in the excellent Michael Williams book from Cambridge, "Americans and Their Forests, a Historical Geolography." For the discussion of Savage, Heathen, Pagan etc. I would recommend an old friend, Robert W. Venables' book, with Christopher Vecsey (editors) "American Indian Environments, Ecological Issues in Native American History" Syracuse Univ. Press The excellent article by William T. Hagan called "Justifying Dispossession of the Indian, the Land Utilization Argument" and Venables article "Iroquois Environments and 'We the People of the United States' Gemeinschaft and Gesellshaft in the Apposition of Iroquois, Federal, and New York State Sovereignties." For the classical discussion on the use of the word "Tribe" I would recommend an excellent new volume edited by William Balee, called "Advances in Historical Ecology." Columbia U. I would recommend the whole book but especially Balee's Chapter 1 "Historical Ecolory: Premises and Postulates and Darrell Posey's Chapter 5 "Diachronic Ecotones and Anthropogenic Landscapes in Amazonia: Contesting the Consciousness of Conservation." From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 5:40 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The tribal imagination When in difficulty, human cultures, however elevated, are predisposed to default to institutions (or classes) which in turn are predisposed to default to tribes, which in turn so easily default to cliques, which in turn default to single leaders. The last are the equivalent of daddies of the original family-sized groups in which we and our predecessors lived, and in which our genes have been shaped, for millions of years. The default tends always in an anti-evolutionary direction towards the earlier basics. "Cometh the hour, cometh the man". The Tolstoyan view of history. So, if cultures are unfortunate in their immediate past histories, they produce the Stalins, Hitlers and Mao Zedongs of the human world. Monsters. Sometimes, if the nominal leaders are not so monstrous but still powerful then the default condition is a little higher, at the clique level. This is why President Bush needed three or four others (but only three or four others) in order to manipulate America into invading Iraq -- an illegal act if there ever was one. When the nominal leader is neither monstrous nor powerful -- and really hardly knows what he's doing -- then the reverse default is a clique that can be well-nigh invisible and works in mysterious ways. Thus President Obama's financial policy is actually that of a clique centred around top nerds in the US Treasury and also friends in the banking world. Not so much a clique in this case as almost a tribe, almost at a higher notch. Whether this bunch, this almost-tribe, can continue succeeding in mystifying the other tribe in Congress is a moot point. But then, the latter tribe is actually in a further default condition already -- two tribes which spend most of their energy performing war-dances around each other. Thus human behaviour is a ratchet which works both ways. With a gentle following wind, it can proceed very slowly in one direction towards culture, but this takes generations. If met with storms, then the ratchet clicks very rapidly in the default direction. Whether a nation is formally a selected bureaucracy as in China, or an elected democracy as in America, matters little. It is where it is on the ratchet that's important. I've simplified, of course. There are many components of a culture -- fertility, science, art, sports, industry, entertainment, etc. -- and they're not necessarily correlated. But some specific state of politics, some specific position on the ratchet, applies in all of them. In the fertility department, for example, the Western cultures are right at the family end. In fact, less than that, because singlehood is a growing phenomenon and, also, families are no longer able to sustain themselves -- neither looking after their old people humanely enough nor producing enough children. Perhaps one day when the default system is taught to children at school as a rendered down account of anthropology, behavioural psychology and evolutionary genetics -- but essentially simple withall -- then perhaps we can govern ourselves and our activities just a little better than now without today's much practised manipulation by a few on the one hand or the punter-like credulity of the masses on the other. Perhaps we'll really begin to know ourselves, as Socrates used to say, and for cultures to know more truly how they ought to operate. The book that's inspired today's outburst? The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind by Robin Fox. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/ Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
