The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Lift-Up-Over Sounding

Lift-Up-Over Sounding Because knowledge can never replace respect as a guiding principle in our ecosystemic relations, it is adaptive for cognized models to engender respect for that which is unknown, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, as well as for them to codify empirical knowledge. It may be that the most appropriate cognized models, that is, those from which adaptive behavior follows, are not those that simply represent ecosystemic relations in objectively “correct” material terms, but those that invest them with significance and value beyond themselves. —Roy Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion One way to imagine the potency of “nature” as a cultural construction is to imagine the appropriateness of the word “aesthetic” in each place where Roy Rappaport1 uses the word “adaptive” in his essay on ecology and cognition. To do that I will review two intertwined dimensions of a mutualism of adaptation and aesthetics among the Kaluli people of Bosavi in Papua New Guinea: the ecology of natural sounds as a human musical ecology; and the conceptualization of place as a cartography of human song and lament. In the first instance the mutualism begins with the natural soundscape of the Papuan rainforest in the Bosavi region. Here the calls of some one hundred and thirty species of birds, as well as the sounds of many frogs, the rhythms of cicadas and insects, the sonic presence of creeks, streams, waterfalls, pools, and other waterway formations are obvious quotidien presences. For Kaluli people, these sound patterns are indexically heard as the time of day, seasons of year, vegetation cycles , migratory patterns, heights and depths of forest, and many other markers of place as a fused human locus of time and space. What Kaluli perceive and know about natural diversity in their world articulates often through attention to these sounds, and through elaborate conceptual and cognitive indicators of the centrality of sound to experiential truth. At the same time, Kaluli vocal and instrumental musical sounds are inspired by, modeled upon, and performed with these environmental sounds. And the evocative powers of these musical performances, as well as their interpretation and aVective response, are modeled from the same pervasive perceptual and epistemological primacy of sound. Here ecological and aesthetic co-evolution [ 193 ] steven feld ⢇ means that the music of nature is heard as the nature of music. Moreover, this iconized or constructed “naturalness” is brought into alignment by an overarching cosmological framework for the interpenetration of nature and culture . This framework is located in the dualism of birds, who both coordinate the local natural historical sense of being in space-time, and whose presence continuously announces the presence of spirits. To each other the birds appear as people, interacting as such and sounding out through talk. To Kaluli, birds “show through” as a metaphoric human society whose colors, behaviors, and sound categories (whistling, singing, talking, saying their names, crying, making noise) thoroughly fuse the “natural historical” and “symbolic” dimensions of imagination and engagement.2 Turning to the ways physical place, sensed and sensible, is imaginatively coded in a cartography of songs and lamentations, the emphasis will shift to how Kaluli song and lament texts are organized as maps of placenames. The sequences of these names are textually co-articulated with names of trees and vegetation, creeks and waterways, and birds. Here we can concretely understand how places are quite literally “placed” in memory, and how their codification and evocation in the formal genres of song and funerary lament poetics intensifies the expressive relationship between the biographical, feelingful, experiential dimension of cultural identity, and the adaptive dimensions of ecological knowledge and awareness. Acoustic Ecology As Aesthetic Adaptation Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? —Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party A commonplace orientation of cultural ecology is to the processes by which societies adapt to environments. Generally this entails understanding how cultural configurations emerge, transmute, reproduce, change, and sustain. Emphases on technology, economics, and the control and regulation of resources are central to these concerns, as is the role of ecological interactions within a broader understanding of the biological and cultural interface of adaptation. One rarely sees or hears talk of aesthetics within these discourses on cultural ecology, co-evolution, and adaptation, matching the equally scant attention to cultural ecology in the discourses...