Sidebar -- Preliminary Considerations

Before I continue to Chapter One, it's important that I make my position clear regarding what may well be the two most problematic aspects of my research: the emphasis on musical evidence, which is rarely if ever taken seriously in the literature on anthropology and cultural evolution; and my notion of  cultural continuity, which departs radically from what has become a persistent dogma of the social sciences, the insistence that continual change pervades all aspects of cultural history.

--------------------------------------------------------

The Musical Dimension

Typically, when confronted with musical evidence, most anthropologists simply throw up their hands, as if to say “what do you expect of us, we are not musicians and are therefore not in a position to comment one way or the other.” The fact that most are not linguists either, or archaeologists, doesn't discourage them from taking that sort of evidence very seriously. But linguistics and archaeology are part of the standard anthropological quadrivium, while musicology is not.

This is unfortunate, because musical traditions clearly occupy a position in most cultures comparable in importance to language, or even moreso, as evidenced by the strong tendency in many societies to retain a traditional musical style even in the face of significant cultural and linguistic change. Moreover, music has much in common with language, and can even be considered a language in its own right, as reflected in many semiotic studies. The relationship between the two has been expressed by a great many different thinkers, from ancient times to the present, in many different ways.

Clearly a great many people have attached considerable importance to music, as evidenced by the enormous number and range of writings devoted to this topic by some of our greatest thinkers over thousands of years. So why are musical traditions so shamefully neglected by anthropology? More to the point, why isn't music considered at least as important to the study of culture as language?

Cultural Continuity

Many social scientists see the perpetuation of a tradition from one generation to the next as something like the reproduction of a tape recording, which loses a certain amount of information each time it's dubbed. From one generation to the next, hardly anything appears to have been lost. But over the course of several dubbings, the original may no longer be recognizable. A favorite analogy is with the well known game of “Rumor,” where someone whispers something to his nearest neighbor, who repeats the message to the next in line, until, after several repetitions, the original message may well be distorted beyond recognition.

In both cases, communication is based on the linear transmission of a signal from a sender to a receiver through an “analogue” process. But cultural transmission operates in a very different manner. For one thing it is not linear. Culture is not simply passed on from a sender to a receiver, because culture is not so much a message as a multivalent lattice or field. Nor is it simply a means of communication, but a generative and regenerative process through which reality itself is constructed. Each new generation is immersed in this “reality” from birth, and its effects accumulate very rapidly to the point that most children are thoroughly conditioned by the time their first sentences are spoken.

Unlike analogue recordings (or archaeological artifacts), culturally transmitted information won't necessarily diminish or get distorted over time, because, as with digital recording technology, what is preserved is not only the information itself, but the process by which the information is stored and retrieved. Transmission errors can certainly occur during digital encoding, but most can be caught and corrected through the use of a checksum, or similar self-correcting scheme. The cultural equivalent of the checksum is the process by which the entire community is continually available to assist and correct the novice whenever a “transmission error” occurs. What we have, therefore, is not simply communication from generation to generation but an integrated and continually reinforced network; not a chain held together link by link, but a chain-link lattice of tightly interwoven connections with multiple self-correction mechanisms.

In light of the above, it is not that difficult to understand how a particular tradition can be “handed down” from “generation to generation” over thousands, or tens of thousands, of years with only minimal or superficial change. Because, for one thing, it is not really “handed down,” but maintained as part of a cultural field that permeates the awareness of everyone in it. And secondly, the generational aspect is almost irrelevant, since there is never a point in time separating one generation from another, but, again, an ongoing temporal field within which individuals of all ages are engulfed. Consequently, there is never a moment of transmission when something is handed down but a continual process of cultural imprinting, enforcement and re-enforcement.

And if such a process can suffice to maintain a certain tradition for a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand years, then, if the society is sufficiently isolated, or capable of resisting external pressure from neighboring groups, there is no reason to assume the same process can't continue for two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand or, indeed, one hundred thousand years, or more. Once such a process gets going there is no intrinsic reason for it to stop. There is in fact no provision for significant change in such systems, which, especially among the most tradition-minded indigenous societies, are designed in such a way as to resist any innovation not directly associated with survival.

This is not to say that a certain amount of “drift” is out of the question. We know very well that cultural dialects can be and are being produced on a regular basis. But such dialects tend to develop via localized linear transmissions that are almost always subsumed within the overall, nonlinear, field. Thus the innumerable variants of particular folk songs have no effect on the overall structure and performance style of all such songs, which remain essentially fixed within prescribed norms.

According to this model, traditions are likely to change only when confronted by powerful external forces capable of distorting or destroying the cultural fields that maintain them. If such forces are never encountered, then both the fields and the traditions will tend to persist. The model should be understood as applying most strongly to non-specialized, indigenous peoples, whose attachment to ancestral traditions is demonstrably stronger than that of more specialized societies, where competition between specialists can over-ride traditional constraints in favor of innovation.