For birders and others, this week's reading... Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. With a title like that...
I've been reading it with an eye for assigning parts of it in special topics class next semester. Has wonderful discussion of how birds show up in Kaluli lament and which birds and how they get represented. Feld is an anthropologist. He got some notoriety a few years ago when he began protesting deals that U of Texas had with a company that was mining in Papua New Guinea (the area in which he does research). Ended up leaving U of Texas. I saw him give a talk a year or so ago at UH on folk music and another on gold mining in Papua New Guinea (which convinced me to never buy gold things, not that I was planning on doing so but am now more convinced than ever).
Also finished up Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in Bedouin Society which I had been meaning to read for years but never did. Great quote that made me think about how we think about poetry so differently than anthropologists (and how some of the anthropology approach, cultural studies?, might help think things through):
What are individuals symbolizing about themselves through expression of these non-virtuous sentiments? What is it about poetry that allows it to be used to express sentiments contrary to those appropriate to the ideals of honor without jeopardizing the reputations of those who recite it? What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that both sets of responses are conventional, what is the significance of having two cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of the ideology of honor and modesty to shape experience? Finally, what does the extraordinary cultural valuation of the poetic discourse tell us about the relationship between the ideology of honor and not only individual experience but also the organization of Bedouin social and political life as a whole? p. 35
Some of these questions are obviously specific to the Bedouin poetry she is talking about in the book, but I like to think that the distance she mentions might help us think about own poetries. Maybe rephrase like this:
What are individuals communicating about themselves and the society they live in through poems that express sentiments suggesting defiance of the moral system? Recognizing that [all] sets of [poetry] are conventional, what is the significance of having [so many] cultural discourses for the articulation of individual sentiments [in the U.S.]? To the extent that what people say, either in ordinary discourse or in the conventional and stylized discourse of poetry, can serve as a window into their experience, what does the discrepancy between the two modes of discourse tell us about the power of [language] to shape experience?
