THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC - UNAM

[Pages:371]THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC

BY ALAN P. MERRIAM

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MUSIC

memory of MELVILLE J. HERSKOVITS

THE ANTHROPOLOGY

NORTHWESTERN

OF MUSIC

ALAN P. MERRIAM

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

1964

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 6 0 2 0 8 - 4 1 7 0

Copyright ? 1964 by Alan P. Merriam. First published 1964 by Northwestern University Press. First paperback edition published 1980 by Northwestern University Press^All rights reserved.

20103

10 9 8 7 6 5

ISBN 0-8101-0607-8

T h e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences--Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, A N S I Z . 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 2 .

Benin bronze statue on cover and title page courtesy of the Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Photograph by Justine Cordwell and Edward Dams.

Material from the following has been quoted with the permission of the publisher: Louis Harap, Social Roots of the Arts, International Publishers, 1949. By permission of International Publishers Co., Inc. S. F. Nadel, The Foundations of Social Anthropology, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1951, and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. A. R. RadcliffeBrown, The Andaman Islanders, T h e Free Press of Glencoe, 1948, and Cambridge University Press. Curt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments. Copyright 1940 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, N.Y. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and of J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Harold Gomes Cassidy, The Sciences and the Arts: A Netv Alliance, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1962. Bert Kaplan (ed.), Studying Personality Cross-Culturally, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1961. Gertrude E. Dole and Robert L. Carneiro (eds.), Essays in the Science of Culture in Honor of Leslie A. White, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960, pp. 2 1 6 - 3 0 . Frank Skinner, Underscore, Skinner Music Co., 1950. Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley, Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits, Trinidad Village, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. George Davis, Music-Cueing for Radio-Drama. Copyright 1947 by Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Paul R. Farnsworth, The Social Psychology of Music, Dryden Press, 1958. Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957. Kenneth L. Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1951. Geoffrey Gorer, Africa Dances, Faber and Faber, 1935, and W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior, George Braziller, Inc., 1955. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1935. Copyright 1935 by Margaret Mead. Published as a Mentor Book by arrangement with William Morrow and Company, Inc., by the New American Library of World Literature.

PREFACE

This book is the result of some fifteen years of thinking and of discussion with colleagues and students in the fields of cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology, two disciplines whose boundary lines are not always clear and perhaps should not be. Of anthropology little need be said by way of explanation, for its content is reasonably clear and its objectives at least moderately well-defined. Such is not the case, however, with ethnomusicology which has undergone a remarkable efflorescence in the past decade during which younger scholars, particularly in the United States, have subjected it to renewed and intensive examination. As so frequently occurs, the resulting discussion has served to blur some of the simple pre-existing concepts delimiting the field, and it is no longer easy to say precisely where it begins and ends, what its purposes are, what kinds of materials it handles or how it is to handle them. One point, however, has clearly re-emerged, and this is that ethnomusicology is approachable from two directions, the anthropological and the musicological. Given these two possibilities, it is equally clear that since we are all human, anthropologists approaching ethnomusicology tend to stress anthropological aspects, and musicologists, the musicological aspects. Both groups agree, however, that the ultimate objective is the fusion of the two taken as an ideal inevitably modified by practical reality.

W h e n one turns to the literature of ethnomusicology, he quickly finds that this ideal has not yet been achieved, for an overwhelming number of books, articles, and monographs is devoted to studies only of music, which is often treated as an object in itself without reference to the

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