Cliven Bundy, King of Nevada

Thursday, October 9, 2014

posted under , , , , , by Ted

Written by Nicholas Cragoe (Sociology)

It’s been a few months since we heard anything much about Cliven Bundy. He’s fading farther and farther from the front page, being quickly forgotten by the media and the public. But for a few weeks in the Spring of 2014, he held court on the dry plains of Nevada grazing country. All the same, a quick refresher: Bundy was and is a cattle rancher near Bunkerville, NV, who decided one day that he’d had enough of being pushed around by federal legislation he had little say in. The straw that broke the rancher’s back seems to have been an attempt by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to curtail ranching ranges in Nevada in order to protect the endangered desert tortoise.
Cliven Bundy
Bundy decided to protest what he saw as federal overreaching by grazing his cattle on federally owned land without providing the necessary paperwork and fees. This was an illegal action under federal law, but through every microphone that would come near him, Bundy proclaimed his refusal to recognize the authority of the US federal government, believing Nevada to be a “sovereign” state and the highest authority to which Bundy would pay allegiance (or anything else). Bundy quickly became a cause-celebre and the mouthpiece for disgruntled anti-government types across the nation, making headlines and giving interviews, receiving support from conservative politicians and media outlets, and whipping the far right into a frenzy. When the government wrangled Bundy’s cattle and tried to make some arrests, an armed standoff ensued near Bundy’s home involving the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), law enforcement officers, and a small militia of Bundy’s family and supporters. Ultimately the government opted to return the cattle and retreated from the scene. Bundy became the darling of the anti-political right, at least until he made some ill-advised and, frankly, surreal comments about the history of race and slavery, at which point Fox News was seen sprinting in the other direction as fast as possible, along with most of Bundy’s more mainstream supporters. In the months since, Bundy’s fame has faded, but the political and cultural conflict surrounding the Bundy family ranch remains genuinely bizarre and unsettled.
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11/29 Lecture, Gabriel Solis: "Moving Beyond Preservation"
Guest Writer: Patrick W. Berry

Friday, December 3, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[On Monday, November 29, 2010, the Unit for Criticism hosted “Moving Beyond Preservation: 'Traditional' Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” a lecture by Gabriel Solis, a professor of musicology and African American studies at the University of Illinois. Below we publish the second of two posts related to the lecture.]


"Sulwa" as performed by the University of Goroka Band (recorded by Gabriel Solis)


Moving Beyond Preservation at the University of Goroka

Written by Patrick W. Berry (English/Center for Writing Studies)

Amidst torrential rains last Monday night, Gabriel Solis, Associate Professor of Musicology and African American Studies, discussed competing views of local music. He argued for a shift from looking at local music as heritage and part of a reified past, to thinking of it as a living, changing thing.

While listening to his talk, "Moving Beyond Preservation: ‘Traditional’ Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” I was intrigued by his claim that universities—exemplified by the University of Goroka in Papua New Guinea—might play a role in creating such a shift in thinking. It reminded me of ongoing discussions about relevance and the university, something that Frank Donoghue addressed at a Unit talk last year, and offered a hopeful example that was unique to Solis’s study.

Solis at one point described a museum in Papua New Guinea in which musical artifacts gather dust, their histories reduced to representing past glories. Like similar museums around the world, with their local trinkets for sale, the collection appears not to be geared toward local people, and, Solis remarked, “culture presented as heritage loses its relevance.” Efforts at preservation of histories, he continued, can reduce usefulness. How might we make our archives useful? How might we put historical collections in the hands of young and old musicians? Answering these questions, Solis contends, involves moving beyond preservation, toward thinking about music as an activity.

During his research in Papua New Guinea, Solis observed a relevant shift in thinking taking place at the University of Goroka. Since the 1970s, the University of Goroka has been offering programs that seek to bring together elders and students to blur the dichotomy between past and present, traditional and modern. Its Expressive Arts program, as described on the university’s website, works to “enable students to develop literacies in the selected areas of study in the Creative Industries as a way to assist them to participate in and develop lifelong interest in the arts and to further broaden their understanding of and involvement in the arts in Papua New Guinea.”

One of the things that students in the program do is document music, recording song repertoires as they now exist. Through this work, the program provides students with a model for how to engage with local music using an approach that values local music and the contribution of elders. It is a program that recognizes the value of process, of collaboration, and of thinking about music-making as an activity that occurs over a period of time. As suggested by the familiar refrains in writing studies pedagogy, we need to attend to process, not simply to product.

At the University of Goroka, Solis saw possibilities that did not align with structuralist readings of culture like those suggested in the work of Marshall Sahlins. Moving beyond claims of continuity versus loss, Solis suggests that a third option exists. By looking at new forms of music-making, he found something that neither replicated older social structures nor simply reproduced Western modernity. It was in this third space that he found an alternative way of working with traditional music.

Solis also mentioned the Mulka Project, in which, through the use of digital media, Yolngu Aboriginal people produce and reproduce cultural representations. “We want to bring knowledge of the past to the present to preserve it for future generations and to understand what meaning it has in the present day and age”—these words by Dr. Raymattja Marika AM, the inaugural director of the Mulka Project (1958-2008), appear in an introductory video on the Mulka Project’s website. It is a statement that captures the need to preserve, but also to experience. Watching the music video that Solis presented, I saw the genre of mixing and remaking that carries commercial influences, while weaving in archival footage.

One record label in Papua New Guinea, CHM, plays a significant role in producing a commodified version of traditional music, a type of music from which the university has managed to keep itself separate. Solis remarked that he saw the Expressive Arts program’s work at the University of Goroka as being in resistance to the market and to companies like CHM. Because of the structure of higher education in Papua New Guinea, with students gravitating toward just a few schools, a single university can play a significant role in advancing the study of music in a way that moves beyond preservation. Solis suggested that the University of Goroka’s music initiative may well have long-term impact in the sense that it produces graduates, ultimately dispersed across the country, who bring with them an approach to music that resists the reductive binaries and engages with the processes of making music.

Following Jodi Byrd’s incisive response, questions from the audience asked about the meaning of the exchange between students and elders. One person asked if the remaking of the songs with new instruments was in fact a form of relegating tradition to the past. Solis suggested that working with traditional music was in the process, in the relationships between elders and students, and in the act of cultivating an approach to learning about music.

The discussion left me reflecting how the categories themselves—“traditional” and “modern”—can shape our understandings and readings of preservation work in general.
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11/29 Lecture, Gabriel Solis
Jodi Byrd, Responding to "Moving Beyond Preservation"

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

Gabriel Solis (above)

[On Monday, November 29, 2010, the Unit for Criticism hosted “Moving Beyond Preservation: 'Traditional' Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” a lecture by Gabriel Solis, a professor of musicology and African American studies at the University of Illinois. Below we publish Professor Jodi Byrd's response]

Gabriel Solis' "Moving Beyond Preservation: 'Traditional' Music, Arts, Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea"

Written by Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies/English)

In his paper, “Moving Beyond Preservation: ‘Traditional’ Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” Gabriel Solis raises a number of significant issues here at the intersections between and among Pacific Island studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and indigenous cultural studies, and in the process, offers us some important interventions to the anthropological notions of tradition and cultural preservation which have trapped indigenous cultural productions in the rigid binaries of traditional/modern, local/introduced, past/present.

What particularly intrigues is Solis’s dissatisfaction with hybridity as sufficiently useful to theorize what might be understood as an indigenous modernity in PNG and the place of Papua New Guineans within the larger, transnational scale of modernity within the Pacific. The problem with hybridity (and perhaps syncretism) as framing ideas to apprehend indigenous cultural practices, is that they both are givens, and they both reify “indigenous” and “western” into the very categories that the artistic and musical forms are trying to resist.

Indigenous peoples continue to be trapped by the structural logics within the ethnographies and historiographies that attempt to account for the violences and accommodations colonialism has produced within indigenous communities around the globe. In the North American context, the modern and assimilative is often lamented within the colonial nostalgias that produce anthropological historiographies as loss, death, and betrayal even as the continent remains a melancholic site for settler remorse over the colonial administrators and agencies that demanded and surveilled such assimilation: boarding schools, removal and reservations, and the state formations of enlightenment democracy which supplanted indigenous structures of consensus governance and transformed power and relation into sovereignty and citizenship. And as Solis reminds us, it is in these ways that the colonial encounter led to the development of modern subjectivities for both the colonial and the native in the first place, an argument that for me calls to mind Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places in which he reminds us that within colonial narratives foundational to U.S. modernity, Indian people are expected as “corralled on isolated and impoverished reservations” where they “missed out on modernity, indeed, almost dropped out of history itself” (6).

And yet, it is the anomalies that Deloria points to, those moments in which modernity is revealed to be constitutive through indigenous presences rather than absences which disrupt the dialectics of modernity which leave indigenous peoples trapped a priori and ahistorically in a past-present lack on the world stage. Indigenous peoples are not distinct from these histories, Deloria reminds us, because modernity and its world “took as its material base the accumulation of capital ripped from indigenous lands, resources, and labor over the course of centuries” (231).

What I found particularly generative in Solis’s discussion of Papua New Guinea and his critique of ethnomusicology’s continued reliance upon a dialectic that renders certain practices outside and alien to modernity, or trapped within visions of change that either celebrate continuity or mourn catastrophic loss is the way in which he challenges the structural logics that shape the binary set of Melanesian or Western. Within those dialectics that Solis critiques reside the colonialist accompaniments epitomized by Marshall Sahlins’ attempt to encapsulate “how ‘natives’ think” about anything at all in the project of historical ethnography dependent, as Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva has argued, upon the centrality of how “English” thinks natives might think in indigenous languages, epistemologies, and philosophies.

The problem that lingers is the problem of tradition as invention and indigeneity as other to modern world history, where anything authentic always already owes, according to Sahlins, “more in content to imperialist forces than indigenous sources” or the vice versa where indigenous modernity replicates indigenous premodernity (475). One of the things that gets lost through such structural renderings of indigenous modernity and the invention of tradition is the fact that tradition itself might be said to be the repetition of invention. If we are to understand within the three different strands of attitudes towards local music in Papua New Guinea which Solis delineates for us--the impulses and contradictions of the documentary, the salvage, and the root-stock resource for national innovation and creativity--then perhaps one of the possible directions that emerges for us is how indigeneity disrupts and refuses the binaries colonialism leaves behind. One of the key questions that rises to the fore in emergent forms of indigenous cultural studies is the question of agency, where finally, PNG culture and music are “living, changing thing(s).”

It is here that I think Solis diverges importantly and significantly from Sahlins to offer us a third possibility that is, in Solis’s words, “neither clearly replicating older social structures, nor simply operating within structures governed by transnational capital.” These third ways, (especially as they manifest within the University of Goroka’s art program and the work students produce), have, Solis compellingly tells us, “the potential to ‘do’ modernity in a way that is unlike other entities in PNG,” where the arts department explicitly serves nationialist goals, but in ways that confound, Solis argues, “any sense of Papua New Guinean people’s marginal position within the system of transnational capital as a problem.” His turn here, in significant ways, echoes and diverges from Arif Dirlik’s argument in his essay “The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism” in which Dirlik pairs purity and hybridity to a self-same concern with an ahistoric essentialism. “Indigenous voices,” Dirlik writes, “are quite open to change; what they insist on is not cultural purity or persistence, but the preservation of a particular historical trajectory of their own” that is “grounded in the topography much more intimately” than settlers and “is at odds with the notions of temporality that guide the histories of settlers” (18). In other words, indigenous nationalisms and the doing of modernity might be framed not as a recovery of a lost past, but of imagining alternative trajectories for an active, living indigenous modernity that has been functioning all along.

Both the University of Goroka and the Mulka Project, Solis argues, resist structuralist readings of culture and “a yearning for a kind of pre-contact state of grace” and are instead enacting creative and innovative transformations of the salvage preservation of endangered culture into indigenous run institutions demanding a condition of possibility that imagines a present and future for Papua New Guinea cultural productions. The two examples Solis gives us engage in what Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has articulated as ethnographic refusal dependent upon “a tripleness, a quadrupleness, to consciousness and an endless play” (74). That potential frame of ethnographic refusal might be said to reside in Solis’s point that the work of the teachers and students is “something other than a kind of run-of-the-mill World Beat hybrid form.” It is process oriented rather than commercially oriented, community-centered and depended upon people to create rather than consume.

In the end, Solis gives us a hopeful direction for indigenous cultural studies in the place of the pessimistic tropics, and one that pushes against the expected and oppositional indigenous/Western binaries that leave indigenous peoples as develop-men upon a world stage still expecting their arrival. Instead, Solis’s paper and examples point to alternative trajectories that confound and refuse the waiting room of history by foregrounding the on-the-ground and local appropriations the emerge where pop music and tradition transform into the doing of Papua New Guinea modernity.


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