Why Claim Cultural Authenticity?: Cultural Organizations’ and Cosmopolitan Populations’ Claims About Reggae and Celtic Music in the U.S
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Why Claim Cultural Authenticity?: Cultural Organizations’ and Cosmopolitan Populations’ Claims About Reggae and Celtic Music in the U.S. A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication, Culture, and Technology By Stefanie Brown, B.A. Washington D.C., December 19, 2008 Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables...................................................................................................iii Chapter One: Introduction................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two: Literature Review........................................................................................15 Chapter Three: Case Study – Celtic Music........................................................................41 Chapter Four: Case Study – Reggae...................................................................................69 Chapter Five: Conclusions...............................................................................................106 References........................................................................................................................124 ii List of Figures and Tables: Table 3.1 The Claims to Cultural Authenticity Made About Celtic Music.......................51 Table 3.2 Cultural Organizations Involved in Celtic Music..............................................61 Table 4.1 What is “Authentic” Reggae?............................................................................82 Table 4.2 Reggae Audiences.............................................................................................91 Table 4.3 A Sampling of the Reggae Industry and its Major Actors.................................98 Table 5.1 Summary of Findings......................................................................................117 iii CHAPTER ONE Introduction The Problem All over the United States, one may find Cajun music and dances. Some of the attendees are Cajuns who have moved from their native Louisiana – which is home to Cajun culture - but a significant portion is not. According to Mark Mattern (1998), who has observed this trend, the non-Cajun group attends traditional Cajun dances to “romantically try and recreate their own perceptions of 'pure' Cajun culture” (p. 107). The same phenomenon is observable with a number of other traditional cultures who have drawn the attention and efforts at preservation in “authentic” form by those from outside of the culture. Why do people care enough about other cultures to attend such dances, and why has the infrastructure developed to facilitate such activities? It seems far more intuitive that each culture would try to preserve itself, but instead individuals and organizations have devoted time and energy to create and experience “pure” or “authentic” other cultures. Why do global cultural organizations and cosmopolitan populations make claims to cultural authenticity, especially when the claim is being made hundreds of miles away from where the culture originated? This thesis shows that claims to authenticity are made by cosmopolitan populations in response to their desires to connect to the past as well as to an ethnic heritage, and to experience the exotic, while cultural organizations make claims because it meets their desire for profit, for easier marketing, and because it fits in with the desires of the individuals or groups who exert some influence within 1 organizations. Other groups may come across “authentic” material and enjoy its consumption, but they do not share the same concern for authenticity as do cosmopolitan populations and cultural organizations. Claims to authenticity, which are culturally-informed statements that the object in question is perceived to be untouched by any influence outside of the culture from which the object comes, are made by cosmopolitan populations and by cultural organizations. Cosmopolitan populations are often categorized as “elites”, but are defined here as those with a high awareness of the rest of the world – what Ulrich Beck (2006) has called a global empathy. They live in a high-tech, globally aware culture where people frequently move from location to location. Authors like Canclini (1995) have suggested that they lack a sense of rootedness and community, and Said (2002) has written about such population's desire for the exotic in his works on Orientalism. Cosmopolitan populations make claims to authenticity because by doing so they are continuing past traditions which provide them with their rootedness and a sense of continuity with an ethnic heritage, as well as allow them to experience the exotic in that the “authentic” tradition is distant from them in both space and time. Their ability to experience “authentic” culture from other traditions is facilitated by cultural organizations. Cultural organizations are the societies, businesses, and other groups who create and spread cultural objects or artifacts. They need to make a proft or gather enough support to maintain their activities (Negus 1999). Individuals use them to promote their own agendas, for instance nationalism (Negus, 1999; Canclini, 1994), and they also find simpler forms easier to market than hybrids 2 (Shuker, 1999). These factors lead cultural organizations to make claims to authenticity because making such claims are profitable, individuals within such organizations think claims to authenticity are important, and it is easier to describe a form as “authentic” than to describe each element of its hybridity. Claims to authenticity are primarily driven by cosmopolitan populations, who lead cultural organization to make such claims through their patronage and participation, but cultural organizations give an added impetus to such claims when they label music “authentic” to make it easier to recognize and market - this enforces the expectations cosmopolitan populations have to find “authentic” music. The questions asked here are important to examine because claims to authenticity about outside cultures are clearly important to some people and organizations, even though at first glance it would seem they should not be because people are thought of primarily as belonging to their own cultures. For example, non-Cajun dancers took the time to learn Cajun dancing styles in an effort to create “authentic” experieces of Cajun culture. It is especially remarkable that superfluous consumption of Cajun culture – what Beck (2006) and others term “banal cosmopolitanism” and find readily available - is not enough, but rather the “pure” experience is pursued. It is also important to examine why claims to authenticity are made because there is a disjuncture between the reality of hybrid forms and the perception of authenticity (as non-hybridity). My conclusions, described above, draw together the work of a number of authors across sociology, including works within popular music studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, and two case studies. Such an interdisciplinary approach was called for by Canclini (1995), 3 and it allows a richer understanding of claims to authenticity, cosmopolitan populations, and cultural organizations than we would otherwise obtain. Many scholars, for instance, deal with only one group or the other. Shuker (2001), Longhursth (2007), and Negus (1999) each writes only about cultural organizations with a strong focus on the music industry. Canclini (1994) writes primarily about government claims to authenticity and its relationship to elite culture, and only briefly discusses industry. Kraidy (2005), Hollinger (1995), and Berger and Luckmann (2006) focus more on the individual or the individual's role in creating and maintaining cultural norms. The understanding I develop about why claims to authenticity are made could not have been achieved without using such a multiplicity of authors. The case studies, which look at claims to authenticity made within the United States about musical forms developed elsewhere, provide empirical evidence with which to compare the theoretical explanations developed elsewhere. Such case studies fill a gap in scholarship, especially within ethnomusicology, that tends to focus on cultural forms as experienced within the originating culture – the ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin (1993) has written that more cross-border study is needed and wrote a book, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West,to start to develop a framework from which to begin thinking about cross-border experiences of music. Conceptual Framework This thesis will examine claims to authenticity made about traditional music experienced outside of the originating culture. Two groups are found to make such claims: cosmopolitan populations and cultural organizations. These groups were 4 suggested as actors in making claims to authenticity by Canclini (1995), who writes about a national patrimony in Latin America as desired by the elite (cosmopolitan populations) and enacted by governments, museums, and industry (cultural organizations). It was further supported by the case studies on Celtic music and reggae, in which I found that those making claims to authenticity were one of those two actors. We will consider how each of these groups produces perceptions of authenticity and why they do so. What is not examined here are the claims of immigrant groups about music from their home cultures, because this thesis's focus is on claims