Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment Author(S): Steven Feld Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol
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Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment Author(s): Steven Feld Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 190-210 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656355 Accessed: 17/05/2009 21:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. 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Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org Dialogic Editing: Interpreting How Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment Steven Feld Departmentsof Anthropologyand Music Universityof Texas Theword in languageis halfsomeone elses. -Mikhail Bakhtin Whenthe writer becomes the center of his attention,he becomesa nudnik.And a nudnikwho believes he's profoundis evenworse than just a plainnudnik. -Isaac BashevisSinger An engaging dimension of currentinterpretive ethnography and its critical rhetoricis the concernto situateknowledge, power, authority,and representation in terms of the social constructionof literaryrealism. Ethnographerstoday are reading, writing, and thinking more about the politics of ethnographicwriting.' That is why I read Bakhtin; in his literaryworld, a dialogic imaginationhelps repositionethnographic writing beyond its overt trajectories,and towardreflex- ive, critical readings. Yet I've had a tendency to kvetch about the very literary genre and trendthat I'm here to contributeto. I like the emphasis on a self-con- scious, dialecticalinvention of culture,but I worrythat the enterprisenot devolve into an inventionof the cult of the author.First-person narrative may be the fash- ionable way to write and critiqueethnography these days, but that alone doesn't guaranteethat the work is ethnographicallyinsightful, self-conscious, or revela- tory. That is why, in tandem, I read Singer;in his literaryworld, there is caution that first-personwriting not pass as a ruse, that hermeneuticnot pass for a mis- pronunciationof a nom de plum: HermanNudnik. A Context This articleopens to a fixed-in-printtext to look at how a new set of readers- its original subjects-opened up and unfixed some of its meanings and reposi- tionedits author'sauthority. I am the author,and the text is Soundand Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982), an ethnography aboutthe Kaluli people of Bosavi, PapuaNew Guinea. While I have been stim- ulated in this endeavor by previous "afterword" essays in Papua New Guinea ethnographies-Bateson's for Naven (1958), Rappaport's for Pigs for the Ances- 190 DIALOGICEDITING 191 tors (1984)-what follows was more directly inspired by a series of significant field experiencesthat positioned Kaluli and me in a more blatantsubject-to-sub- ject relationship. In 1982 I returnedto PapuaNew Guinea for a short summerfield trip after an absence of five years. While I was back in Bosavi, my book was published;its arrivalin the field, and my momentaryfixation on it stimulatedthe Kaluli to ask aboutit, and stimulatedme to attempttranslating sections of it for discussion with them. This article reportson the form of ethnographicdiscourse that developed in these encounters. The "dialogic" dimension here implicates what Kaluli and I say to, about, with, and througheach other; with developing a juxtaposition of Kaluli voices and my own.2 My focus on "editing" invokes a concern with authoritativerep- resentation;the power to control which voices talk when, how much, in what order,in what language. "Dialogic editing," then, is the impactof Kaluli voices on what I tell you about them in my voice; how their take on my take on them requiresreframing and refocusing my account. This is the inevitable politics of writing culture, of producing selections and passing them off as authenticand genuine, and then confrontinga recenteredview of thatselection process thatboth questionsand commentsupon the original frame and focus. In more directterms, my aim here is to let some Kaluli voices get a few words in edgewise amongstmy otherreaders and book reviewers. My secondarytitle, "InterpretingHow Kaluli Read Sound and Sentiment" is meantto implicatethe work Kaluli helped me do in orderto "write" them, and the work I had to do for them to "read" that writing. I want to suggest that this understandingis multiplytextual, that Kaluli perceive the coherences and contra- dictions in my representationalwork as being about me in similar ways to how I perceivethe book to be writtenabout them. I also want to suggest Kaluli perceive it as a story aboutthemselves that they also have occasion to tell, a line I'll use to play off of Geertz's phrasesituating culture as "a story they tell themselves about themselves" (1973:448). But Kaluli tellings are differentfrom mine in arrange- ment, focus, intention, and style. I'd also suggest that my Kaluli readersrealize as clearly as I do that all of our tellings elide and/orcondense certain scenarios while playing out others in detail; and that both kinds of tellings and tellers have a complicatedcross-understanding of the way they speak and write with an acute awarenessof differentaudiences. A Text Soundand Sentimentis an ethnographyof sound as a culturalsystem, a book about naturaland human sounds-birds, weeping, poetics, and song-and how they are meaningfullysituated in the ethos, or emotional tone, of Kaluli expres- sion. The form of the book originateswith Kaluli ideas as they are packed into a myth about the origin of weeping, poetics, and song in the plaintive sound of a fruitdove,the muni bird. I presentand unpackthat myth, following its structure, with chapterson birds, weeping, poetics, and song that alternatestructural and 192 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY cognitive summarieswith symbolic/performancecase studies. In this fashion, the book continually moves back and forth between Kaluli idealizations, prescrip- tions, intentions, and actualizations,and these are played off each other by my juxtapositionsof linguistic (from metalanguageto texts), musical (from form to performance),and cultural(from ideationto action) analyses. As to what is "in" the book: Kaluli myths and cosmology portraybirds and humans as transformationsof each other in death and life, living in different planesof visible and nonvisiblereality that in part"show through"to each other. Birds can "show through" by their sounds; Kaluli apprehendand relate bird sound categories to spirit attributionsaccording to which ones "whistle," "say their names," "talk Kaluli," "cry," "sing," or "make a lot of noise." The explicit link between bird sound and humanemotional expression is first formed in the arenaof weeping. The descending four tones of the muni bird call creates a melodic frameworkthrough which women's funerarywailing turns into wept song. While the performanceof this sung-texted-weepingevokes the image that, like the deceased, the weeper too has "become a bird," the switch from sponta- neous to elaboratelyplanned ritual expression hinges on poetics. Transforming the "hardwords" of assertivediscourse to the "bird soundwords" of poetic song involves evocative linguistic strategiesto speak "inside" the words, and to "turn themover" so they reveal new "underneaths."Song texts are organizedby these devices to follow a "path" along a set of place-names;these evoke the pathos of experiencesKaluli sharetogether at the places thatthey travelto or visit each day. These poetic "bird sound words" are then melded with the musical material of birdsound, a melodic song scale again based on the tones of the munibird call. A polysemous lexicon of water motion names the contoursof song melody and creates a theoretical vocabulary for compositional and aesthetic discourse on song. To be deeply affective and to move membersof an audienceto tears, these "flowing" sings are then performedin a plaintive bird voice by a dancer cos- tumedas a bird at a waterfall. While these are some of the featuresdetailed in the book, it is probablymore to the point to say that my "topic" was the aesthetics of Kaluli emotion, or, put differently,the inventionof sound as aestheticallyorganized sentiment. My work in Sound and Sentimentwas to demonstratehow sound is constructedand inter- pretedas the embodimentof feelings; that is, as aestheticallyaffecting evocation in the Kaluli ritualperformance of weeping and poetic song. Readers and Readings Let me now introducesome of my Kaluli readersand say something