Both anthropological purists and plain-old decent citizens of the world necessarily deplore the invasion, infiltration, colonization and eventual obliteration of indigenous cultures. But anybody who loves the arts has to do some secret, shameful rejoicing: collisions between the SUVs of a dominant culture and the donkey carts of the “developing” world produce weird beauty amid the carnage. The hybrid music of the American South, for example-blues, jazz, country, rock and roll-is one of the glories of world culture. So would you trade the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans in order to get it? If you would, you’re a monster. If you wouldn’t, you’ve traded away Robert Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, as well as George Gershwin, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Either way, cultural genocide.
What brought this to mind (you must be wondering) is a newly released three-CD anthology on Smithsonian Folkways Records called “Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea,” recorded and annotated by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. Bosavi is the name of a mountain in Papua New Guinea’s southern highlands; it’s also the name that some 2,000 people living in its foothills give to their home, their language and themselves. Like certain long-displaced Native American tribes, the Bosavi live in collective longhouse communities; they farm, hunt and fish. Until the mid-1960s, they’d been mostly isolated from outsiders. But the arrival of evangelical Australian missionaries in 1964 changed everything. The missionaries cleared land for an airstrip, eventually built clinics and schools-and set about the destruction of Bosavi ritual and religion, music and dance. “Confident that the forest was filled with satanic spirits,” Feld writes in his helpful (in fact, essential) booklet, “they hardly bothered to learn any of the local cosmology…. The message was unequivocal: either renounce traditional ways and prepare for the second coming of Jesus Christ, or face the impending hell fire. The message intensified when the … missionaries imported Huli evangelical pastors from the highlands to the north to aid in spreading the gospel. In addition to a particularly zealous style of preaching, the Huli pastors easily intimidated their Bosavi neighbors, to whom they felt both culturally and morally superior.” After the evangelists, predictably, came the anthropologists, the labor recruiters, the development workers and, finally, the good cop/bad cop act of “development”: environmentalists and loggers.
The hellfire preachers scared their “captive audience” of New Guinean hillbillies out of ages-long ritual practices. Much of the disc calls “Sounds and Songs of Ritual and Ceremony” was recorded in the 1970s and documents “performance styles ultimately abandoned as a result of the social upheavals.” The disc includes wrenching funerary weeping songs; a swampy, spacey seance song that morphs into a passionate call-and-response longhouse-rocker, and the ceremonial drumming that disturbed hearers so powerfully that they would sometimes “burn either the shoulder of the drummer, the side of his instrument, or both, in retaliation.”
You can hear what persists of indigenous musical forms on the disc called “Sounds and Songs of Everyday Life”: whoop-and-holler work songs to the accompaniment of axes and machetes, a gentle, throaty improvised female duet to greet the afternoon cicadas (which serve as a tambourinelike backup), a jew’s-harp made of bamboo played with a rock-steady, almost techno-sounding beat. (Some producer ought to sample this; Moby, if you’re out there somewhere: check disc 2, track 9.)
For most modern Western listeners, of course, a little of this goes a long way, and they may want to start (and finish) with “Guitar Bands of the 1990s.” The missionaries had brought their hymns and taught the Bosavi Western song forms and vocal harmonies; guitars and ukuleles arrived in about 1975, when Papua New Guinea became independent and Bosavi laborers started bringing them home after working temporary jobs in the north or on the coast. They also brought portable cassette players and tapes of such Papuan string bands as the Paramana Strangers; “the few available cassettes,” Feld writes, “were played until they disintegrated.”
The music that resulted, with its spare, churchy harmonies, bluesy single-string guitar leads and chunky rhythms, sounds a little like something off the Harry Smith “Anthology of American Folk Music”; in fact, the common Bosavi practice of having a female voice sing the melody while a man sings harmony below her is the same technique that gives the old Dolly Parton-Porter Wagoner recordings their distinctive mountain tang.
Both literally and figuratively, this is mountain music. Not just the same sound, but the same subjects: lost love (“it’s OK, it’s all right; go find yourself another man”); dead mothers (“I can only cry/my mother, where have you gone?”); homesickness (“Mount Bosavi is my place/why did I leave my home and go away”), and that old-time religion (“brother, sister, convert/here and now, not tomorrow”). True, a couple of the songs aren’t the kind of thing you’d hear in eastern Kentucky: “long ago, in the past/Bosavi had no dictionary/however/having just made it Steve and Bambi have brought it here/for that reason/all of us are happy with Steve and Bambi.” Steve is Feld; Bambi is anthropologist Bambi B. Schieffelin, who’s been studying such topics as language acquisition, parent-child interaction and the development of Bosavi literature since the 1970s.
Both from an anthropological and a musical point of view, this stuff is compelling and absorbing, but is it ultimately a good thing? Sure, the musicians in these bands seem to be having a great time, and so will any listener who gives them a willing ear. But in another 20 years, will this sort of professionalism, and the inevitable exposure to more and more music from the outer world-wait until these people hear Bob Marley, or Eminem-have killed the impulse that makes the Bosavi sing along with the cicadas?
Well, yeah, probably. Should somebody stop it before it’s too late? Put up a fence? Confiscate the radios and tape players? Fortunately or unfortunately, this process-whether we consider it cultural enrichment or cultural contamination-is unstoppable. (Turn on any Hot Country radio station and you can hear what happened to America’s mountain music.) The only sane response is to crank up our Negative Capability generators, greet the ambiguities with ambivalence, enjoy the good music that’s come out of them-and be grateful that someone’s recorded it before it, too, disappears.
