Michael gave a fantastic talk on Alan Lomax and Harry Smith today. I was struck by Lomax’s role as an unwitting anthropologist who took up in the 60s and 70s (what must have appeared to be) a deeply suspect, almost neocolonial project to categorize and staticize world music and dance. As one astute commenter on BoingBoing puts it, Lomax “seemed to hold his subjects in contempt […] preferring to keep his ‘peasants under glass.'” His cosmopolitan and, as Michael termed it, “democratic” vision must have seemed dangerously close to that of the cosmopolite cum cultural imperialist, a position Derrida ventriloquizes best: “I am (we are) all the more national for being European, all the more European for being trans-European and international; no one is more cosmopolitan and authentically universal than the one, than this ‘we,’ who is speaking to you.” Okay. So that’s one way to think of Lomax: as engaging in a specific type of anthropological project, a type of project that (thanks to Clifford Geertz and the publication of Malinowski’s diary) was passing out of style at the time and had become deeply morally suspect.
Michael’s talk also suggested to me another way of thinking about Lomax. Rather than only seeing him as carrying the torch for an anthropological approach and perspective that would soon–and rightly–come under attack, we can also see him as a precursor to what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading.” That is, Lomax’s Global Jukebox anticipates, and perhaps in part is the inspiration for, a style of scholarship popular today, one which privileges connection over content, the collective system over the individual item.
I wonder if Lomax is a link between a discredited perspective in anthropology and perhaps its revivification in the field of digital humanities and literary studies. I wonder what this tells us about the new privileging of “networks,” “interconnectedness,” and “systems” made possible by digital technologies and expanding sets of data. I wonder what this tells us about the unconscious assumptions we hold when we approach and try to parse this data.
Significantly, as the Q&A to Michael’s talk made clear, the Cantometrics coding system that Lomax pioneered was designed to forge connections; in other words, the 37 criteria did not reflect, so much as they created, patterns and commonalities among disparate musical cultures. The same (as Moretti admits) goes for distant reading; the criteria, the units of analyses, imposed upon texts necessarily yields connections and patterns because that’s what they are designed to do. They create the supposedly “objective” connections they are looking for (Moretti flirts with objectivity, I think). Lomax’s Cantometrics, as Michael noted, appear dated, arbitrary, and a bit bound up in assumptions of the cultural superiority of Western mode of measuring “difference” and “commonality.” As inspirational as Lomax clearly is as a sort of proto-digitalist, I wonder if he is also a cautionary tale, making visible the pitfalls inherent in today’s digitally-driven “distant” scholarship.
Winter,
This is such an interesting interpretation of both Kramer and Lomax!
Thank you for making me think–when Michael gestured to Modernist impulses, contrasting Lomax to Smith, I didn’t actually put Modernists into the equation. Your invocation of Moretti and his modernist call for “distant reading” is contextually so useful.
As I think of Moretti, I am tempted to draw even more parallels with Smith and Lomax. And I find it even more useful that MJKramer “disambiguated” Lomax’s Digital Jukebox from Lomax the man and Lomax’s other auditory legacies. In Kramer’s positioning of Lomax as author of computational systems, Moretti’s “distant reading,” Cantometric coding practices, and digitalization of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival create a temporal conversation that demand further attention.
Lomax, from this vantage point, seems to me to be simultaneously proto- and performing- digital humanities in ways that call for us to consider both historically implicated and extremely contemporary and urgent questions. DH, in much or our earlier discussions, has become institutionally placed via a sort of ahistorical imperative for catching up with the “new.” Yet, as you usefully point out, we can glean from today’s presentation, that this “flirtation” with digital humanities and all that it entails has quite a legacy that we would be wise not to overlook.
thanks! jillana
Jade,
Thanks for your wonderful, thoughtful reflections on the talk. Great clarifications of the fraught issues around Lomax. He was, and remains, a polarizing figure in ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and, we might add, in emerging work in digital history.
It is, I suppose, important to emphasize the that Lomax saw his work as anti-imperialist, as substituting a community of all humanity as equal for conventional western superiority of so many in his historical moment. Then again, as your turn to Derrida aptly suggests, this doesnt mean that his project didn’t absorb, unintentionally, the imperial logic of a romanticized cosmopolitanism. I think the romanticism of his view on so-called “primitive” cultures, which he viewed as more complex, more human, better, against modern mass culture in the west did not displace hierarchies so much as flip them on their heads. Also, does Lomax’s investment in Americanness alter Derrida’s argument that cosmopolitan anti westernism was a weird permutation of imperialism? Not make Lomax any better but just alter the equation because of the specific differences of Americanness and europeanness? I wonder.
As I think Jillana is suggesting, your post also made me ponder the lurking connections between globalization in its mid-20th century moment and digital humanities now. Yes, Smith too is wrapped up in this moment, but I still think his different sense of temporality, of the boundaries and substance of an archive, of his quirkier modes of visionary handmade displacement of older cultural forms, offers an intriguing dimension *when* brought into tension/connection with Lomax’s proto big data distant reading work.
I’ll continue to absorb your comments as I think about where to go next with this talk. Thanks again!
Michael
Michael, I regret not hearing what sounds like a really engaging talk. The discussion set forth here in the blog has emphasized for me something that I think is easy to forget: that history is far from a teleological system unwinding endlessly toward “progress” but rather a repeated set of configurations and assemblages of ideas and actions according to contingent circumstances. (Hearing U-Michigan’s Renaissance scholar Valerie Traub speak this Monday also enabled me to reconsider this phenomenon). I’ve consequently been thinking recently of history as a “switchboard” in which backlit panels flash or remain dark according to a particular configuration of ideologies and actions (still working on this idea).
As you demonstrated, Michael (and if I’m not unhelpfully simplifying your talk), Lomax understood his project as democratic, and this is important, for it seems to run up against the subtleties of romantic cosmopolitanism that Derrida articulated (thanks Jade). I think one implicit lesson in this project is, then, to rearrange Bruno Latour’s words, that “we have never not been neoliberal.” Lomax stands as somewhat of a cautionary tale, perhaps, and certainly this seems apt today. I’m thinking also of the problem of pamphleteering in seventeenth-century London, or the rise of academic professionalism in the late nineteenth century; each of these periods displays something like a tension between the drive towards democratic principle and the simultaneous closure or objectification of a particular group or segment of society.
Andrew —
I like your metaphor of history as a “switchboard” and your phrase, “a repeated set of configurations and assemblages of ideas and actions according to contingent circumstances.”
Perhaps the biggest issue about Lomax–what is at once promising and worthy of critique in his work–is his conceptualizations of cultural democracy. As part of this presentation–a very early effort to make sense of folk music collecting in relation to the digital–I’ve been reading John Szwed’s biography of Lomax. Learning many more details about Lomax, his understanding of folk music must itself be understood through both the frameworks of romanticism and modernism, I think. His politics of culture must be grasped in their shaping by New Deal Popular Front context and a pivot he made between the popular regionalist art movement of the 30s and the WWII/Cold War global turn in American cultural thinking (and geopolitical power). I think, for one, that we should not dismiss the egalitarian dimensions of his work even though they are wrapped up in problematic ideologies and practices. We should not merely celebrate his work, of course. But we I think it is important to approach it as more than just completely flawed. For now, the more I ponder the Global Jukebox Project, the more I think it is worth recovering, perhaps even reviving, for what it can teach us about similar problems and possibilities in digital scholarship.
Thanks for your extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking comments!
Michael