This rich and varied collection highlights the subtle but powerful role that music plays in making the world a more hospitable place. The wide-ranging chapters, all written by experts and activists, deal with specific places and processes and enrich our understanding of how cultural exchange and learning happen and come to be transpired. A must read for ethnomusicology and for anyone with an interest in the role of culture in our complex world today.
Cultura Y Transculturation Pdf Download
alter/nativas latin american cultural studies journal alter/nativas (Online) ISSN 2168-8451 Copyright 2021Published by the Center for Latin American Studies with the support of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University.
Musical instruments provide material evidence to study the diversity and technical innovation of music in space and time. We employed a cultural evolutionary perspective to analyse organological data and their relation to language groups and population history in South America, a unique and complex geographic area for human evolution. The ethnological and archaeological native musical instrument record, documented in three newly assembled continental databases, reveals exceptionally high diversity of wind instruments. We explored similarities in the collection of instruments for each population, considering geographic patterns and focusing on groupings associated with language families. A network analysis of panpipe organological features illustrates four regional/cultural clusters: two in the Tropical Forest and two in the Andes. Twenty-five percent of the instruments in the standard organological classification are present in the archaeological, but not in the ethnographic record, suggesting extinction events. Most recent extinctions can be traced back to European contact, causing a reduction in indigenous cultural diversity.
Music production is a universal feature of human cultures (Mehr et al., 2019). The cultural evolution of music is a growing new field ripe to develop, considering the success of the comparative method in other disciplines, from evolutionary and cultural anthropology to linguistics (Nettl, 2010). Non-material aspects of music like scales, tunes and melodies have been subject to cultural evolution studies in recent years (Savage, 2019). Songs have for instance been statistically examined with aspects of pitch such as harmonic content, melody and tonal arrangements as well as timbre, with novel analytical tools that permit quantification and comparisons in space and time (Leroi and Swire, 2006; MacCallum et al., 2012; Serrà et al., 2012; Savage and Brown, 2013; Mauch et al., 2015; Savage and Atkinson, 2015; Mehr et al., 2019; McBride and Tlusty, 2020).
We can use organological data to study human cultural innovation and its transfer among human groups in space and time. Several methods are available to examine if and how the network of instrument relationships relates to the biological and cultural diversity of the people who play them. A fruitful approach is the mapping of characters in phylogenies, with statistical analyses of correlation (Nunn, 2011; Brown et al., 2014; Bégat et al., 2015). Some musicological traits have previously been linked to diversity in languages and/or genetics in other regions of the world: simple clustering techniques have been used to compare the distribution of instruments and language families in Oceania (Mclean, 1979), Taiwanese polyphonic group songs have been linked with local mitochondrial DNA variation (Brown et al., 2014), correlations between song styles and mitochondrial DNA diversity have been detected in Japan (Savage et al., 2015b), and broad range comparisons have been performed between music structure and style, linguistic features and genetic diversity in Northeast Asia (Matsumae et al., 2021).
In this paper, we present an exploratory quantitative assessment of native musical instruments and examine their distribution in time and space. Our goal is to explore changes in diversity and extinctions of single instruments, and connections with linguistic relatedness, by tying the instrument diversity to the human groups who produce them. We explored diversity patterns of musical instruments in South America with three case studies of quantitative analysis involving novel datasets: (1) a list of instruments based on the von Hornbostel and Sachs classification system (1914), expanding the most current database of musical instruments (and sound devices) with recent descriptions focusing on South America; (2) a musical instrument database based on the prominent work by Izikowitz (1935), updated with current socio-linguistic information; and (3) a database of panpipe features, expanding that by Aguirre-Fernández et al. (2020). These datasets were contrasted with linguistic and cultural information and explored through different methods.
Five fundamental issues concerning the study of material cultural evolution were presented by Tëmkin and Eldredge (2007), after their research on Baltic psaltery and cornets, and have been further elaborated by an expanding body of literature (Lipo et al., 2006; Gray and Watts, 2017; Youngblood and Lahti, 2018). A summary of these critical points, highlighting major limitations and possible solutions, is provided to bring further context to our instrument evolution study.
The first and most significant issue is in the different mode and frequency of interlinear transfer of information between biological and cultural entities, with horizontal transfer heavily influencing the cultural transfer. Cultural transformation has been claimed to be fundamentally different from (vertical) evolution in the past because cultural inheritance can be horizontal/blending (Kroeber, 1923; Moore, 1994). The issue of non-linear vertical evolution is also important in biology, as hybridization and other forms of horizontal gene transfer do occur across the tree of life (Abbott et al., 2013).
After examining the caveats to consider for our cultural evolutionary analysis of musical instruments, we proceed with our first broad continental screening, examining the diversity of archaeological and ethnographic specimens. We compiled and updated an extensive instrument dataset, including several new entries from sources dedicated to South America. Our 501 entries were divided into three classes: aerophones, membranophones, and idiophones (Fig. 3a). Chordophones were disregarded, as they were arguably absent in pre-Columbian times (Izikowitz, 1935). The current state of documentation is shown in Fig. 3b, including new entries for each class of instrument (49 aerophones, 46 idiophones and four membranophones). The composition of the updated dataset reveals a preponderance of aerophones in South America, which account for more than 50% of the instrument entries in the continent (66 out of 124). These 66 entries represent about 40% of the global aerophone coverage in our dataset. Only 30% of the South American aerophones are present in the ethnographic record only, possibly associated with relatively recent innovations or information loss (Fig. 3c). The second most represented instrument class in South America are idiophones (41 entries, 33%) and of those, 50% are present either only archaeologically, or both archaeologically and ethnographically, whereas the other 50% have been recorded to occur exclusively ethnographically.
The colours relate to the cultural areas described by Murdock (1951), as illustrated in the map: (1) Isthmian; (2) Colombian; (3) Peruvian; (4) Loreto; (5) Caqueta; (6) Savanna; (7) Guiana; (8) Montaña; (9) Jurua-Purus; (10) Pará; (11) Goiás; (12) Eastern lowland; (13) Chilean; (14) Bolivian; and (15) Xingú. The scale bar illustrates the distance among branches.
The archaeological and ethnological record of native musical instruments from South America documents a great diversity of aerophones and idiophones. This diversity comprises organological clusters that correspond to preferential exchanges between human groups who belong to defined geographical and cultural units, and in some cases speak languages of the same linguistic family. The study of instruments offers a rich complement to the study of music itself, with material artefacts being preserved in the archaeological record and enabling a deeper time perspective.
The pre-Columbian use and development of musical instruments in South America may have been influenced by cultural exchange with other continents (Riley et al., 1976). The possibility of long-range geographical connections between human groups using panpipes has already been explored (Aguirre-Fernández et al., 2020). Pre-Columbian contacts between the Americas and the Pacific have also been suggested based on domesticated species such as the sweet potato (Roullier et al., 2013) and chicken (Storey et al., 2007), and left traces in the genetic makeup of Pacific islanders (Ioannidis et al., 2020).
This subject of transpacific contact remains controversial in spite of the growing independent lines of evidence that support it (Jones et al., 2011). In terms of musical instruments, the challenge lies in finding relevant archaeological data regardless of its incompleteness (Perreault, 2019). In addition, studies on cultural transmission dynamics (Scanlon et al., 2019) applied to musical instruments would help understand the transmission mechanisms in place and the likelihood of transmission patterns (e.g., imitation from family members; Chitwood, 2014).
The neighbour-net analysis of panpipes (Fig. 6) allows for flexibility towards horizontal transfers and contact events overriding the evolutionary backbone, which is commonly expected in cultural traits (Moulton and Huber, 2009). The panpipe dataset benefits from a more systematic and robust analysis of the traits that are present or absent in the different specimens described, with multiple specimens associated with each society. The phylogenetic approach provides remarkable insights to broad areas of cohesiveness in panpipe construction, even if a similar limitation in the number of features analysable on a large scale is in place (13 panpipe features discretized in 53 character states). The subdivision of the large Andean cluster (corresponding to the Peruvian cultural area identified in Murdock, 1951) into a northern and a southern block mirrors the linguistic and genetic evidence of northern and southern spheres of influence in the Central Andes, as identified by Stanish (2001) and confirmed by linguistic and genetic evidence on population structure established 2ff7e9595c
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