3.5: Conclusion

Violence, Difference, and Peacemaking in a Globalized World

Writing in 1970, the American sociologist Philip Rieff (1922–2006) stated that for the sake of stability, “cultures” should have clear and definite boundaries. According to Rieff the “members of a culture learn, through their membership, how to narrow the range of choices otherwise open. Safely inside their culture—more precisely, the culture safely inside them—members of it are disposed to enact only certain possibilities of behavior while refusing even to dream of others. . . . Members of the same culture can expect each other to behave in certain ways and not others.”¹ In Rieff’s view the purpose of a culture is to instill those social norms. Indeed, Rieff believed that a culture—conceived of as a bounded, unitary entity that teaches and defends norms—could “prevent disorganizing questions from arising.”²

In Rieff’s time there were many “disorganizing questions,” among them challenges to prevailing social norms governing gender and race and worldwide protests against colonialism and war. The 21st century has witnessed an intensification of those questions. Processes of migration and mediation have accelerated. In the past few decades large numbers of people have been deterritorialized. As guest workers, immigrants, deployed members of the military, or refugees, they dwell in countries where they may not have the rights traditionally granted by nation-states. They may bring customs and practices that cause friction with populations that were already there. Local schools, houses of worship, and other institutions may accommodate these deterritorialized people or resist doing so; either way, the presence of these populations ties distant places to each other and changes how people live. Their presence also makes the population in many places more heterogeneous and challenges the idea of nationhood as a particular people tied to a particular geographical place.³

Page 230 →In today’s world, then, we should pay attention to the people who move, the people who stay in place, and the contacts between them. According to the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, “Mobility is often perceived as a threat—a force by which traditions, rituals, expressions, beliefs are decentered, thinned out, decontextualized, lost. In response to this perceived threat, many groups and individuals have attempted to wall themselves off from the world or, alternatively, they have resorted to violence.”⁴ Precipitated by mobility, feelings of loss or change can make it harder for people to live together.

According to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, in addition to the changes caused by large-scale migration, mediated entertainments (music videos, movies, television) have also changed how people think about each other. Media from afar offer people images of lives different from their own. Through television, Appadurai notes, lower-income people witness theatrical versions of how wealthier people live. When they see that prosperity is impossible within the financial system in their neighborhoods, that comparison offers them new information that shapes their own expectations for what is possible, prompting them to develop new “scripts for possible lives.”⁵ Likewise, some activists have found the media helpful in cultivating a growing worldwide awareness of human rights and in raising the expectations of women or minority groups that they, too, can assert those rights.⁶ If, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, a nation is one kind of imagined community, mediated communication allows individuals to be networked at a distance into much larger imagined communities, in which people might share some norms or values. No one is linked with everyone, but many people are linked with others internationally, and that connection changes what these people know about the rest of the world.

Appadurai calls these moments of clashing information, in which individuals’ knowledge about faraway people or situations conflicts with local knowledge, disjunctures. In Appadurai’s view, living with many kinds of conflicting information is now commonplace because global phenomena may create new conflicts on the local level.⁷ Furthermore, different elements of the social landscapes people experience in their everyday lives may conflict; for example, the music people want to receive from afar may not be available owing to financial constraints, or the values of an ethnic minority may conflict with those of the nation-state that rules over that minority group. Different individuals, neighborhoods, or nation-states may experience a variety of disjunctures and be challenged by a variety of conflicts and constraints, for it is the interaction between social forces at different scales that produces the conflict.

Page 231 →The existence of disjunctures is not new. We saw in chapters 1 through 3 that as people have moved through processes of migration, colonialism, and diaspora, conflicts have arisen between the “local” phenomena and the “from elsewhere” that change how people think, live, and make music. As we saw in Turkey and Japan in chapter 5, the impulse to “modernize” a nation or a nation-state stems from a process of comparison: a judgment about a group of people in relation to others and the desire to impose standards from elsewhere on the judged people. As mediated communication increased and travel became safer and easier, opportunities for disjuncture multiplied.⁸ As when Laura Boulton made a recording of the Iñupiat singer Joseph Sikvayugak, the encounter of audio recording often brought together people with different expectations of what their encounter might mean—for Sikvayugak, preserving his people’s music in a time of change; for Boulton, material for publication and earnings. This encounter changed the Iñupiat people’s idea of their own heritage over the decades following Boulton’s visit.

Even as the era of globalization has produced economic growth and feelings of connectedness, it has also produced clashes related to those social changes. Recent decades have witnessed more and more conflicts that target specific groups of people with the intent of destroying them completely.⁹ In Indonesia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, Sudan, and Syria, among other places, brutal attacks have targeted persons belonging to specific identity groups. Appadurai believes this hardening of divisions among groups is closely aligned with the anxiety and instability caused by globalization. In recent decades it has become less clear who is in charge, who defines the terms and sets the rules for how people live. As we saw in chapter 7, in a globalized world not only nation-states make these decisions; corporations, international organizations, and military or police forces may also exert control over what everyday people can or cannot do. As we saw in the case of Brazil’s copyright enforcement, actions across international borders also disrupt the power of nation-states, making them less able to control what happens inside their borders.¹⁰

Appadurai points out that not only is globalization unevenly distributed; the resources for understanding it are also unevenly distributed. For instance, individuals may know that jobs are being added or disappearing in their town, without direct knowledge of the global forces that cause these shifts. Likewise, they may see that their usual business of buying and selling audio recordings on the street is disrupted, without knowledge of the international agreements that caused the disruption. Whether they want to or not, everyone is participating in globalization, but not everyone has control over their participation, Page 232 →leaving people feeling afraid or confused as they try to master their situations. Appadurai notes that minority groups often become a target of violent acts because their presence heightens these uncertainties for the majority population. The presence of different languages or customs may threaten the coherence of social and educational systems. And because the minority is close at hand, as a neighbor, their presence may make the instabilities and challenges caused by global forces feel personal.¹¹

The widespread circulation of media has not solved the old problems of displaced populations or unequal opportunity, but it has added layers of complexity to those problems. As we saw in chapter 6, many people in the mediated world have used music to define themselves and to distinguish themselves from others, individually or in groups. In an environment where mediated sounds are abundant, people feel free to choose from and blend a wide array of musics.

At the very same time, contradicting this freedom of choice, struggles over the ownership and control of music have become more and more pervasive. Arguments about appropriation have taken on urgency: many listeners are insisting on clear definitions of “ours” and “theirs,” calling for a hardening of the lines between groups of people and kinds of music. On one hand, members of a minority group may believe it important to monitor that boundary to guard against appropriation. On the other hand, members of a majority may define a minority’s “culture” as a tactic of exclusion, accompanied by criticism of others or restrictions on others’ rights. Policing the boundary between groups only increases the feeling of separation and conflict.¹² Yet in a time when unseen global forces are changing local practices, it is not surprising that people might want to avoid “disorganizing questions” in favor of certainty.

The use of music to define the boundaries between groups can be benign—a mere matter of taste—but it can also do harm. During the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq US military personnel brought their music with them. They listened constantly, whether to generate excitement before missions or remind themselves of home with personalized mixtapes.¹³ But according to the musicologist Suzanne Cusick, US military personnel also used music to break the will of prisoners. As part of a larger interrogation plan that routinely put prisoners under intense stress, US soldiers frequently chose music that they knew would be offensive to Muslim prisoners. In some Islamic traditions entertainment or frivolous music is forbidden. To prisoners who held these beliefs, being forced to listen to popular music with explicit lyrics Page 233 →or performed by women put them in a morally objectionable position from which they could not escape. The soldiers also used very loud music, especially heavy metal music, to keep prisoners awake for extended periods of time. In this setting music became a way of drawing a sharp distinction between “us” and “them,” supporting the selfhood of the soldiers while tearing down that of prisoners.¹⁴ This wartime situation is another disjuncture in which a global conflict becomes localized, changing the lives of individual persons.

We have also seen that local conflicts can become meaningful global forces. Rap music emerged from the disjuncture felt by African American and Latinx youth: living in cities of dramatically unequal circumstances, they have used music to address unfair differences in economic and social opportunity. The worldwide appropriation of this once-local music allows a disjuncture felt in one place to become an international convention for representing frustration and demanding social justice.¹⁵ Thus, disjunctures do not only originate in global circumstances; they can also emerge from local concerns.

When Philip Rieff developed his theory about the norms that make up a “culture,” he described two ways of understanding the world that were in direct conflict with one another. Rieff imagined the old model, on which Western cultural values were based, as a vertical scale of value, in which the top is better than the bottom (fig. 9.1). Rieff developed many analogies for this model. Based on the monotheist idea of “one God,” this hierarchy privileges oneness, unity, and wholeness, and it devalues multiplicity or changeableness. This model pertains not only to religious values but also to artistic and scientific thinking. Consider the example of the pop singer Lady Gaga, or anybody else who is considered to be too changeable: having many identities, being multiple, automatically bestows a lack of “integrity” or authenticity. Musically, this scale of value means that some music has to be judged more valuable than other music and that all members of the “culture” must acknowledge that judgment as true.

Rieff’s second model, in contrast, was a horizontal, nonhierarchical model (fig. 9.2). It closely resembles Thomas de Zengotita’s idea of mediated thinking, for in this model all options are equally valid. No one is entitled to say that some are better or worse than others. Rieff wrote his essay to criticize the writer Oscar Wilde, who delighted in overturning social hierarchies. Wilde believed that the “true personality” of humankind “will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different.”¹⁶ Wilde envisioned a society that resembled Rieff’s second model, allowing many individual identities and commitments to flourish. Page 234 →In contrast, Rieff believed that the mediated selves who thrive in this environment destabilized society: if everyone has a god’s-eye view, and flits from one identity to the next, it is difficult for a society to maintain a sense of ordered values where some identities are clearly preferred.¹⁷

Fig. 9.1. Schematic of Philip Rieff’s “vertical of authority.”

Rieff believed firmly in the necessity of his first model: the hierarchical, vertical order. Without a hierarchy that would allow us to make judgments, he reasoned, we would live in a lawless society: “everything could be expressed and nothing would be true.”¹⁸ In the world Rieff sketched out, difference was a private matter, kept to oneself: one’s public identity was based on common ground with other people, and those commonalities preserved unity and order.¹⁹

To be sure, having clear universal standards for judging whether some music is better than other music offers listeners a guidepost for deciding what to listen to and making claims about what music has value. The European concert music tradition is marked by the existence of a canon—a recognized and valued subset of musical works. (In the case of European music these are the works that often appear on course syllabi and on the programs of large arts institutions like symphony orchestras and opera houses: works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Giuseppe Verdi, and so forth.) In the history of the United States, too, the music of empowered groups has been marked with more prestige. Page 235 →Some European Americans took for granted that European concert music was good and dismissed other types of music as mere noise.

Fig. 9.2. Schematic of Rieff’s “anti-culture.”

The habit of assigning prestige extends to many kinds of music: jazz fans may make their case for the superiority of particular styles or players, and so may fans of country music. Not all musical genres lend themselves to the formation of a canon.²⁰ But in our day, processes of preserving and conveying heritage have often led to the selection and canonization of particular performances or works. Creating canons reinforces a vertical standard of value. Music selected for the heritage treatment gains prestige, and it travels farther and more easily than the music not selected. Challenges to a canon—purposeful attention to musical practices outside the valued collection—correspond to Rieff’s second model, in which people may assign value to many different musical customs, treating each as worthy of respect.

Since Rieff’s time, other thinkers have offered support for a less hierarchical model, one that might allow for more diverse lifeways within a single society. The sociologist Craig Calhoun points out that the idea of a constitutional democracy—a framework of laws that guide social relationships and ensure rights—establishes norms but does not require judgments that some ways of life are better than others. In practice the history of the United States reveals tensions between the vertical dominance of citizens of European origin and the horizontal “nation of immigrants” ideal of heterogeneity—and between Euro-American concert music and other American musics. Yet Calhoun imagines a functioning democracy in which difference is recognized but does not define citizenship, a society that has a commitment both to rational discourse and to social equality.²¹ Calhoun’s theory does not answer all the questions; but it does describe a way in which the equality of Rieff’s second model could exist without the lawlessness Rieff predicted.

Rieff’s second model did not replace the first: these two models coexist and Page 236 →compete, sometimes in paradoxical ways. Many of the social conflicts of our time stem from differences between religious fundamentalism (vertical) and pluralist secularism (horizontal).²² Once people become aware of many optional identities and practices, it is harder to make them cooperate with a vertical authority that forbids some of those practices, and governments or other actors sometimes eliminate options by force. Scientists tend to seek one coherent explanation (vertical); people who argue against evolutionary theory use a “hear all sides of the debate” argument (horizontal). One person can switch back and forth between these two models of thinking, and most of us do so without conscious thought. It is not clear whether one model is gaining dominance over the other, but it is clear that the difference between them is driving significant conflicts in the United States and elsewhere.

The solutions Appadurai offers to the conflicts the world faces combine the second model that Rieff describes—the nonhierarchical one—with a legal system, like Calhoun’s, that would secure basic rights for all people. Appadurai believes that the only way out of the horrifying cultural violence that so much of the world is now experiencing is to encourage everyone to embrace mediatedness and the mixed traditions that come with it. Appadurai suggests that governments should cut the link between ethnicity and citizenship, making it easier to be a citizen of a place without belonging to the major ethnicity or nation historically associated with that place. States should accommodate minorities and allow dual or multiple citizenship so that fewer people remain stateless or lack basic rights. In Appadurai’s imagined peaceful world nationalism could still exist, but it would be framed multiculturally: group identities would be forged based on principles of openness and mixture rather than authenticity, exclusion, or purity. Access to media would be widespread, and people would use the media to promote cultural mixing as a social norm.²³

Canclini agrees with Appadurai to a great extent: he says that artistic mixing that comes from genuine engagement among people produces greater understanding. At the same time, however, he notices some dangers. He believes that encouraging mixing may dissolve “weakened” social groups or practices: if groups with unequal resources collide, the customs of the weaker group often adapt to those of the stronger. Kwame Anthony Appiah has already dispensed with this objection: no one can choose whether the weaker group should change except the members of that group.²⁴ But for people living under duress, others’ attempts to use their music to make hybrids can feel threatening to their sense of self. If white musicians borrow black spirituals (chapter 3), historical and continuing inequities between the two groups make Page 237 →this borrowing a potentially offensive appropriation. The particulars of the relationships around the music’s making will shape listeners’ reactions, but it is reasonable to assume that because of the power differential, this form of borrowing carries some risk.

For Canclini the biggest ethical and aesthetic risk of mixing musics is that it makes the musics that have been merged appear to be equal partners, masking inequalities of power.²⁵ This false appearance of equality may include instances of tokenism, in which representations of inclusiveness may hide continuing inequality, as when people of various skin colors appear on posters for a program that serves minority groups poorly. This strategy may make members of the majority group feel good by depicting friendship or closeness. Yet the various people involved in a project may not all experience their participation that way; even as one party feels friendly to the other, another might feel forced or participate only for practical gain. The debates about Paul Simon’s Graceland (chapter 6) address this risk without resolving it. As outsiders to the Graceland situation, we cannot really know how the interplay of power, fame, money, and music felt to all participants, but it would be naive to believe that differences in power played no role in their work. Canclini urges us not to mistake market forces for real affection and to consider carefully what inequalities may be masked by hybrids.²⁶

Likewise, on the largest scale, Canclini believes that the idea of “planetary reconciliation” represented by the United Nations–style “showcase of cultures” (chapter 5) presents a distorted image of reality. The UN showcase makes it seem as though “the world” values every nation’s presentation of its own art equally, that all groups stand on the same footing. Yet experience suggests that profound asymmetries persist in economic and political relations among nations. The nation may also serve its citizens unequally: state officials may do a poor job of showcasing minority musics or even suppress them (chapters 5 and 7). Canclini wants artists to retain the power to criticize unfair situations or refuse to participate in them. He fears that if the global marketplace takes too much control over artists’ lives, they might no longer be able to stand apart from it. For Canclini, mixing is good only if artists choose it, and they must also have the option to make music that blends poorly with other musics—refusing to mix.²⁷ As we have seen (chapters 7 and 8), participation in the global music market requires economic and personal trade-offs.

As we saw in chapter 3, individual people may feel constrained when others lock them into fixed categories. The music scholar Jairo Moreno advocates a “principled indifference to difference”: he finds it unnecessary that Page 238 →“difference-based identities, particularly those of oppressed peoples and societies, must be constantly proclaimed and relentlessly performed in order to resist or subvert the status quo.”²⁸ In Moreno’s study of the jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón, Moreno praises Zenón for creating situations that allow people to participate in music together, regardless of their expertise or past experience. Acknowledging that each relationship between people, groups, or nations has its own power relations, Moreno argues that we can create situations that suspend hierarchies, allowing us to connect with each other without our differences becoming a primary focus.²⁹

To some extent Moreno’s approach resembles Rieff’s second, nonhierarchical model of society, but it leaves room for people to connect in the public sphere based on their common interests, an element of Rieff’s first model. Moreno’s idea also resembles recent theories about how to create a stable democracy that includes diverse peoples: stability requires finding a way to build feelings of solidarity and social commitment among people who share a geographical space, regardless of their ancestry, history, or musical preferences.³⁰ Moreno argues that in the moment of musical performance, individuals may find a point of meaningful contact regardless of their background or heritage. Appiah calls this kind of value a “project-dependent value.” That is, people who hold differing religious principles or opposing political positions may still come together and agree on particular ideas for a time—that torture is wrong or that the blues are beautiful—and those ideas offer a place to begin.³¹ Participation in music provides both a point of personal contact and a shared value as a starting point.

Like Moreno, Craig Calhoun believes that the public sphere can be a setting where people choose to develop social solidarity with one another. We know that people value tradition and heritage; and, for different reasons, they also value novelty.³² As individuals, we choose which traditions to foster, which to join, which to create anew, and participation with other people can help us imagine who we are in new ways. Human groupings of any kind are not set in stone; indeed, our social choices, including our music-making, form and reform our groupings as we are brought into contact with each other.³³ In Calhoun’s view, “the nature of life together is chosen as it is constructed.”³⁴ In other words, the choices we make about how to relate on a micro level, how we make music together or invite others to share our music, are not a result of our social order; these choices build our social order. By deciding to use music in ways that connect us with our neighbors, we may build solidarity and community.

Page 239 →As I mentioned at the end of chapter 8, the anthropologists John Kelly and Martha Kaplan make the case that people need representation in two senses: metaphorical representation, having the feeling of being heard, seen, or recognized; and literal representation, as in a democracy that grants and protects meaningful rights.³⁵ As we saw in the case of Hyo-shin Na, for many individuals the mixing and remixing of music may address that first sense: the mix may help them define and express their places in the world or help them connect with others. Music alone cannot accomplish the second, literal kind of representation; only political action can extend and protect human rights. Indeed, there is nothing magical about music; it can be used for harm as well as for good. But, at least in concept, musical mixing might ease the way for the political project of inclusion. Canclini writes that blended artistic practices can help societies “work democratically with differences”: respect for another person’s music may serve as a smaller-scale demonstration of respect for that person’s personal autonomy.³⁶

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Literature always anticipates Life.” Or, as present-day activists have argued more colloquially, “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.”³⁷ Artistic representations do not fix the world’s problems, but they do help us to imagine what is possible for our own lives. By articulating the challenges and joys of lives lived in a globalized and mediated world, hybrid musical experiences allow individuals to make new identities for themselves or blend old identities with others’. As Appiah has written, “if we care about others who are not part of our political order—others who may have commitments and beliefs that are unlike our own—we must have a way to talk to them”—and they to us. Shared artistic experiences allow people to establish these contacts, often mediated over distance.³⁸ As we saw in the case of rap musicians on the African continent (chapter 8), this form of solidarity need not mean giving up one’s own voice, but it may mean demonstrating care for another’s tradition. That sense of attachment seems important, for extending care may entangle people in relationships of respect, perhaps even of obligation.³⁹

Thomas de Zengotita has warned that the constant mixing, remixing, quotation, and mediation of words, sounds, and images may lead to “a certain point of mass meaninglessness”; that is, awash in a sea of representations, we may stop judging, shrug, and simply turn away.⁴⁰ Yet we have encountered many recent examples in which the particular elements of the mix, and the way they are mixed, matter very much to musicians and listeners. The musicologists Olivia Bloechl and Melanie Lowe suggest that “what we do with what we know . . . discloses who we are and with whom we are in community.”⁴¹ Page 240 → The signaling of identity and connectedness through musical borrowing suits the mediated self, which eagerly declares its positions and alliances (chapter 6). This signaling has all the positive and negative traits of mediated behavior: it is hard for us to discern what is real and what is put on for show, and a single choice may be some of each.

At the time of this writing, “disorganizing questions” remain unavoidable. Since the 1960s, various groups all over the world have challenged dominant standards of value in their societies: refusing their assigned roles, asserting civil rights, or seeking equality under law. Disagreements within the borders of countries are at least as heated as those between countries.⁴² The mixing of musics disrupts the tidy categories of “nation” and “culture,” and it may seem like a further element of disorganization. Yet, as a musicians’ strategy, musical mixing may promote not disorganization but reorganization: migrants and mediated persons finding ways to relate to one another and convey their experiences. In Canclini’s view these strategic mixes “help us make the world more translatable, which is to say more cohabitable in the midst of differences.”⁴³ It is possible—and much to be hoped—that these translations might create points of contact that encourage respectful relations among the citizens of the world.