In this collection of a dozen essays, Robert Cantwell considers “three distinct but closely conjoined domains of human life—music, festivity, and culture” (xi), all of which resonate strongly with each of his previous books: Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (1984), Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture (1993), and When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (1996). Well-versed in scholarship bearing upon his chosen topics, equally conversant with historical and social phenomena suffusing and surrounding his objects of inquiry, Cantwell is fundamentally an erudite, free-associating essayist offering personal meditations to “folklorists and fellow travelers” (xxi) that are concerned with poetic and philosophical implications, with meaning and morality, with understanding and action.
Commencing with an introduction subtitled “Folklife as Real Life,” Cantwell (re)acquaints readers with his Classical Greek cum twentieth-century Euro-American literary critical neologism, “ethnomimesis,” a high-sounding term that stands in for such humbler locutions as “folklore” and “expressive culture” in its signification of collective symbolic behavior, in the process establishing the author’s familiarity with Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, published by the philosopher and literary critic Erich Auerbach in 1946, while producing a populist, from-the-bottom-up, vernacular modification of it. What’s more, as a champion of ethnomimesis as both word and social phenomenon, Cantwell asserts its power as a profoundly real means of resisting the incessant barrage of mediated culture manufactured, promoted, spun, and sold by corporations, politicians, one-size-fits-all institutions, and practitioners of artistic homogenization. Not unlike his generational contemporary, Bob Dylan, famously photographed in the early 1960s brandishing a sign reading “Stop the Rising Tide of Conformity,” Cantwell infuses each essay with insights gleaned from folk culture, personal experience, a disparate yet intriguing range of artists and thinkers, a deep commitment to liberal principles, and a surrealist’s sensibility. And much like the French filmmaker Agnés Varda, whose The Gleaners and I (2001) limns the holiness of often-marginalized yet profoundly creative souls who recycle society’s relentlessly abundant refuse, Cantwell asserts the cultural worth “of the scavenger, the homeless man who rummages among the detritus that always lies in the wake of the capitalist juggernaut” (46); and he salutes both folk and folklorist who transform “what is dispersed, discarded, ruined, and despised to what is recovered, concentrated, and renewed, rendering it at once rare and precious, scandalous and subversive” (222).
The quartet of essays constituting Cantwell’s first section are expansive meditations on the meaning of music, particularly what has come to be called “roots music” in contemporary American life. Honing in on the King Oliver/Louis Armstrong recorded collaboration “Canal Street Blues,” the emergence of boogie-woogie, the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music in both analog and digital incarnations, and the persistent power of experiential traditional auditory knowledge, Cantwell forcefully challenges the dominance of official, primarily textual authority in states, commerce, and the academy.
In section two a trio of essays examines community as expressed through festivity, beginning with a consistently lucid, wide-ranging, frequently brilliant expansion of a prior publication in Baron and Spitzer’s Public Folklore (1992). Concerned with the “deeper social, economic, and political character of the folklife festival” (94), Cantwell draws upon the broader historical context of cultural exhibitions to illuminate the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife’s commitment to fostering face-to-face personal encounters rather than distant spectacles. The result is the best critical examination extant of the folklife festival as a potent multi-faceted mode of representation practiced by public folklorists. In a subsequent essay, the ephemeral plaster of Paris “White City” created for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 offers further context and contrast as bygone yet disturbingly familiar sham and short-lived festive grandeur is juxtaposed with its contingent stark, dark, dirty, hurly-burly real world. By far the longest and most literary essay in the entire collection, “The Annual Dance: Festivity and Culture in ‘The Dead,’” is a close reading of James Joyce’s story from Dubliners in relation to the complexities and contradictions of Irish life at a moment of historical and cultural tumult.
The book’s third and final section features five essays ruminating variously on the inherent creative and political power of rooted collective practices, of cultural ecologies, of what gets called folklore as means of preventing or at least mitigating “the sudden disappearance of the workplace or the gross devaluation of the resources upon which it depends, the violent upheavals in settled landscapes, the physical bifurcation and dismantling of neighborhoods, massive internal migrations, or any of the other assaults of pure capitalism” (244). Cantwell muses with purposeful whimsy on the implications of Woody Guthrie’s Pictish stance as an embattled “little guy” of questionable social status whose songs—shot through with the “tension between a promise and its disappointment” (207)—took sides consistently with the dispossessed. Imaginatively summoning the notion of the English artist, social philosopher, and activist John Ruskin that “illth” is the opposite of “wealth,” Cantwell conjoins the “blackness” of coal, oil, grime-coated workers, African Americans, and ultimately 78 rpm records to claim poetically that “in the blues disc all the discursive residues of blackness come together” (217). More pragmatically, “The Parallax Effect” draws upon the author’s scant yet revelatory fieldwork experiences to ponder the concept of folklore in relation to literature and, by extension, the teaching of literature to undergraduates. With “Folklore’s Pathetic Fallacy,” again invoking Ruskin, Cantwell turns to polemic, exhorting all folklorists, and public folklorists in particular, to go “beyond documentation, memorialization, and preservation towards active creation, forging a politics of cultural transformation” (244). The collection’s closing essay, “Habitus, Ethnomimesis: A Note on The Logic of Practice,” notes commonalities but also emphasizes clear distinctions between Cantwell’s concept of ethnomimesis and the notion of habitus as developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Cantwell asserts more specifically that, whereas habitus is chiefly preoccupied with objective social conditions and the behaviors and attitudes of people within given social environments, ethnomimesis constitutes a potentially liberating social imaginary collectively created through folklore forms that are at once symbolic and actual.
Given Cantwell’s topical scope, keen intelligence, and interdisciplinary approach to matters of central concern to folklorists, this collection has much to offer, although I suspect not all would-be readers will be charmed by every essay. In keeping with Cantwell’s admirable self-revelatory and reflexive stance, and despite thoroughly enjoying most of this collection, I confess a strong aversion to the conceptual hair-splitting, sustained abstractions, and painful deliberation of the obvious characterizing the more overtly philosophical chapters. Invoking Keats, as Cantwell often does, I was sometimes borne on the “Ode to a Nightingale”’s “viewless wings of poesy,” yet also transported where, as in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing.”
Cantwell’s admirable engagement with the politics of culture also compels mention of several ironies and contradictions seething through at least this reader’s response. To begin with, the names of Texas oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and the discipline of folklore’s working class hero Archie Green problematically face one another on adjacent front-matter pages thanking the Getty Trust, while dedicating the book to Green. Then there are: the probable academic folklorist actual audience contending with the supposedly public folklorist intended audience; the spectacle of a mostly armchair scholar urging colleagues to action in the public sphere; the titular I-speak-for invocation of Beale Street’s silent voices despite the fact that they can “talk” and often have “talked,” sometimes with assistance from such folklorists as David Evans, Bill Ferris, Judy Peiser, and Dick Raichelson; the further reification of such canonical and historically significant folk revival figures and documents as Woody Guthrie and the Harry Smith Collection and the correspondingly diminished attention to particular contemporary practitioners of ethnomimesis; the repeated opposition to “mediated experience” replacing “real experience” and the almost exclusive preoccupation with such mediated productions as records, festivals, and the fieldwork-based writings of folklorists; and a romantic, reductive characterization of Southern blacks and whites as quintessential folk, as in a description of Calumet, Indiana, being “heavily settled by migrating southerners, black and white” (26), despite the significant presence of all manner of European immigrants in that heavily industrialized region.
But so what?
Robert Cantwell is very clear that his writings rely fundamentally on his own experience. And so in reading and reflecting on his essays, we might remember another daring, provocative, far-reaching, poetic, Americanist voice, Walt Whitman, who in his remarkable “Song of Myself” asked this question and provided this answer: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.”
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[Review length: 1412 words • Review posted on September 22, 2010]