Sound Structure as Social Structure

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. n this paper I address two questions: What are the major ways that the classless and generally egalitarian features of one small-scale society reveal themselves in the structure of organized sounds? What are the major ways that these same features reveal themselves in the social organization and ideology of soundmakers and soundmaking? By providing an overview of these areas I hope to illuminate some dimensions of a sociology of sound for the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, a traditionally nonstratified society where egalitarian features seem significant to sound structure, and where inequalities also are clearly represented in the distribution of expressive resources for men and women.My concern with these problems derives from a preoccupation with merging ethnomusicological questions (the cultural study of the shared meanings of musical sounds) with sociomusical ones (the study of musical sounds from perspectives of the social structure and social organization of resources, makers, and occasions). My work of the last few years (Feld 1981(Feld , 1982(Feld , 1983 attempts to understand the most salient lessons about the structure and meaning of Kaluli sounds and ways they are inseparable from the fabric of Kaluli social life and thought, where they are taken for granted as everyday reality by members of this society. My title alludes to a perspective that considers structured sound as "un fait social total," in the sense that sociologists like Durkheim, Mauss, G. H. Mead, and Schutz stress the primacy of symbolic action in an ongoing intersubjective lifeworld, and the ways engagement in symbolic action continually builds and shapes actors' perceptions and meanings.My title also alludes to another paper, Song structure and social structure, one of Alan Lomax's seminal cantometric reports (Lomax 1962). This reference is meant to locate this paper, and the Kaluli pattern it reports, in a larger comparative framework for the sociomusical analysis of classless and egalitarian societies. In doing so I also want to reconsider Lomax's rationale for why we should compare sociomusical systems, and what we can compare from one to the next.For Lomax the "principal message of music concerns a fairly limited and crude set of patterns" (1962:450); as a form of human behavior music should be Final version rec'd: 2/1/84 ? 1984 Society for Ethnomusicology 383 384 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, SEPTEMBER 1984seen as highly patterned, regular, and redundant in each society, yielding stable structures. Lomax suggested that cantometrics provide profiles for each of these...

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