How to communicate potlatch in the medium of sound?

Hein Schoer’s Box of Treasures is organized around a 42-minute piece of soundscape-composition, which was produced for the Sound Chamber at the Nordamerika Native Museum (NONAM) in Zurich, Switzerland. Along with this intention come the fascinating aspects of the project as well as its inherent tensions.

The main characteristics of Box of Treasures are the following: it is an artistic research project concerned with an ethnic group Schoer refers to as ‘Namgis First Nation of the Kwakwaka’wakw, descendants of a tribal society of the Northwest Pacific Coast which classical cultural anthropology refers to as ‘Kwakiutl’. Accompanied by a NONAM ethnographer and in close contact with local indigenous institutions Schoer, between 2009 and 2012, stayed three times in the region of Alert Bay, a small town in the north of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. Box of Treasures is a documentary of the whole project and includes diverse material. The soundscape composition itself is presented in two versions, one in stereo and another one in quadraphonic surround sound. The composition is supplemented by an exposition entitled Four Worlds: Cultural Soundscape Composition and Trans-Cultural Communication, a book of about 400 pages. This text serves at least two purposes: generally speaking, the text serves as a sophisticated reflection on several aspects of the project. More specifically, it offers a contextualization of the project in the fields of soundscape composition, cultural anthropology, and transcultural pedagogy. In addition, more audio material, photographs, films, recording logs, ethnographic fieldnotes and so on are included in the Box of Treasures.

The composition blends sounds of flora and fauna (like flowing water, sea lions) with the sounds of people talking, teaching, elaborating on mythical issues, laughing, woodworking, and singing and ritual music making (in a potlatch ceremony). Schoer himself comments on the composition in classic Schaferian/Truaxian soundscape terminology and presents the composition as a sequence of four ʻmovementsʼ: the Natural Soundscape, the Artificial Soundscape, the Human Soundscape, and the Cultural Soundscape.

Schoer highly recommends listening to the quadraphonic version, which I, unfortunately, could not do. However, I am quite sure I understood his point. His emphasis on listening to the quadraphonic version is not only due to his fascination with and expertise in high-end audio technology, an issue he does not put much emphasis on but which is still very obvious; rather, it is intended to stress the epistemological approach of the project, namely its orientation towards atmosphere, affect, and immersion.

Sound is one of the most powerful communication media culture and humankind have at their disposal. […] [W]e believed that the experience of the sounds of a culture brings an immediacy and intimacy, an immersive quality, that the usual object-focused approach of classical exhibition design was lacking. (4)

Obviously, this approach faces difficulties when used in intercultural settings. For, as Georges Devereux, who did fieldwork on the Sedang in Vietnam, once pointedly remarked, it is impossible to interpret the backache of the anthropologist, resulting from weeding during participant observation, as a bodily perception of a Sedang peasant. Despite his basic sensibility towards ontological multiplicity (the title Four Worlds refers to ontological differences between the several discourses the project combines, namely soundscape theory, audio fieldwork, transcultural pedagogy, and cultural anthropology) Schoer, as far as I can see, seems to fail to address the problem of the cultural framing of the meanings of sounds. As some kind of alternative, he presents a rather rough account of the critique of cultural anthropology, especially concerning generalizations and essentialism. This leads Schoer to an interpretive understanding of ethnography and a modification of his primordial ambition to produce a sonic representation of contemporary Kwakiutl culture:

I had decided to make a composition that does not attempt to represent Northwest Coast culture as a whole (which would be as futile an attempt as it would be presumptuous), but instead to present a glimpse of Kwakwaka’wakw contemporary life in Alert Bay from my personal perspective. (108)

He is trying to work this out in coeval dialogue with his informants, an approach he compares to corporate music making. Schoer's frequent use of concepts from the field as metaphors for his working process and results could be seen as a consequence (this is most peculiar in Schoer's use of the concept of ‘box’, because the making of wooden boxes is presented as one of the most artistic traditional crafts of the ‘Namgis).

From my point of view as an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar, employing ethnographic methods as well as concepts from folklore studies and cultural anthropology, Schoer's project is very appealing. This is due to the sonic vibrancy of the composition itself and Schoer's cautious and open-minded attitude towards sounds and people alike. Furthermore, the additional information the box is offering is impressive. However, the appeal of Box of Treasures is also due to the less convincing aspects of the project of which I would like to mention two. (1) The composition evokes a picture of everyday life in which the re-appropriation of traditional skills (language, myth, crafts, rites) prevails. I do neither call into question the existence of these activities nor their relevance – but I do miss sonic articulations of other, and even more ordinary, practices of daily life. From my point of view, at least, this weakness of the project is the result of a fundamental misconception of cultural anthropology. Despite his plea for perspective and ʻin-betweennessʼ, Schoer seems to cling to an idea of cultures as holistic entities. However, in cultural anthropology’s more recent discourse, dynamics of culture are highlighted and more particular research questions are instead articulated regarding more particular cultural fields. (2) Schoer presents the potlatch ceremony he attended as a fundamentally inexplicable situation: ʻI will not attempt to try and describe what happens here, one has to be thereʼ (159). The reason for its inexplicability is, of course, that he has no cultural knowledge of the character of the potlatch. In a further effort to provide an explanation Schoer (a) relates dances, songs, masks, and the myths they articulate to the property of clans and hierarchies between clans who, in former times, used to be of high rank. Moreover, he describes the ceremony (b) as the coming-to-life of a spirit world, a world of myth in which men turn into animals. Both approaches are not explicated and evoke an impression of the potlatch as a ritual that is inexplicable and mysterious (about a group of carving artists, who is closely tied to potlatch and myth, Schoer writes of an ʻarcane auraʼ; 138). I just wonder why he decided to ignore Marcel Mauss’¹ and Claude Lévi-Strauss’² considerations on the topic: they show how totems, taking the shapes of animals, in tribal societies often serve as subject positions which place the members at a certain position in cosmology as well as positioning the individual in relation to other persons who belong to the same clan or to others. In view of this background, ‘to get connected with the spirit’, ‘with the ancestors’, means getting in touch with one’s most fundamental identification. Neither in the composition nor in the book does Schoer grasp this cultural logic, neither in a general sense nor in its contemporary manifestations. However, while listening to Schoer's composition and reading his book I got the impression that the mythic logic did in fact work quite efficiently here. This is due to what Schoer tells us about what happened when he got back to Alert Bay to present his composition.

ʻ[A]ll agreed that it was a fair representation of their contemporary cultural and everyday life. […] [T]he main reason why they approved of my work and were confident I would put it to respectful use was that I came backʼ. (171)

‘Coming back’ here seems to be synonymous with both giving back and taking part in a practice of symbolic gift exchange, which is the more general term for potlatch. By giving something back, Schoer himself became a subject in accordance with this mode, insofar as his own relationship with the people of Alert Bay changed:

ʻ[T]he intention of working with equals was replaced by feeling equal. By now the personal relations built up have gained at least as much importance as the successful implementation of my research plan. (172)

Maybe it is something of an overinterpretation to locate Schoer in this way in ‘Namgis culture, and maybe it is even more unfair to accuse him of a rather superficial attitude towards the discourse of cultural anthropology, especially in view of the fact that he explicitly defines Two Weeks in Alert Bay as an installation for a museum and not as a study of anthropological research. Having said this, it is simply impossible to represent culture without studying it, isn’t it? So there remains a kind of tension inherent in the project that stems from the idea of producing a soundscape composition to represent a cultural situation. Finally, Box of Treasures points to this tension and to the state of the art (for that is what it is!) in sonic ethnography: still having the status of a very promising idea waiting to be translated into a methodology.

Notes on contributor

Jochen Bonz did ethnographic fieldwork in the cultural realm of house and techno music (Subjekte des Tracks, Kadmos, 2008), and is interested in the cultural shaping of subjectivity (Das Kulturelle, Fink, 2012). His recent research project is concerned with the sensual experiences of football fans. For many years he was based at the University of Bremen, Germany, and is now working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Cultural Anthropology at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria.

Jochen Bonz
Department of History and Cultural Anthropology, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria
[email protected]
© 2016 Jochen Bonz
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079983

Notes

1. Mauss, The Gift.

2. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures.