ANALOGIES AND DIFFERENCES IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSICAL CULTURES ACROSS THE HEMISPHERE: INTERPRETIVE MODELS AND RESEARCH STRATEGIES.

Before our eyes, African-American cultures in their various expressions have unfolded a fascinating picture of resilience, transformation, invention, and innovation, revealing analogies, divergences, parallel strands, cohesion, single traits binding certain regions together or separating them, and idiosyncrasies of individual artists. It is a tremendous undertaking to unravel this complexity, spread out over four hundred years. What are the causes of the specifics and generalities? Why are there analogies and differences? What has actually happened during that time span and in all those different places?

Ideological Outlooks and Research Methodologies

While the basic questions are plain, the answers depend not only on our ever-expanding database and individual researchers' methodologies but also on the researchers' ideological outlook. A perusal of the vast literature reveals a recurrence of certain basic assumptions and interpretive models upon which the declared research results depend. In this paper, which is basically theoretical though not devoid of concrete examples, I will outline some of the most influential interpretive models, which I have divided into six categories. My aim is to make us all more conscious of our various modes of thought, even if such consciousness is at times painful. I will express criticism but without devaluing any individual researcher's methodology or philosophical outlook. Nor do I claim infallible objectivity for myself. And yet, the fact of my almost continuous, thirty-eight-year research in African societies--as well as the legacy of Sigmund Freud in my birthplace, Vienna (see Horgan 1996)--will give this paper a special frame of reference.

The six interpretive schemes to be discussed have influenced research strategies and actual work in African-American studies. All of them, alone and in combination, have been applied to explain analogies and differences not only in African-American music across the hemisphere but in African-derived cultures as a whole. They are the following: (1) biological reductionism, (2) socio-psychological determinism, (3) pseudohistorical reductionism, (4) historical particularism, (5) cultural materialism, and (6) cultural diffusionism. The most elementary schemes are summarized under model (1), while the psychologically most revealing may be those under (2) and (3); the most open-ended schemes are probably (4) and (6).

Biological Reductionism

This model embraces several explanatory schemes. Observers working from this perspective often silently or overtly subscribe to the assumption of a causal link between "race" and "culture."(1) Cultural specifics are imagined to be hereditarily interrelated with "race." "Race" is even thought of as predetermining culture, although it is rarely stated that way explicitly. In their assessment of African-American cultural expressions, this group of observers might therefore begin their treatises with the acknowledgment of racial "identity" markers, implying that African-American cultures are shared-and creatively perpetuated only by individuals who can be identified from their physical appearance as African-American. Since physical appearance and heredity-determined behavior are central to the biological-reductionist approach, cultural analogies are emphasized, and differences are interpreted as creative variation within a basic matrix. African-American cultures are generally conceptualized as homogeneous and as demonstrating a kind of innate resilience.

The point of departure and unifying element in this approach is the perception of a set of physiological identity markers serving as a core statement, expanded by the juxtaposition of apparently causally related expressive forms and modes of behavior. Around the core idea of "racial identity," language, art forms, music, literature, dance, etc. are arranged in a manner designed to confirm the identity and innate unity of the population group thereby isolated. I therefore call this model "the racial Marguerite" (see Fig. 1).(2)

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Biological reductionism has other forms of expression in the literature. One is manifested in the particular direction taken in behavioral studies identified by the term ethology, whose founder was Konrad Lorenz, best remembered by the public for his spectacular communication with grey geese. In his footsteps, other researchers have transferred the methods of Lorenz's work with animals to human beings, thereby launching the branch of human ethology. The term "ethology" has been variously defined as "biology of behavior" and "comparative behavioral research," its objective being to understand animal and human behavior from a biological viewpoint and to analyze "species-specific" behavior (Spindler 1988, 137). A celebrated exponent is Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who studied group cohesion and control of aggression in the !Ko Bushman society of Botswana. An analysis of his texts, however, reveals that the ideological basis of his approach lies in unilinear evolutionism. He himself admits that he proceeds from the assumption that his mid-twentieth-century !Ko represent an "antique state of humanity" (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1972, 21).

Still surviving, although often under surrogate terminology, nineteenth-century unilinear evolutionism has influenced theoretical developments and research strategies throughout the humanities, including African and African-American studies. Authors applying it to music have variously proposed that pentatonic scales are more "primitive" than heptatonic tonal systems, that the history of jazz is an evolutionary sequence from "simple" to "complex" (e.g., in the chords), that on the Guinea Coast the "stage" of anhemitonic pentatonism was passed through by cautiously incorporating two more steps into the scale, with the singers "not yet" certain about their pitch, and that that was the origin of "blue" notes (see Mecklenburg and Scheck 1963). It was even once proposed that musical scales are transmitted by heredity.

Another biological reductionist trend has surfaced more recently, resulting from several breakthrough discoveries in genetics that have raised expectations that a magic key has been found to unlock the causality of gender differences, racial differences, sexual orientation, and the like (see, for example, Begley 1997). In this view, complex human behavior can be reduced to the workings of single genes--a position with the hidden psychological advantage that individuals can thus be acquitted of moral responsibility for their actions.

However, this popular new creed of one-gene/one-behavioral-trait causality is regressive historically, just as much as the fiction of "cultural memory" harks back to eighteenth-century Lamarckism.(3) I anticipate that by 2010, or earlier, when the Human Genome Project is completed, it will become more apparent that the one-gene/one-trait equation cannot be safely used to predict or even retrodict individual behavior, let alone that of large, heterogeneous communities such as African Americans.

Socio-psychological Determinism

In contrast to biological determinists, observers working from the perspective of social or psychological determinism tend to explain analogies and differences in African-American cultural expressions not as manifestations of some innate "nature" of this population group but as a result of nurture under specific, recurrent circumstances, that is, as behavior that is acquired and developed through processes of enculturation. Researchers working from this model have noticed that a population can be artificially segmented and isolated from the larger context through socio-psychological forces and can be pressed into demonstrating identities that are ultimately ascribed (see Kubik 1994a, 42-43). Put simply, one group ascribes to another group the role it expects it to play; individuals in both groups then come under social pressure to adhere to these stereotypical expectations.

A thorough analysis of this phenomenon was carried out in Burkina Faso by Paul Riesman (1993), who studied social interaction between two groups--the dominant Fulbe and the submissive Riimaaybe, who were subjugated by the Fulbe in the nineteenth century. The Fulbe hold all the political power, and the Riimaaybe are said to "wear imaginary strings round their necks" like goats (i.e., slaves) (172). The groups are said to display certain "ethnic" character differences; but when Riesman examined whether such differences were founded in different modes of child rearing, the result was negative. The groups' different "ethnic characters" were the result of internalized anticipations about the other group. In a stratified society split into oppositional groups, children learn to behave in accordance with the oppositional group's expectations. Enculturation prepares them not only for a life geared to the needs of their specific communities but also for interaction with the opponent. It was observed that, in both ethnic groups, adults pressure their offspring from an early age to learn to behave "like" a Fulbe or "like" a Riimaaybe. Deviant behavior is discouraged. For this reason, suggests Riesman, a Fulbe child will soon develop consciousness that he or she is a Fulbe and is not a Riimaaybe and will learn to act in conformity with the internalized modes of that group. A Fulbe will appear tone-deaf in contact with Riimaaybe music, and the subjugated people seem incapable of ever understanding the spirited Fulbe court music, with its shrill oboes (alghaita), long trumpet (gagashi), and military-style ganga snare drums.(4) Needless to say, a child of either Fulbe or Riimaaybe parents, raised in a totally different society somewhere else on the globe, would develop quite different behavioral patterns that would have no relation to the Fulbe/Riimaaybe antagonism (see also Kubik 1995, 157-158).

Heterostereotypes do serve a purpose: they guarantee the status quo in social hierarchies. For this reason they also sometimes change rapidly with a change of power. If only minor adjustments are made within the stratified society, the heterostereotypes can be displaced from one area of expression to another--for example, when institutionalized segregation is replaced by economic segregation.

From the perspective of socio-psychological interpretive schemes, it would seem that cultural resilience in minority groups also functions as a defense mechanism against perceived threats to the group. Thus the continuity and resilience of "black" cultures in the Americas into the twenty-first century can be understood as a socio-historical phenomenon resulting from societal splitting mechanisms brought about by a power structure supporting social stratification. To put it simply, if society were not divided, its expressive culture would be equally shared by all. Societal splitting and alienation, with all their attendant in-group/out-group antagonism, often result from prolonged pressure by power groups that have an interest, economically or otherwise, in the split. What initially perhaps are perceptions of group differences are then systematically inflated to become factual differences in a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. The late Alex Haley was painfully aware of this. A week before his death in 1992, he declared that he intended to "take America beyond Roots by breaking down what he called the artificial lines of race, lines that too many conclude are walls." These walls were "illusions that had somehow grown into fearsome reality in the American mind" (quoted in Williams 1992, 5).

An early stimulus to systematic research of group interaction based on data collection and observation came from sociolinguistics. Peter Trudgill, in his introduction to Sociolinguistics (1974), demonstrates how language usage can define group membership. Social-class dialects of English, he says, are indicative of the relative social status of groups in a stratified society (34ff.). His discussion of the formation of social-class dialects suggests analogies with the formation of ethnic groups, as I have shown in an analysis of ethnogenesis in eastern Angola (Kubik 1994b). Inasmuch as language identifies membership in a social class, it also indicates a speaker's membership in other group formations, e.g., ethnic groups. However, speaker recognition tests have also revealed that pseudo-ethnic formations abound on earth, some of the most impressive examples of which are found in the United States. "Blacks" and "Hispanics," for example, are such pseudo-ethnic entities, which can in no way be considered ethnic groups because language and cultural differences cut right across these artificial lines. This has been repeatedly shown by tests in which tape recordings of varieties of American English were played to audiences who were asked to judge whether the speakers were "black" or "white." In one such experiment it was found that the geographical origin of the speakers was much more identifiable than their "race." Another experiment, conducted in Detroit, had an approximately 80 percent success rate for listeners of various backgrounds recognizing "black" or "white" speakers; the 20 percent error rate represents a figure large enough to testify that there is no inherent link between a person's linguistic profile and his or her physiology (Trudgill 1974, 52).

More recently, the musicologist and linguist Benjamin Boone discovered blues-like speech in Jelly Roll Morton's famous 1938 interview with Alan Lomax. His computer analysis of the speech patterns and spectrum suggested "that pitches commonly associated with blues music were being utilized"--not only by Jelly Roll Morton, a New Orleans musician and composer, but also by Alan Lomax, a musicologist who grew up in the South, who seemed to have acquired a similar speech template through his own acculturation into the African-American community (Boone 1994, abstract).

These findings might help to temper the emotions that were stirred during the recent discussions in the media about "Ebonics" (a neologism composed of the words "ebony" and "phonic"), referring to what used to be called "black English" or "African-American vernacular English" (see Leland and Nadine 1997; Gibbs 1997). This vernacular, which functions for many as a home language, is grammatically consistent, incorporating phonetic, tonemic, and grammatical characteristics that can be traced structurally to several West African languages. But these features are not "genetically based." Furthermore, the discussion of whether "black English" is a dialect or a language only piles up dead weight. The debate in Africa twenty-five years ago about which African languages should be called "dialects" and which should be called distinct "languages" paralyzed educationists who proceeded from the notion that only "languages" were suitable for teaching in schools. Eventually, Mubanga E. Kashoki of Zambia, some other colleagues, and I exposed the futility of these concepts. We proposed that all variants within a language cluster should be understood as forming a dialect continuum. This principle applies equally to European languages. "Schwitzer-Dutsch," "Plattdeutsch," "Wienerisch," and standard High German (Hochdeutsch), the written language, are all part of one and the same dialect continuum that can be called German. Likewise, Oxford English, American Standard English, Guinea-Coast Pidgin, Ebonics, and Australian English are all part of a dialect continuum. Furthermore, each component is a "dialect" of all the other components. Both Ebonics and American Standard English can therefore be considered dialects of English.

It would appear that cultural and linguistic differences that set some African-American communities apart from the American mainstream are enhanced by forces of social marginalization. In reaction to marginalization and economic deprivation, these communities have developed defense strategies, emphasizing coherence and separate identities (e.g., "black ethnicity") through non-conformist behavior in all sectors of life, including the arts. Their search for a separate identity goes even to the point of posterior acquisition of African identity markers that are considered part of a long-standing cultural heritage--the reclaiming of selected traits from historical sources or archaeology, or traits that are not especially tied to the twentieth century, such as language. Seen from this angle, society appears to be split artificially into oppositional entities, each group attempting to bring its members into line. I therefore call this model "aligned societal molecule clusters" (see Fig. 2). Some authors working within the socio-psychological interpretive model would also stress that the marginalized groups' defense strategies ultimately play into the hands of the very same power structure that has forced them into marginalization, since they subscribe to the power structure's own biological reductionist ideology.

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Pseudo-historical Reductionism

The central theme of this third model, which gained currency in the United States especially during the 1970s, is expressed by the idea of "roots," thereby adding a diachronic element to the ideology of (static) biological reductionism. Observers working with the concept of "roots" also ultimately proceed from the notion of "race," vaguely conceptualized as recognizable by certain external anthropologically peripheral physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair texture, etc. However, since the "roots" concept is superimposed on the static concept of biological reductionism, a major cognitional problem emerges: how can a diachronic link possibly be established between Africans, among whom African-American genealogies once started, and the race/culture equation ascribed to African Americans? If the race/culture equation is scientifically valid, African-American and African cultural expressions and their underlying concepts should be identical in kind, but obviously they are not on any conceivable general level.

With the presence now of many African students in the United States, a stunning phenomenon has been observed: mutual distrust. Very few African Americans, particularly within the marginalized social classes, seem to be comfortable in the presence of African individuals or seem to feel any particular bonds of identity with them, in spite of declarations to the contrary. Moreover, the readiness to express this antagonism seems to be inversely proportional to the educational standards of both parties--the least educated tend to express their aversions more openly.(5) Anyone calling attention to this phenomenon will normally provoke a strong negative reaction from the parties concerned. But it is clear from psychoanalytical experience that strong denial reactions always confirm the unconscious presence of precisely the ideas or impulses in question. The phenomenon is called resistance in the psychoanalytic literature: resistance to a repressed idea that threatens to gain access to Ego's consciousness. One of the tasks of the analyst is to help the client accept the unpleasant idea. The antagonism described can be explained by assuming that Africans are often unconsciously perceived as representing the African American's past--a past long abandoned and immured in the mind. Contrary to all conscious reasoning, Africans symbolize to many African Americans the era of the Atlantic slave trade, or simply slaves (Kubik 1994a, 41). In cross-cultural contact, the encounter with another culture always stimulates unconscious ideas in the individual. It can be a "lost identity" that strives for expression, but that identity is very different from what Ego believes it is. Since it can be negatively charged, Ego is afraid of such knowledge about the self; so Ego projects these contents onto some outside symbol, identifying someone else with the unconscious thoughts. That is also what happens between African Americans and Africans, as it does between adherents to any two cultures.

Contemporary African-American self-perception is sometimes symbolically encased in the pseudo-historical concept of "roots." The model of a tree with its roots is so attractive to the mind because its multiple symbolism visualizes deeply entrenched ideas about self. I therefore call this interpretive model the "tree of ontogenesis" (see Fig. 3). Many papers and books have been written on the "roots" of African-American music--the roots of the blues, the roots of jazz. Synchronicity, namely the (belated) twentieth-century encounter between African Americans and their African contemporaries in art and music, as well as in person, is reinterpreted by the "roots" model diachronically, thereby reflecting the unconscious psychological configuration described above. No one talks about "the roots of South African kwela music in American swing jazz." Here, researchers prefer to speak of "influences," "adaptations," etc. In self-perception, "African-American culture" appears to stand "above ground level," in the clear light of historical consciousness, while "Africa" is relegated to a position of darkness, an ahistorical existence "below ground level" and yet forming an eternal source of energy that feeds the African-American tree.

[Figure 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Symbolism is always multifaceted and multidimensional. Images have several parallel meanings that neither contradict nor exclude one another In another dimension, therefore, the "roots" model can also be considered as a disguised version of evolutionism and, as such, pseudo-historical. In a sense, it parallels evolutionistic interpretive schemes developed by nineteenth-century anthropologists that reinterpreted other peoples' cultures as representing earlier stages of their own.

"Roots" as a concept was popularized by Alex Haley's Pulitzer prize-winning book of the same name (1976) and by the television miniseries based on it, which traced Haley's family back to Kunta Kinte, Haley's remote ancestor in Gambia. But by the early 1990s, Haley had largely transcended the concept of "roots" in its original meanings. There have been other signs recently of America's transition "beyond roots" and the breakthrough of a more aggressive, deromanticized perception of Africa by African-American intellectuals visiting the continent. An example is Keith B. Richburg's new book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997), which traces a journalist's ordeal amid racism and ethnicism in Somalia, Kenya, and Rwanda, where the author was mistaken for a Tutsi by Hutu militiamen.

Historical Particularism

This systematic, historically oriented approach, avoiding grand explanatory schemes and working instead from factual data obtained either in the field or in archives, developed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Often described, though not quite accurately, as "historical particularism" (Harris 1968), it was stimulated by the teachings of the anthropologist Franz Boas and has gained momentum in African-American studies. One of Boas's intellectual offspring was the influential Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963). He rejected nineteenth-century evolutionist ideas about cultural stages and considered the word "primitive" to be invidious and pejorative. Postulating cultural relativism, he considered Euro-American culture and lifestyle as just one of the many possible cultural variants, not "higher" or "lower" than any other (see Herskovits 1973). With a new terminology making use of the concepts of selection, retention, survival, reinterpretation, syncretism, and cultural focus (Evans 1990), Herskovits set out to unravel the behavioral patterns operating in intercultural contacts. He directed his research especially to African-American cultures as well as those of the Guinea Coast (Herskovits 1938a, 1938b, 1941).

A league of researchers dealing with the history of jazz, blues, and other African-derived musics began to operate from concepts developed by Herskovits, applying refined field interview techniques supplemented by the evaluation of written, pictorial, and other historical sources. Frederick Ramsey, Rudi Blesh, Richard A. Waterman, and others all belong, in a certain sense, to that school. In Cuba, Fernando Ortiz adopted a related approach, although he rejected Herskovits' original concept of acculturation in favor of the two-way concept of transculturation (Ortiz 1940). More recently, Dena Epstein (1973, 1977) has been in the forefront among researchers working with historical methods, scrutinizing an enormous number of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century sources from the United States and the Caribbean to reconstruct African-American music history. Although the work of these scholars often also incorporates interpretive schemes of the kind I have discussed above, and although the historical-particularist approach has not always been extended to the African continent, it warrants consideration as an independent scientific strategy. Within this school of thought, major musical expressions in the Americas, such as jazz, have been studied as specifically American cultural phenomena arising in the context of particular social situations.

Obviously, there are deficiencies in historical particularism if it is practiced only descriptively, thereby yielding an abundance of detail unrelated by cause and effect. A compensatory reaction to this accusation may be seen, for example, in the zeal of some jazz historians of the 1940s and 1950s to impose an artificial order onto fortuitous(6) style changes in jazz, postulating a ten-year cycle of change from Dixieland and Chicago jazz of the 1920s to swing of the 1930s, bebop of the 1940s, cool jazz of the 1950s, etc. Such simplistic schemes are, of course, easily sold because they are so easily impressed upon the popular mind, but they only vaguely reflect the realities of history.

Cultural Materialism

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered that economic factors determine social structure and ultimately cultural expression, including the arts. From this perspective, the major forces that have determined analogies and differences in African-American cultures, including music, would appear to be economic. Cultural manifestations by African Americans are explained as a social response to particular socio-economic situations characterizing various time periods in New World cultures. Marvin Harris (1968, 22) for example, pointed out that the differences in race relations that could be observed in Brazil and the United States during the 1960s could never adequately be explained by stressing "Portuguese national character and Catholicism" versus "Anglo-Saxon racism and Protestantism." He proposed a cultural-materialist explanation that would start with "the ecological potential of colonial Brazil as compared with colonial North America, differences reflected in sugarcane plantations, as opposed to tobacco and cotton plantations." He also enumerated other factors, such as differences in migratory patterns and the more balanced sex ratio that existed among the English colonists in the U.S., as opposed to "a markedly unbalanced one among the Portuguese." Finally, he pointed to economic factors that dictated a different treatment in Brazil and the U.S. of the offspring of "miscegenation" with African slaves and to the totally different demographic pattern in the two countries during the early nineteenth century.(7)

By analogy, in the cultural-materalistic view, the rise of reggae music in Jamaica would have to be explained solely as resulting from a particular socio-economic situation during the 1970s and the economics of the international record market in that period (see Johnson and Pines 1982; Martin 1982). However, economic factors are better understood as catalytic. Their importance and catalytic function in the rise of new musical forms in the United States can be demonstrated. After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton plantations began to be established profitably to the west of the Appalachian mountains, and with these developments came the transfer of many slave workers from South Carolina, Virginia, and other eastern states. That was the beginning of a development that culminated culturally in the rise of the blues during the last decades of the nineteenth century. To be sure, economics did not create the blues, but without the new social environment created in what was to be called the Deep South, through the establishment of large cotton plantations with relatively scattered settlements, the highly individualistic music called blues would probably not have emerged in the form it did.

Here it must be added that economic interdependence, even between antagonistic population segments, can also turn into a powerful integrative force. A current example is the rise of what is gradually assuming the shape of a "United States of Europe" through economic integration and monetary union, in spite of distinct cultural and language differences. Africa has provided brilliant examples of how interdependence between different population groups based on economic specialization has attenuated the probability of war and genocide. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Bantu-speaking peoples who migrated into southeastern Angola eventually reached a state of peaceful coexistence with the autochthonous hunter-gatherer !Kung Bushmen through an economic symbiosis whereby each ethnic group contributes to a common market on the basis of technological skills the other group lacks. Technological exchanges also include music--musical instruments in particular. The !Kung Bushmen have adopted iron-age instruments such as lamellophones from the Bantu; the Bantu learned much from the Bushmen about the techniques of using certain musical bows. A similar example is provided by Bantu-Pygmy economic symbiosis in many parts of Central Africa. Bantu neighbors of the Pygmies have adopted the latter's polyphonic singing style, and the Pygmies adopted several musical instruments from the Bantu. In the New World, whatever ghastly structures of exploitation have been at work, African-American artists have successfully stepped into the limelight through specialized skills in music, dance, and theater that no one else could match. In turn, the development of African-American musical forms drawing on European as well as African traditions heavily determined the shape of mainstream American music.

Cultural Diffusionism

Interpretive schemes based on this model tend to explain analogies and differences in African-American cultures as resulting from different cultural transplantation patterns deriving from the various ethnic backgrounds of Africans deported to the New World during the slave trade. Thus, the presence of a strong Dahomeyan population element in Haiti accounts for the transplantation of Fo religious concepts such as vodu (Courlander 1962), while the presence of many Angolans in early nineteenth-century Brazil has been considered responsible for the numerous Angola-related traits in Brazilian music (Kubik 1979). Equally, most of the candomble religious manifestations in Brazil have been identified as Yoruba (Nago)-based or Ewe (Gege)-based (Herskovits 1944; Merriam 1956-1957). With the deepening of our knowledge of both contemporary and past African cultures, culture-diffusionist schemes have recently gained in detail. Increasing attention has been given to the cognitive dimension, and concepts such as vodu and orisa in two different West African cultures have been semantically compared (Kubik 1996). From a generalizing, panoramic outlook linking African-American cultures vaguely to the African continent, the culture-diffusionist approach has evolved research models based on the strict use of historical methods, whether working with present-day field materials, the oral tradition, or archival sources (see, for example, Evans 1970, 1972, 1990, 1994; Kubik 1990, 1991b, 1993b; Pinto 1991).

Karl Wernhart (1994, 318) has emphasized that speculations about possible diffusion on the basis of cross-cultural analogies must be separated from factual, historically verified processes of human migration and cultural transplantation. There are two different methodological approaches to the question of diffusion: the first tries to diagnose diffusion through cross-cultural comparison of present-day culture traits; the other attempts to do so by cross-cultural comparison of contemporaneous historical sources from the areas in contact. It can be misleading, therefore, to include these very different approaches under one blanket term.

With regard to the first method, it is never sufficient merely to build the evidence on the criteria of similarity of form and quantity of resemblances, as systematically described by Fritz Graebner (1911, 108). Graebner's Formkriterium stated that similarities between two culture traits found in different places and not arising out of the nature, material or purpose of the trait should be interpreted as the result of diffusion, regardless of the distances separating the two places. In addition, his Quantitatskriterium held that if more such parallels are found between the two cultures compared, the likelihood of contact and diffusion between them is increased. As sound as these original proposals were, their validity depends on cultural stability. In order to show that a given culture trait is a conclusive diagnostic marker of a historical connection between two cultures that are now separate, one has to examine whether the particular trait in question could have been inherently stable over long periods. In social structure, the evidence is very difficult to procure. In music, certain pentatonic scales seem to have been stable in several African cultures for a long time; but transferred elsewhere, they can be easily projected upon and reinterpreted within a heptatonic framework, as the tonality of the blues demonstrates. In the realm of material culture, finally, characteristics such as the shape of drums, the type of resonators in xylophones, and the materials used can change quickly in history, depending on what is available locally for their construction and therefore on environmental factors. Such traits can be stable for a long time, but they can also change overnight in a radically new environment. They are therefore not very useful in building conclusive evidence for culture contact.

Conversely, the mathematics of so-called asymmetric time-line patterns in African music (see Fig. 4) is a realm that is immune to all social, cultural, and environmental influences (see Kubik 1979). Accentuation, mnemonic syllables, and instrumentation of the time-line patterns are all highly variable, but no one can change their intrinsic mathematical structure. Any such attempt simply destroys the pattern. African time-line patterns are therefore either transmitted or not transmitted. Their absence in the blues and virtually all U.S. African-American music (unless affected by Caribbean styles) and their selective presence in Afro-Brazilian, AfroCuban, and other cultures further south constitute one of the surest indicators of the historical connections of these African-American cultures to specific regions of Africa. Asymmetric time-line patterns are not found everywhere in Africa. They are concentrated on the Guinea Coast and in West-Central Africa and are characteristically absent in most of East Africa, in southernmost Africa (among both Khoisan and Bantu speakers), and in the western and central Sudan among speakers of Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic languages. The longest asymmetric time-line pattern (24 pulses) in the pyramid stump occurs among the Bangombe pygmies of the southwestern Central African Republic; this surprising discovery was made by ethnologist Maurice Djenda and me in 1966.

Figure 4. The mathematics of West and Central African asymmetric time-line patterns, shown as a pyramid stump

Cycle    Pattern
number   structure         Notation

   8        3+5                      [xx *

  12        5+7                  [x * xx *

  16        7+9              [x * x * xx *

  20       9+11          [x * x * x * xx *

  24      11+13      [x * x * x * x * xx *

                                                 Predominent
Cycle    Pattern                                 geographical
number   structure           Notation            distribution

  8         3+5      x * xx *]                   Universal

  12        5+7      x * x * xx *]               Guinea Coast,
                                                 West-central
                                                 Africa,
                                                 Zambezi
                                                 valley

  16        7+9      x * x * x * xx *]           Central and
                                                 West-Central
                                                 Africa

  20       9+11      x * x * x * x * xx *]       (no data
                                                 available)

  24       11+13     x * x * x * x * x * xx *]   Pygmies of
                                                 the Upper
                                                 Sangha
                                                 (Central
                                                 African
                                                 Republic,
                                                 Congo)

In material culture, comparisons based on form and quantity of resemblances have to be expanded by an assessment of technological complexity and uniqueness. The so-called cord-and-peg tension (Wieschhoff 1933, 15-16) is found in drums of the candomble religion of Bahia, Brazil (see Fig. 5), as well as in the drums called apinti in Surinam. It is unique to the cultures of the Guinea Coast and can have been carried to these New World places only by deportees from those areas in West Africa, especially speakers of Akan languages, Ewe, Fo, or Yoruba. The name apinti, the Yoruba designation of a specific type of drum, hand-played and often used for talking (Laoye 1959, 10-11), is an additional indicator. Equally diagnostic is the presence in Brazil, Colombia, and Panama of drums showing the so-called wedge-and-ring tension (see Fig. 6). David Evans observed it also in and near Maracaibo in western Venezuela in 1996, with the ring made of rope (Evans 1997). This tension is native to the west-central region of the African continent, including southeastern Nigeria, southern Cameroon, Gabon, and parts of the Republic of Congo. Its presence in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is just as much a diaspora phenomenon as is its presence in cultures of the New World, where it was transplanted with the slave trade. The general test for artifacts that can serve as diagnostic markers for historical connections between cultures that are now separated is their degree of technological complexity. The more complex an artifact is, the more unlikely is its multiple, independent invention and the more appropriate is its assessment as a diagnostic marker in a diffusionist explanatory scheme. Until we reach the stage of expressing technological complexity by a general mathematical formula which can then be correlated with the probability scale of unique versus multiple invention of a trait, this criterion can serve at least as a rule of thumb.

[Figures 5-6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One feels tempted to call culture-diffusionist explanatory schemes the "organ transplant" model, which suggests both their merits and their deficiencies: transplanted organs can be beneficially assimilated by their new host, but they can also generate unexpected reactions in the new environment or be rejected entirely. A plain culture-diffusionist approach in African-American studies--unless it is applied comparatively to several African-American cultures--tends to emphasize identities and analogies while downplaying the differences. It is thought to give insufficient weight to the forces of adaptation and innovation that have characterized New World developments (wa Mukuna 1994; Martin 1991). Without at least a strong infusion of awareness of the "mechanisms" of culture contact as conceptualized, for example, by Herskovits (1938a) and recently expanded by David Evans' formulation of trends of "revival" on the basis of eclectic borrowings from elsewhere (Evans 1994), culture-diffusionist approaches are sometimes limited to the earliest stages of African-American cultural history.

Some Recommendations

It is obvious that the six theoretical interpretive models that I have summarized above lend themselves to combinations. In practice, very rarely have individual authors followed just one line of thought. Although each scheme can be submitted to decisive criticism, it would be an overreaction to deny any of them the legitimate right to exist. The purpose of my summary is to make my fellow scholars a little more aware of what we and our colleagues are actually doing and from what sorts of silent assumptions we sometimes proceed. One could further analyze the implications of each scheme in terms of competing perspectives: individualistic or collectivistic worldviews, factual-historical or idealized evolutionary assessments of events in time, belief in a purposeful or a fortuitous nature of history, whether or not there is anything like conscious and deliberate human decision (free will), or belief in "born-so" fatalism programmed by genes or, in John Locke's view of the human mind at birth as a "blank slate" on which the sociocultural environment then inscribes its unmistakable hieroglyphs.

Perhaps a reasonable starting position conducive to a realistic assessment of cultural development in the Americas during the past four hundred years is to keep the time dimension constantly in mind, regardless of the interpretive schemes adopted--and not only the American (or African-American) part of the story, but the simultaneous and interconnected African and European parts as well. Whether we realize it or not, from the early sixteenth century on, the whole world was being increasingly linked by a worldwide web of information exchange. Its carriers, in the absence of electronics, may have taken a little more time to reach their destinations, but they did reach them. A new musical fashion coming up in Luanda, Angola, in the 1750s could possibly have been heard in Rio de Janeiro or Lisbon six weeks later. There were probably few simple one-way transplants of cultural ideas without any returns in one form or another. For example, Pierre Verger (1968) has written of the flux and reflux of people and cultural commodities between the Gulf of Benin and Bahia, Brazil, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dena Epstein (1973, 65-68) has uncovered some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sources that testify to the use of African musical instruments on slave ships for the purpose of "encouraging the captives to dance as a means of preserving their health." It is here that the myth of the Middle Passage as the cutting of an umbilical cord, followed by the victims' cultural amnesia, dissolves. The Americas were permanently connected to Africa and Europe from the sixteenth century onward by a two-way information highway that affected all the communities involved, with notable repercussions even in remote areas of the African interior.

Certainly, such understanding does not make our task easier. Reconstructing at least part of the ever-changing picture across the ages requires the meticulous application of historical methods, preferably working within one delimited period at a time, and with sources from both sides of the Atlantic. We simply cannot afford uncontrolled time-journeys in African-American studies.

Luckily, during the past thirty years historians and archeologists in Africa have uncovered an abundance of intra-African as well as external precolonial sources, so that periodic comparisons across the Atlantic are now often feasible. Where this is still not possible, a second comparative approach can be used, though with precautions concerning the projection of present-day data from either continent into the past. Whenever this path is chosen for the purpose of reconstructing and interpreting past sequences of events, one must be aware of the underlying assumption of cultural stability. Anthropological research cannot subscribe a priori to that assumption; on the contrary, from the study of factual data we have learned that cultures around the world are naturally unstable and have always been. They drift from one configuration into another. Change is, therefore, an inherent cultural phenomenon. Another stunning observation has been stressed recently (Kubik 1994a, 17), namely, that individuals do not necessarily belong to one and the same culture from cradle to grave. Individual cultural profiles can change considerably during one's lifetime. Processes of enculturation are in principle lifelong, and the learning processes released by any culture contact can be compared to the enculturation experienced by individuals earlier in their lives. Anyone who has done fieldwork in language communities other than the one in which he or she grew up is bound to realize sooner or later that with every acquisition of a foreign language one's overall inner cognitive landscape changes.

The study of culture contact and transculturation in any area of the world, including the Americas, is bound to be deficient if one proceeds from a concept of rigid cultural membership and a monolithic model of culture to analyze "miscegenation," "hybridism," "dialogue" (a surrogate term that became fashionable during the 1970s), or simply "contact." Culture understood from that viewpoint is at best a nonoperational, shadowy concept. It is devalued outright by the simple, observable fact that any culture, whether of the present or the past, is multicultural: at every stage of its history, it is the result of forces of invention, borrowing, reinterpretation, and innovation. The very word "hybrid," borrowed from genetics, loses its qualifying capacity from the moment one realizes that all cultures have never been anything else.

One can, of course, trace where such and such a trait in an actual cultural configuration comes from, and possibly even where it originated, thereby splitting a culture into interactive functional components. An example of a longstanding transculturation process that occurred in Africa is the city of Luanda, founded by Paulo Dias de Novais in 1575, which over a period of four centuries developed a distinctive culture with reinterpreted Portuguese and Kimbundu elements of various periods of history. Luanda is different from any other culture area of Angola or Portugal.

The learnability of culture is also vividly demonstrated by the phenomenon of "cultural drift," i.e., the shifting of distribution areas of cultural goods, technology, and single traits, often by chance. All these can migrate from one population group into another or from one social stratum to another during any given historical period. The versions of African xylophones in the New World present an instructive example of migration of African cultural goods and technologies into the Amerindian population (Garfias 1983; Kubik and Pinto 1994). Richard Graham (1994) has presented another case of instrumental migration in his analysis of African-derived musical bows and playing techniques (as well as the presence of the banjo) in Euro-American communities of the Appalachian mountains. Graham's observations are not surprising, in view of the relative proximity of this area to South Carolina, where African descendants were concentrated in the eighteenth century (see also Epstein 1973, 62).

When people are transplanted from one cultural environment to another, the new environment always initially tends to challenge and weaken old patterns of behavior, pressing for their modification. The individual transplanted into a different cultural environment is suddenly faced with alternatives to familiar modes of behavior. This may be experienced by some as threatening to deeply entrenched attitudes, traditions, and structures, but by others as liberating them from these forces. Individual reactions can range from enthusiastic acceptance to total rejection. A crucial factor in determining the outcome is how the "receiving" culture reacts to the newcomer. Viewed from the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, it appears that every cultural encounter is accompanied by projections of one's unconscious onto the other group (Kubik 1991a, 325). The outcome depends on what kind of content is projected. Culture contact, therefore, is always to be understood as an encounter on parallel psychological levels: the conscious and the unconscious. For example, conscious rejection of the "other" is quite often accompanied by secret, unconscious identification with the rejected "other." Many cultural encounters are therefore characterized by an ambivalence that is difficult to dismantle.

The history of African-American cultures in this hemisphere is a history of many different cultural encounters. Phenomenologically, any culture contact, and all that results from it, is just one variant in the panorama of all forms of group interaction. In the absence of a scientifically useful definition of "culture," in fact, we are liberated from the constraints of an all-too-narrow definition of acculturation. We discover that the same psychological patterns of interactive behavior rule all kinds of contact between groups, irrespective of size and content. Whether we are considering group formations based on profession, gender, age, religion, genealogy, or any other organizational criteria appropriate to a stratified society, or large groups such as communities speaking the same language, nationalities, and nations, the observable patterns of interaction are psychologically identical.

Thus, even if "culture" is a misty or fuzzy concept, this does not hurt our research attempt, so long as we know it. We can continue to do cultural research, using the term loosely, as long as we realize that what we are actually studying are oscillating groups of people and their ever-changing interactions. Free of dogmatic concepts, we can then simply define each interacting group empirically, within the changing landscape of time and space, by its momentary state. Instead of proceeding deductively from undefinable sociological jargon, we can look at the language/culture profile of specific groups with accountable memberships, preferably on a small scale, and try to delineate each group's characteristics, the beliefs shared by its adherents, its economic basis, its institutions, its habits and customs, and its value systems determining normative behavior. If the group interacts frequently with a different one, we can repeat the same data-gathering process with the contact group and possibly elicit prevalent patterns of interaction. Ideally, if we have understood the meanings of these interactions in depth, it should then be possible to test our findings by trying to predict what sort of interactions between the two groups will take place in the near future.

Analogies and differences in African-American cultures across the hemisphere can be understood as the result of a complex interplay between social, economic, psychological, and other factors spread out along four dimensions in space and time. This ever-changing picture can be analyzed--on the basis of written, pictorial, artifactual, and aural sources--more effectively if current methods and interpretive schemes are employed within the framework of a new scientific consciousness that includes self-analysis.

(1.) Ironically, neither "race" nor "culture" has ever been successfully defined in anthropology; and yet these concepts remain deeply entrenched in popular thought styles (see Douglas 1996 for this term).

(2.) I am alluding here to the weB-known "flower societies" of St. Lucia, which divide the larger community into moieties. Individuals can be members either of the group called "La Marguerite" or of that called "La Rose." The members say of one another that they have different characters (Kremser 1993).

(3.) Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was a French biologist who believed that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

(4.) The same applies to other peoples in West Africa whose territories were conquered in a similar way, as I observed myself among the Kutin of northern Cameroon (Kubik 1989, 82-89).

(5.) Any doubts about the reality and intensity of such feelings were quelled by the ample evidence of my own field observations, including symbolic actions, behavioral lapses, and slips of the tongue that regularly occur on both sides during interaction (Kubik 1993a).

(6.) My use of "fortuitous" here does not suggest any absence of causality. It simply means that the interface of incalculable factors creates patterns that we cannot predict and that those patterns tend to be chaotic.

(7.) For demographic development in Brazil from 1835 to 1890, see the figures in Kubik and Pinto (1994, 214).

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GERHARD KUBIK is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Mainz and professor of cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology at the University of Vienna. His many publications include Angolan Traits in Black Music (Junta de Investigacoes Cientificas do Ultramar, 1979) and Extensionen afrikanischer Kulturen in Brasilien (Alano Verlag, 1991).3