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FOREWORDColloquium: Music, Worship, Arts“The World in Pieces” —so Clifford Geertz entitled his lecture in 1995 to the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. We used to be able to study culture and inculturation with some sense that we knew what we were talking about, especially when it came to the spread of Christianity throughout the world: Christianity was embodied in the cultures of Western Europe, and carried easily spotted valises with it wherever it went, trunks that were unpacked in various stages, their contents reused, reappropriated, and often thrown out. Now, as the essays in this volume demonstrate in a variety of ways, we know too much simply to look at how a faith tradition must and will be transformed as it moves from one set of “cultural norms” (who could even think in such terms anymore?) to another. To paraphrase Geertz in his lecture cited above, the pervasive raggedness of the world, the shattering of larger coherences, has made relating local realities with overarching ones extremely difficult. “In a spintered world, we must address the splinters.” There could be no better introduction to this volume of essays presented first as lectures to the ISM community in 2004-05, than that provided by the ethnomusicologist Jeffers Engelhardt. He, like Geertz and other anthropologists today, studies what once would have been termed splinters, and so too do musicologists, literary critics, theologians, liturgiologists, art historians, and historians in general. At present there is a rampant need for many to try to define, explain, hold onto the religious values they were inculturated with as children, and people who aren’t academics often ask those of us who are why we are saying more and more about less and less, or reifying people and places so foreign to them: “What about us?” But who are you? The Christianity that was sent by missionaries throughout the world is now returning to the West, bags repacked with music, languages, prayers, and expectations, and in the company of other faith traditions as well. In a world splintered by trauma, and complexified by massive demographic shifts, Engelhardt suggests that we speak about and study processes of change on the edges between peoples who are in fundamental disagreement about their beliefs. This could be a medievalist watching the NASCAR opening ceremonies on a treadmill in the gym, or a Mexican family on its way to their first church service in New Haven. What do these have in common when the people are so different? Some things, perhaps, are human: expectations, different though they may be; reactions to alternity, across a spectrum; the nature of fear of an alien culture appropriating what one knows or of familiar rituals being turned inside out—it is these kinds of things that we look to now, and our authors offer many ways in which to do this, and many ideas about what is learned when we do. As we in the West sing world hymnody while being challenged to the scalps of our own comfort zones by stripes of Christian beliefs we do not recognize, we will change, like it or not; and even if we retreat, it will not be to our familiar hobbit holes in the Shire. This new issue is packed with many ideas about religion, ritual, music, culture, and change. Take it with you wherever you may travel and become a student of these processes yourself as you go. Margot E. Fassler |
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