Alan Lomax lecture on cultural diversity to mental health professionals in Newark, New Jersey (part 1)

Note: Alan Lomax: Thirteen years ago I was in Washington and spoke to a National Mental Health seminar. At the time, I was an anthropologist and folklorist, and they said what does [inaudible] have to do with mental health, and ever since I have been studying the relationship of how people live and behave in everyday life and how they express themselves in the arts. Doctors tell us that humans are 90% water, culturologists that people are 90% culture, the idea being that the arts are a kind of summary of culture, culture being what you're buried in all the time. The share of heredity - personality - is about 10%. Findings about expressive art might be useful tools for a number of things that concern [inaudible]. You know what to do with sick individuals, social scientists are supposed to deal with sick societies. Discrimination secretly poisons the social fabric, but we can't agree about it and don?t know how to deal with it. I hope what we are going to do will be a contribution toward healing some these wounds. Cultures are being destroyed, thrown away, just the way the physical environment is being destroyed. Mankind has devised 10,000 patterns of behavior - what we call cultures. These are now being threatened by central mainstream educational and media systems emphasizing Western culture and telling people to forget the heritage of their forebears. Growing up in Texas, we all felt very provincial. We went to sleep at the symphony and at the opera. Some of us went to Eastern schools and came home with records to astonish our neighbors and make them ashamed of their own imperfect traditional cultures. I always thought Moby Dick was the best novel. The crew of the Pequod represented all different kinds of Americans - Polynesians, Indians, black Africans, Latins, and a Pole. The whole human race was on board this piece of history. The Siberians came here first, 25,000 years ago. One kind of European occupied the Northern hemisphere, another the Southern, with Africans occupying the middle ? the whole crew of the Pequod (the only ones left out being the Australians). The American Indian cultural system and songs reflect the profile of a consensual system. Culture is transmitted during the 3,000 interactions per second that occur during human communication. The cultural templates for recognizing these 3,000 interactions are learned from our mothers. They are the curves of culture. It is not what you do, but the cultural style in which you do things, which tell you what if what you do is appropriate for me. All of us have at least two cultures, the one we learned at home and the one we have to acquire at school. The dominant culture told us that Shakespeare was the greatest writer, Leonardo the greatest man, and Michelangelo the greatest artist. Our teachers have shaken us into the mold of the mainstream cultural type. There is nothing wrong with that, although we all of us know how uncomfortable you felt about things you didn?t really agree with. But what is wrong is those who have had their culture kicked to pieces by the school system| the people who are left out because they don?t understand the terms of the situation. My theory is that people who come to you, the healers, have deep feelings of inferiority and difference, which separate them from you healers and from a solution to their problems. You know how you feel if you don?t have the right clothes, not only clothes, but your accent is wrong, you walk the wrong way. I think the more we all know and understand about these differences the better. There are many other factors in human problems but confining ourselves to culture, I believe in the co-equal value of these different life-styles that make America and the world. I have tried to get the music of the world into the schools, the non-fine-art tradition - all of us belong in that group. Folk culture is not written down. We are at a disadvantage when faced with the cultures that have museums and books. When we say, "I know what I like" we are saying we belong to another tradition. I have found a way to make unspoken traditions come to the surface. You have heard that the arts are a vehicle for individual expression. You deal in individuals. If I have found what everybody shares with everybody in their group that should be of some interest to you. But our classifications are as valid as classifications of the birds and insects. The Cantometrics system has defined 37 different aspects of song that listeners judges - can agree about 80 percent of the time. We have applied this system to 4,000 songs, 10 songs from 400 cultures: 60-70 African ones, 40 European, 70 or 80 Asian. When we compared a basic profile of Afro-America -- the West Indies, Brazil and the southern USA, Columbia, and Venezuela-all places with black culture-to Africa, their profiles are virtually identical, such features as how many phrases per verse, kind of rhythms, length of songs were kept constant through slavery and urbanization through cultural transmission. This means you can take away language, religions, and people can still maintain their culture. [Plays an example of Ray Charles and an African call and response chorus]. This style corresponds to the breathing style used for females who lead work groups in gardens. Overlap is the key to African tradition, while the European one is to be perfectly still, say, while the psychiatrist talks to the patient. [More comparisons, charts]. Knowledge of how cues work might be helpful in understanding people?s backgrounds. A patient who speaks before the doctor has finished might be reflecting their culture. Traditional work systems comprise: Gatherers, Hunters and fishers, Gardeners, Animal husbanders, Plow agriculturalists (people who can extract minerals from a deeper level of soil), Irrigationists (people who can control the water supply). We have found a correlation between musical styles and productivity. Example: Jean Ritchie singing ?The Cuckoo.? Little repetition. Songs like that are most frequent in complex societies that deal with specificity. Tiresome detail can be omitted when everyone knows the story. The Amerindians are on the other end of the scale. They have 50 percent repetition. Opera singing has very precise enunciation, which is highly correlated to levels of layered social control. [Plays examples of wordy and precise singing.] Energy. High energy is related to level of diet ? not vegetable, but grains and meat. Loudest music was rock and roll during the middle of the Vietnam War. Pygmy music.