A book arrived in the mail, from Duke University Press—unrequested, probably intended as a candidate for review in the journal Agriculture and Human Values, for which I am the book review editor. The book, Unearthing Gender, is an ethnographic analysis of the songs sung in northern India. My first thought was that it was unlikely to be relevant for either the journal or for my current work (which is focused on gender). As is my custom, I opened it and glanced through it. But the more I perused it, the more interested I became in the potential of songs (and perhaps other similar cultural products) as a useful method for gender analysis. One particularly appealing aspect is that these songs are sung by all castes, but particularly the lower caste women—perfect representatives of the most difficult perspectives to include in any kind of collaborative effort. But perhaps even more appealing is the degree to which the words of the songs reflect serious emotions, power dynamics, ideal behaviors within the society. These are all issues we find difficult to access, record, measure, perhaps use constructively.
As I read, I thought of my own response to song throughout my life. It has been visceral. Songs describe feelings shared within our own cultural groups; they can catalyze desire, sadness, joy, laughter, grief. Songs can recreate the emotions one has felt at the times associated with the song. They can bring back previous eras in a deep and powerful way; they ‘take you back’, touching cultural and personal chords within. And they can bring groups together, strengthen feelings of communality.
Many of the American songs I remember best, that have touched me the most, are about men and women—desire, sexuality, the pain of separation, the joy of reunion. I best remember those from my youth and young adulthood when I suppose my own gender notions were crystallizing. I think of the young couple who elope to escape wider disapproval of their union (“Runnin’ Bear loved Little White Dove, With a love that couldn’t die”—in this case, both dying in the attempt). The sympathy I felt for the man, injured in the war, whose woman abandons him seeking pleasures elsewhere (‘Ruby, don’t take your love to town.’). Other songs recognize the woman who stands up to her man, refusing to accept some of his behaviour (“These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what I’ll do; one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.”). Some celebrate a woman’s strength directly, “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman…”. Then there’s “Mata Hari”—“O what a wicked girl was she, that’s the kind of girl I want to be…”, which idealizes the adventure and illicit pleasures of being a female spy! In Quilcene, Washington, a logging town when I lived in the 1970s, the songs of Buzz Martin were favorites among the men—his songs eulogized logging and the logger as a ‘real man’. I remember a T-shirt I saw on a man descending from a huge log truck: It said “If you aint a logger, you aint shit.”
The cultural values that emerge from these American songs differ greatly from those described from northern India—where a woman’s adultery can result in her death, always in tragedy; where her submissiveness and maintenance of her husband’s family honor—no matter the cost to herself—-are lauded in song. I have not gotten to the book’s chapter on men’s songs, but I doubt that the kind of hard physical labour admired in Quilcene will be considered a positive value in India.
I then turned my thoughts to the forest cultures of Indonesia about which I normally write. I never investigated songs per se, but I did record some of the stories that the Uma’ Jalan Kenyah (Dayaks of Borneo) share with each other. Perhaps they are comparable to songs—they often include rhymes in the main story, and choruses intoned together by the audience as chants. Some tell wondrous stories of Kenyah culture heroes (like Balan Tempau, after whom my son is named). Some include morality tales about the ideal (and undemocratic) relationships among the aristocracy, commoners, and slaves. These same stories provide clear ideals for men (courage, strength, competition), for women (beauty, industriousness) and for both (cleverness). Another type of song is sung during community work groups. The men and women sing as groups and playfully taunt each other about a variety of things, including courtship and sexuality, each charging the other with being the initiator in sexual encounters.
One time the Kenyah made up one of these chanted performances for me as part of a good-by party. The chants were a form of teasing—about the questions I had been asking in my most recent survey—and elicited great hilarity. The ‘singer’ had made up sexually explicit questions (e.g., about the ubiquity of men’s penis piercing) that I had not asked. The associated group chant was “Koda’ kado’? Koda’ kado’?” (“How many/much? How many/much?”)—a somewhat tedious question I had in fact asked repeatedly about each kind of tree each family was growing. Unlike traditional relations among the classes, Kenyah gender relations are comparatively equitable—differing by sex, but from a global perspective, equitable. These songs and performances display values far closer to American expectations about gender relations than to those in north India.
Anyway, I have been surprised to conclude that looking at songs and other cultural performances is certainly worth considering if one wants to understand gender relations. Insofar as such cultural products exist, they may well be a treasure trove of information about the elusive research topic of gender dynamics.