>>Female Speaker: From the Library
of Congress in Washington D.C.
>>Betsy Peterson: Hello everyone.
Please take a seat.
My name is Betsy Peterson.
I'm the director of the American
Folklife Center here at the Library
of Congress, and on
behalf of the staff
of the American Folklife Center,
I just want to say a wonderful
and warm welcome to all of
you for coming to the latest
in our Benjamin Botkin
Series, Lecture Series.
The Botkin Series is an opportunity
for the American Folklife Center
to highlight some of the best
and most current scholarship
in folklore ethnomusicology,
oral history,
and other cultural
research scholarship.
It's also an opportunity for
us to expand our collections.
All of the lectures in
this series become part
of the American Folklife
Center collection,
so that future generations
and individuals
from throughout the world
can benefit from all
of this wonderful wisdom
that passes through here.
It also will make its way
onto our website and again,
so people can watch the
lecture and learn from it.
So with that said, just
want to give you a reminder
to turn off any electronic
devices, cell phones, and the like.
Today I have the great honor
of introducing a very distinguished
ethnomusicologist and a good friend
of the American Folklife Center,
Dr. Anthony or Tony Seeger,
as I know many people know him.
He is the distinguished professor
of ethnomusicology emeritus at UCLA,
and he comes from a
pretty musical family.
He's the grandson of the influential
ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger,
and a few of his relatives
have achieved their own fame
as folk musicians.
And although Tony does play,
his interests have laid more
with scholarship and
with ethnomusicology.
Tony earned a BA at Harvard
and an MA in Social Science,
and a Ph.D. in Anthropology
at the University of Chicago.
And he went on to do his early
field work among the Suya Indians
of Brazil.
Both his classic book, "Why Suya
Sing: A Musical Anthropology
of an Amazonian People," and
today's presentation are based
on this Brazilian field work.
Between 1975 and 1982,
Tony taught ethnomusicology
at the Museu Nacional
in Rio de Janeiro.
And while there, he also established
Brazil's first master's program
in ethnomusicology at the
Brazilian Conservatory of Music.
Returning to the United States
in 1983, he accepted a position
at Indiana University as professor
of anthropology and director
of the Archive of Traditional Music.
And during his years at Indiana,
he worked with Louise Spear
to co-edit a catalog of the
Archive's important holdings.
But in 1989, he made his
way to Washington, D.C.,
to serve as the first
curator and director
of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
By the time he moved on in
2000, going to UCLA to take
on the distinguished professorship
of ethnomusicology, Tony had served
as an executive producer and
editor of nearly 220 albums.
His many other accomplishments
are equally impressive
and far too numerous to list here.
But I'll just mention that some of
them include being the president
of the Society of Ethnomusicology
from 1991 until 1993, and,
more recently, president of
the International Counsel
of Traditional Music
from 1997 until 1999.
And so without further
ado, I could keep going
with such great accomplishments,
but I want to welcome Tony to come
up here and tell us about his work.
Tony. [applause]
>> Anthony Seeger: Let's
see if I can get that.
Well, thanks for coming.
Wow, the room filled up
while my back was turned.
[laughter] Good to see you all.
While I do this, can
you hear me all right?
I can't tell, because I'm
in back of the speaker.
It's all right.
Guha says it's all
right, it must be.
It's a real pleasure to be here.
It's a pleasure to be here partly
because I've enjoyed coming
to the Benjamin Botkin lectures
that I've attended here in the past.
I'm going to try to at least
add to what they have given me.
I hope you enjoy this one and if you
don't, sorry, come to the next one.
[laughter] It will be
-- it will be better.
My talk today is I think
particularly appropriate
for this institution.
I chose it partly because
of this particular conjuries
of organizations that the
Library of Congress has,
one of them being the
copyright office.
And this is a story about
copyright or ownership and concerns
about ownership and changing
ideas about ownership
over a period of about 40 years.
It's also a place that has a very
strong collection of folklore
and recordings of traditional music,
and that's also part of the story.
And I hope that the people
who study it also can sing it
because it has a song that I
really need your help singing.
That -- the song has a new verse
for each section of the talk,
and if you don't sing it
well enough, I'll stop.
[laughter] It also uses
some photo and some video,
but I'm not as good at those.
And my song texts are
pretty lame too.
[laughter] A lot of
good work has been done
on intellectual property laws
and the particular cultural bias
of the copyright laws that emerged
in England and the United States
in the mid-19th century,
and a little bit before.
And also as the authors
rights in Europe,
also about the middle
of the century.
At the same time, these ideas about
individual creativity, and genius
and ideas, and the consolidation
of a particular kind of market,
capitalism, occurred, and
those ideas then of ownership,
and eventually of music ownership,
really, really influenced the laws
that have been made on
intellectual property,
and those then have been largely
passed on to the rest of the world
through trade agreements and
under some degree of duress
for those countries who weren't
interested in starting them.
But I'm not going to
talk about that.
That's really been nicely discussed.
I've talked about it
myself in the past,
and it's been really
nicely discussed
by Rosemary Coombe in her book.
Also by Jane Alexander, who's
coming back I think to talk
about intellectual property
at the National Museum
of the American Indian
in, what, two weeks or so.
And it's also by Michael Brown.
That's a different story and I'm
not going to talk about that.
Instead, I want to tell
you about something
that I don't think is
very well-documented.
And that is how ideas about
ownership change in a very small,
remote community over
a period of time.
And there are very few
studies that actually do that,
because very few people have
followed the same process
over a long period of time.
And the other is very few
places that I know of have
such a dramatic central event in
which the transformation was made.
And I'm going to be talking about a
central event in about 2004 or '05,
as I recall, that it really
brought the issues of, well,
is this song our song, or
not, right to the fore.
And the question about is this song
our song or is it somebody else's,
is of course an old question of
the study of the folk revival
in the United States, and it's a
pretty old story around the world,
where people are increasingly
wondering,
who really has the right to this?
Is it our song because we've
always sung it, or does it belong
to somebody else because
they have a copyright on it,
or how does this really work?
There's a lot of insecurity
around the world,
and I want to introduce you to
a particular kind of insecurity.
[pause]
Let's see what I've got here.
I want to begin with gratitude.
Usually you put your "thank
yous" at the end of a paper,
but I really need to begin
with one, because I owe so much
to the Suya Indians, who now
like to be called the Kisedje.
They've changed the
name for themselves,
because Suya is what
other people call them
and Kisedje is what they
always call themselves,
as I wrote in my book in 1981.
But they weren't using
them for themselves.
It just was -- they said,
"Well we -- our name is this."
Now they would like
everyone to use it.
And I owe them a great deal.
They were extremely -- they
have been always patient.
And they are enthusiastically
awaiting our return visit in May
of this year, so we will be
going back in a few weeks.
And my intention in
the next -- in that --
in that visit we're making in May,
is actually to finish clarifying
the topic I'm topic today.
So this topic also helps
me prepare for that visit.
Here's the song.
With apologies to "I
Never Will Marry,"
did anybody ever hear the song,
[sings] "I never will marry,
I'll be no man's wife.
I expect to live single,
the rest of my life."
Well, here's your chorus,[sings]
"Is this song our song,
or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
Try it all together now.
You've seen it.
You've heard it.
[laughter] Some of you have
ventured into it already.
>> Multiple singers: "Is this song
our song, or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>>Anthony Seeger: Thank you.
This is a great audience.
I love that.
[laughter] I will then
go to the first verse.
[sings] "One day as I
wandered down by the lakeshore,
I heard fish a singing
and listened some more.
They ask me to join them,
and I danced with them too.
By the time we had finished I knew
their songs through and through."
>>Multiple singers: "But
is this song our song,
or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned the songs from
animals, and from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>>Anthony Seeger: The group
I'm going to talk about,
and I've been working with
the Suya now since 1971.
So we're talking really
about 44 years,
and this is a long-term
research project.
I think as we get more and more
ethnomusicologists reaching my age,
we have more and more
long-term field projects.
[laughter] But as you heard, this
isn't all I did during my lifetime.
It's just one that -- a ball
I've sort of kept up in the air
and gone back from time to time.
The Suya, or Kisedje, live
right smack here on the affluent
of the river called the Xingu,
which goes up into the Amazon there.
And they made peace with Brazilians
in 1959, and so when I visited them
in 1971, it was really only 12
years after they'd made peace
with the Brazilian
societies and also
with their indigenous neighbors.
They'd been seen once by
a German explorer in 1884,
but then pretty much
disappeared except for showing
up to kill some people from
time to time in between.
And some of their enemies allied
themselves with rubber tappers
and got .44 Winchester rifles and
shot at their village and burned it
down in about 1918 or '19 and that
sent them up into the head waters
of a river where they
were pretty hard to find.
And no one found them until
airplanes were flying overhead
and found their village
and they made --
they were contacted and made peace.
This is in the early 1970s.
The village I saw first was on the
back of an affluent to the river,
called the Suya River,
Little Suya River.
And it had about six houses.
There was a large one
here, a small one there,
another one, one under construction.
And there was a men's house
that they hadn't yet built
that was going right there.
There was a new village.
It was a small village.
There were only about
120 of them all together.
It was a -- and my wife
and I, looking like that,
I'm not sure I could do it
anymore -- [laughter] --
moved in with 30 Kisedje
in this house
and started learning the language.
And I had to go hunting and
fishing every other day for my food,
and she processed manioc,
and did what a classic
anthropology book would tell you
that anthropologists
do, try desperately
to learn things and often failed.
Now, it's hard to -- you know, it
seems strange they were distant,
but in fact what's really
interesting and important
about other societies is that they
start from very different precepts.
And precepts, sort of ideas
about ownership is one,
but let's try ideas about math.
We're back to fish.
A teacher who is -- came after I
did and was trying to teach them
about math, because they -- their
numbering system went one, two,
three, many -- [laughter] -- and
that works for lots of things,
but it really doesn't work
for the Brazilian currency,
which generally is in the
thousands and it isn't --
and it's always changing.
Inflation is changing it.
And so it's really hard to
figure out how money works.
But for more than just the simple
reason of the high numbers,
if you -- a question that she asked
them was, "If you have five fish
and you give two fish
to your brother-in-law,
how many fish do you have left?"
Anybody got an answer?
Probably three.
Three. And they had
a word for three.
But, in fact, the answers came
back anywhere from three to eight.
And one person said, "Well, when
I give fish to my brother-in-law,
I always get the same amount back,
so in fact I haven't lost anything."
And another one said, "When I
give fish to my brother-in-law,
I get twice as many back."
[laughter] And so, as she
was trying to work out how
to discuss this problem,
one of them said,
"Why is it that you whites think
that when you give
something away, you have less?
When we give something
away we have more."
That's the key, of course.
Giving things away does
not necessarily imply less,
unless you're using a
certain type of balance book
and you have a certain type of
presuppositions about what it is
to not have something, to
give it away, or to sell it.
So, the fish story is
where I want to start you.
It's a different set of
presuppositions about what goes
on when you're doing something.
And what goes on when you're
owning things is similarly
about giving it away.
The 1970s, the word
for ownership was --
actually it wasn't the word
for ownership -- they --
I'm not sure there was a word
for ownership, in that sense.
It was a -- an owner controller.
What you really did when you owned
something, was you had the right
to give it away and you had
the right to tell people
that -- to take care of it.
But you didn't really have the
right not to give it at all.
If somebody asked you for something,
you were always supposed to give it.
If it was the shirt on
your back, you might say,
"Wait until I've changed my shirt."
But if it's something
you have, if people say,
"Give me some fish,"
you give them your fish.
If they say, "Give us --
can you give me your
hammock or your matches?"
well if you have enough,
you give them away.
And that was a really interesting
kind of society to live in.
I was wondering, "How
can you live in a society
where people just ask you for things
and then you're obliged
to give them?
You always give them and you're not
even feeling that badly about it."
I discovered that actually
there are limits on it.
You can ask that of your relatives.
You can't always ask it
of your non-relatives.
And if you're someone who asks
about -- wants things all the time,
and doesn't have anything to
give back, you can be accused
of being a witch and
get clubbed to death.
[laughter] So there is kind of a --
there's a sort of last case scenario
if it's really not a good
idea to keep asking people
that aren't related
to you for things.
But it was a society in which I was
-- coming from the United States,
it was an impressive
amount of sharing of things.
And the Kenday [spelled
phonetically],
or the owner controller, also by
some people called the master --
it's a wide spread concept in
South America among South American
Indians, that there are masters
and these are very complex rights,
but basically also
obligations to give.
Every -- and the fish in the
case we had before of the fish
that you learned the songs from for,
the fish actually are
the masters of the song.
As are the people that the person
who learned the song taught it to,
but the person who
actually learned the song,
who taught it to the
humans, is not a master.
He's just a kind of transmitter.
So the mastery, the control
over the song belongs
to the animal originally and then
to the people who sing it allowed
for the first time but not
for the person who happened
to be invited by the fish to sing.
Someone -- my grandfather started
to talk about intellectual property
and my uncle Pete wrote
about it quite a lot.
And so when I was in the field,
I of course was quite sensitive
to issues well you know, "What
does this word mean, kenday?"
And so when they -- when I
learned my first song from somebody
who learned it from the
tree, I said well --
they said, "You're the
kenday of the song."
And I said, "Well what
does that mean?
What can I do?"
And they said, "Well, if somebody
sings your song, you can say, 'duh,
sing it well.'" [laughter]
Don't mess around.
Sing it well.
So -- and that was it.
That was it.
So it was a really different
concept than copyright.
It wasn't my song really.
It was just my song to make
sure other people did well.
It was -- but it would be remembered
as my song, and when I die I expect
that somebody will remember them
all and sing sort of in my memory
after I'm gone, depending on
how well they're still singing.
But they also learn
songs from captives.
[sings] "We captured our
enemies and asked them to sing,
and from these captives we
learned many good things.
We planted their crops and
we learned to make pots,
and we mastered all their
songs, which we liked a lot."
>>Multiple singers:
"But is this our --
what's our song or is this
song theirs, and our body paint
and haircut, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, and from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>>Anthony Seeger: Indeed.
Here's -- on the left-hand side you
see some Kisedje singing a mouse
song or songs by -- sung by mice,
learned by people,
and then sung back.
On the right hand side, is an
Upper Xingu ceremony they learned
from other Indians.
And that's in 2010 with a
photo taken by my daughter.
Here's what -- this is the music
that they say is essentially theirs.
They know of no other
community in the world
that sings this kind of polyphony.
Oops, wait.
[music playing] That polyphony is
created by a lot of individuals,
each singing their own different
song to the same rhythm.
[singing] There's a kid.
[singing] The Upper Xingu songs
actually sounded quite different.
[singing] This is me
by the way in 2010.
It was a very smokey day, so there's
lots of wood smoke all around.
[singing]
Now, when I got there
in 2000-- in 1971--
both of those songs were theirs.
There's no question.
Animal songs and the songs they
learned from enemies were theirs.
And this comes from a history of
their conception of their history
from the beginning of time
is that they always existed,
but in the beginning
they had nothing.
And slowly, through a series
of really smart, clever things,
they were able to get
everything that they wanted.
And so they ate raw meat until they
discovered the jaguar had fire,
then they stole the
fire from the jaguar.
They ate rotten wood
out of their fish
because they had no garden crops
until they learned about corn
and maize from the mouse
that -- in the water --
and they took all the mouse's
corn, and now the mice have
to invade their houses to get the
corn that they once had themselves.
In the beginning they had
no names, but they found --
they learned about names
from a tribe they encountered
and learned all of their ceremonies.
And they didn't have anybody
ornaments, but they found out --
they encountered another tribe
and learned their ceremonies
and now wear body ornaments.
And then they encountered
that German explorer in 1884,
and he describes how the Kisedje
came to the island they were camped
on in the evening and engaged
them in talking and were looking
at things, meanwhile, carving
holes in the sand with their feet
and dropping them in
and covering them up,
so that when they left the next
day they found his expedition was
missing a lot of things, one of
them being the water thermometer
that he was using to
measure the water temperature
and it was his only one.
And then he said he wondered
what they were doing with it,
perhaps wearing it
around their neck.
That's also the way they
approach Brazilian society,
which was to take all the things
they wanted and try to avoid having
to take the things they didn't want.
So the history, then, of accretion,
a sort of predatory accretion,
and when predatory accretion
hits copyright law you might have
a problem.
And here is how it turned out.
[sings] "Along came
an anthropologist.
We learned his songs too.
And our women sang Pretty
Polly all the way through.
He made an LP and said
the music was ours.
We got trade goods of
plenty sent from afar."
>> Multiple singers: "But
is this song our song,
or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too.
But are these our songs,
oh what shall we do?"
>> Anthony Seeger: Thank you.
You're doing it better than I.
[laughter] They did learn
songs from us, from the start.
They really liked our songs,
partly because of the harmony --
I don't think -- but also they
learned songs from captives,
and I think they just
considered their anthropologist
to be another kind of captive.
[laughter] They called me "our
anthropologist," actually.
[laughter] I was owned
by them in a sense.
This is their village in 2008 and it
pretty much looks like this today.
It's much larger.
There are more than seven houses.
There are 20 houses
or 18 to 20 houses.
It has the basic structure of a
clear plaza with a men's house
but a much bigger men's house.
It's finished.
And all around, you can
see little white spots.
Those are parabolic antennas.
This is a wired village.
They have wireless internet, if not
in the village, right next to it.
In the next photo,
I'll show you where.
And they're very much
into technology.
They have a much better
digital video camera
than I will ever be able to own.
[laughter]
And they do much better using it
then I have ever been able to do.
The most recent -- the Portuguese
version of "Why Suya Sing"
that is coming out in Brazil this
month, has actually got a video --
a DVD with it instead of a CD,
and it actually has their video
of the mouse ceremony
in it to begin it,
because they did an absolutely
brilliant presentation with no --
and I wasn't involved at all.
So anyway, they're really
good at using technology.
And this is the village from a
distance, so that you could see
that it has an air strip coming
in, and it has a road going
out that takes you to one
city and then another city,
and then wherever you
want to go in Brazil.
This little square area here is
where they put all the things
that are sort of between what
they really think is theirs
and the Brazilians, and that's where
the school goes, the infirmary is,
and a few other -- and the
Wi-Fi is and the telephone
with its own satellite dish
that goes up to the sky
that the Brazilian
government installed.
That's all in this area, because
they're trying to keep one area
for themselves, one
area that they run,
and then once they get off the
reservation, and then they're trying
to defend themselves
against the Brazilians
or the frontier that's out there.
[sings] "The top fashion model
to help a good cause made us
an offer that gave us pause.
We would license our design
and paint her body too
and NGO helped us to
decide what to do.
But is this --
>> Multiple singers: -- song our
song, or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too,
but are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>> Anthony Seeger: Gisele Bundchen
was the super model, and she wanted
to help the environment of the
region and came up with the idea
of making a line of sandals that
would have indigenous designs
on them, and went to an NGO
that approached the Kisedje
to provide those designs.
And also to make that ad,
which involved painting
Gisele with body paint.
"Oh," they said, "We
don't really have any.
All the body paint -- all
the women body paint --
female body paint we have
came from other societies."
[laughter] "We learn them
all from the Upper Xingu.
We learn them from" -- and they
went through and then they,
"Is there anything
that's originally ours?"
That was really stumping them.
And that was really a problem,
because they didn't want
to share the $200,000 or so that
were going to be paid by the company
that was getting the designs.
It was a good contract in
the sense that it was honest,
there was money involved,
it was more money
than they had ever seen
or imagined before.
It was a lot.
And they didn't want to share it.
What do you do?
Well, they thought about it for
a long time and said, "Well,
there was a ceremony that
none of us had never seen,
but we know that there was a
special paint for the women.
Maybe it looked like this."
And lo and behold, they decided
yes, it had looked like that.
[laughter]
And so when Gisele comes in they
actually paint Gisele with this
that they said is ours and
belongs to nobody else.
But it was that moment when
money, a lot of money came in,
that the whole issue of
ownership and the whole issue
of whose rights -- is this really
their song, or is it our song,
becomes acute, because they
didn't want to pay or be sued
or have their enemies
attack them and kill them
or whatever they would
do if they were angry
about their keeping all the
money that was involved.
That was the moment, and Marcella
Stockler Coelho de Souza has written
a really nice article about that,
because she was there
in the village.
She is an anthropologist who
I introduced to the Kisedje
and she's been working with
them since 2004 or something.
And she was there, she saw it,
she had saw the discussion,
she made that photograph,
and saw what happened
afterwards with these sandals.
So, you see what happened,
and all the singing
in that was really old songs.
It wasn't women songs,
which are mostly borrowed,
it was really old stuff
that they guarantee,
they're certain it's theirs.
In 2014, their vocabulary
and the use of words
for theft has increased a lot.
You know, as I said at the
beginning, you are the master
but you're actually
respected to give it away.
There wasn't much thievery and that.
I only know of one case
where somebody actually
stole somebody's belongings
and it was one woman stealing
another woman's belongings,
because somebody stole from her
husband or something like that.
It was sort of a reciprocal
stealing.
In this case, though,
all of a sudden you --
they used the word "tho
akndo" [phonetic] to mean
that a white person stole a
story from us and wrote it down
and they used the word "tho
akndo" which is actually to steal
or to take or to have
something disappear.
I mean I'm not -- that's
what I'm going to find
out a little more about in May.
I did have a linguist.
There was a linguist, Rafael
Nonato, living in the village
when I was trying to figure this
out last fall, and I wrote him a lot
of times, but it --
I feel much happier
if I were actually there
asking the questions.
And he's a linguist and he sees
things somewhat differently.
And then Bill took
my clothes is a joke.
If it's a joke, it's "tho akndo."
If he took it -- if the
person took it and planned
to wear them themselves
and never give them back,
then it's a different verb "akini".
And so Tony "akini" my tobacco,
with the assumption I was
going to smoke it, right?
That would be a phrase.
Or Bill took my clothes
with the intention
of keeping them would be "akini."
So, there are various kinds of
intentionality involved in the use
in the words that they're
using for taking and theft,
and that's quite different.
And --
[pause]
I need to catch up
to where I am here.
Oh, I'm pages ahead.
[pause]
We're getting close.
All right, so first they
stopped singing certain songs,
because they weren't theirs.
Then they decided to stop
making certain handicrafts
that they learned from
other tribes up river.
And so they stopped making
a certain type of basket,
that was a sieve basket for
a type of manioc they learned
about from the other tribes,
so they stopped making that,
because they didn't want to
sell it and have the members
of that tribe complain that
they were selling their ideas.
They stopped making wooden
stools and painting them
with the paint designs
they had used for decades.
They created a new kind of
crochet basket that is totally new,
that I can't imagine what they
would use it for, but they make it
for sale, because they wanted
something that was theirs,
as opposed to anybody else's.
They also began to
change their language.
In the course of 150 years of sort
of first peaceful relationships
with the groups up river, and
later having stolen the women,
having women from that
society right in there,
their language had changed.
And it used -- was
using a whole bunch
of what we would call lone words,
words from another
language, perfectly natural.
They started systematically
getting rid of those.
They would sort of agree --
it's a very small society,
so you can sit and, you know --
unlike ours, which has so many it's
so difficult to change
something, they can sit in a circle
with the entire community
there and say, "We're not going
to say this word karakarako
for a rooster anymore,
we're going to say krunusideptude
[spelled phonetically],"
which is what the old people
used to call chickens,
because they have a little
funny thing that's red
on the top of their heads.
"And we're not going to
call foreigners, Brazilians,
karai [spelled phonetically]
anymore,
because that's actually
not our word for it.
We call them people
with big clothes,"
because the first whites they
saw had these big clothes --
people with big skins I'm
sorry, people with big skins,
because the first whites they saw
had clothes like you're wearing
and it looks like, to them, a
really strange kind of skin.
So they were going back to a
linguistic fundamentalism as well.
So what started as a concern about
ownership and music and things began
to spread to areas of handicrafts,
began to spread to language,
and other parts of
their society in a way
that I don't think most
people would anticipate.
The idea that other people would --
might own and have
some claim on things
that they had taken 150 years ago,
suddenly became salient to them.
And the NGO that was working with
them, and working with Gisele,
actually was trying to
get a law passed in Brazil
that would give Indians inalienable
rights to their knowledge.
It wouldn't expire after 70 years.
It would be theirs forever.
And that gets really complicated
when you're talking about groups
that have been relating with one
another for hundreds of years.
Whose song really is the song?
Perhaps it doesn't even
belong to the people
who are there in the upriver place.
It could belong to somebody else.
But at the moment, they have
story of retracted and going back
to a kind of sensualism in a lot of
different areas of their society,
because of the -- their
concerns about copyright law.
Let's see where we are.
On the other hand, they aren't
giving them back to the fish.
[laughter] The animals and the
fish, they say, "We didn't steal it
from them, they told it to us."
And so the words they're
using for fish is --
the mouse and the fish too --
taught us, "sat en" [phonetic].
Told how to eat corn
and made it our food.
And when a man was invited by the
mice to join them for ceremony,
he listened and taught it,
but he didn't steal it.
So, in a certain domain
they're quite certain
that it wasn't thievery, it was
really more in the complex domain
of social relations with
other indigenous communities
that became salient and sort of
has affected their activities.
On the other hand, one could argue
that you couldn't copyright the --
how long is the life of a god?
If you believe that the mouse
sprits were teaching it to them,
perhaps they never die
in which the Suya rights
to those songs also
already never expire,
because although they're
old, the god is still around.
The mice are still there,
they can't hire lawyers.
[laughter]
Today, and this is -- [sings] "Today
we are careful about what we sing,
we've changed the way
we make many things.
The fish songs are our
songs, but not all the rest.
So we'll stick with the old
ones that we like the best."
>> Multiple singers: "But
is this song our song,
or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>> Anthony Seeger: Sort
of to conclude, I guess.
I'm up to there.
The Kisedje history was
one of constant acquisition
until suddenly -- in a particular
moment of intertribal relationships
and legal changes within
Brazil and the attempt
to have the indigenous
peoples understand them
as they were understood by the NGO's
and as they were in the process
of being made -- changed it a lot.
And so the proud history that
they recount in their midst
of constant conquest and acquisition
suddenly has to change and they're
in the process of changing it.
This problem wasn't a problem until
media and money became involved,
because the distances were too
far and no one really cares
if you're singing their song unless
you're making money and they're not.
And at the same time,
NGO's were involved
in this transformation,
and so was I.
When I made a recording with
them, co-produced a recording
of their music called "The
Vocal Art of the Suya."
It was the first single LP --
recording on LP of a
single community --
indigenous community in Brazil --
apparently ever published in Brazil.
And I gave them all
the royalties to it
and told them actually
they had the rights to that
and other people shouldn't
be allowed to use it,
unless they gave permission.
And it seemed to me like a really
good idea, and yet, of course,
looking down the road 30
years, I probably did sort
of start them off on the idea.
[laughter] Maybe there's something
in this and we do want to protect
in -- our songs and our
ideas, and lo and behold,
this Gisele Bundchen is just
a much bigger and much more --
had a much more impact
on the way they live.
This is some Suya women transcribing
the recordings that I sent down,
because I had sent all the --
about half of the recordings --
the older ones I did on reel to
reel tape they had been working
with for a couple of years.
I'm just now copying all
the ones I got from Indiana.
They were made on cassettes.
Which are somewhat later and I'm
taking them down with me in May.
[sings] "Today we are
careful about what we sing.
We've changed the way" --
oh we sang that already.
[laughter] Wait, I
went the wrong way.
That's right.
There it is.
[sings] "It's not just the
Kisedje, who are often confused.
All around the world,
it's just like that too.
Everywhere they're asking us to
explain in a language that's simple,
a language that's plain."
>>Multiple singers: "Is this song
our song, or is this song theirs?
And our body paint and
haircuts, does anyone care?
We've learned songs from
animals, from enemies too.
But are these songs our
songs, oh what shall we do?"
>> Anthony Seeger: That's what I had
to say, because that's the story.
It is a story and yet it's a story
that has very wide ranging parallels
and some implications for how we do
talk about songs and how we do work
with communities to help them
understand what their songs are
and what they might
want to reconsider.
Or what the implications are of
singing other people's songs,
and they could be nothing.
After this whole thing,
they went up --
the chief went up river and
talked to the chief of one
of the Upper Xingu tribes,
and he said, "You know,
you guys have changed everything
so much in that ceremony.
It's not ours anymore.
It's yours."
[laughter] The Suya say
"We sing it the right way.
They've forgotten how to sing it."
And so they changed it.
But in any event, they had
permission to sing an important one
of the female ceremonies that --
and quite a number of
the male ceremonies.
That's just the one that
you saw me dancing in.
Again, so for some things
they had permission.
For others, they've asked
me to take them off the CDs.
They've asked me to take them
out of the recording that goes
with the book, the next time it's
reissued, in order to sort of live
up to what they see as the
potential relationships
that might be affected.
So, even when the law
isn't involved,
even when there are no
lawyers present, even when --
the laws haven't been finished, they
have a big impact on places that --
in ways that you never suspect,
in the ways that have nothing
to do necessarily with song.
But the -- have to do with language
and artifacts and self-perception.
Thank you very much.
[applause] Some of you have
been standing the whole time.
Wouldn't you like to sit down?
There really are seats.
Then you can ask a question.
[laughter] Or you can ask
a question standing up.
Does anybody have a
question or a comment?
We have a few minutes.
It's not -- it's about ten of 1:00
and I'm -- we're done at 1:00,
or before if you want to leave.
Yes. Atesh [spelled phonetically].
>> Male Speaker: So I
found in your opening
of your presentation you spoke to
how you could use a song by asking
for permission from the owner, which
implies an idea of distribution.
And I'm just curious, are
their ideas of distribution --
it sounds like there are from
the trip by the chief upriver
to the Xingu, where you talked
about sharing and who owns what.
Why didn't the idea occur to
them about sharing the money?
>> Anthony Seeger: Ah!
Well, because money is limited.
Sharing songs, you don't lose
anything when you give it.
It goes right back to -- [laughter]
-- to Thomas Jefferson saying,
"When I -- when you light
your taper for mine,
I lose nothing and
you gain a light."
And that's true when
you're giving away a song.
It's not true when you're giving
away what might get you a truck
or a gun or something
like that, or, you know,
a hunting rifle or
something like that.
That's the real reason.
And so it's really the market
economy and money that does this,
not the other; otherwise I think
people would be perfectly happy
with it, because you give it away
and you really haven't
lost anything.
Once you're giving it away
and losing something --
it's the question of
those fish again.
You know, if, by giving half of it
to that group, you got as much back
or twice as much back, that would be
one thing, but that hasn't happened.
That's not -- and they
certainly wouldn't think of it
if they got something from
somebody else that they would have
to give them twice as much back.
I don't think that would fly.
But I'll ask.
I'll ask. Thank you, Atesh.
We've got a couple over here.
Yes? In the -- yes.
>> Carl Fleischhauer: I don't
know if you were pointing at me.
Hello.
>> Anthony Seeger: Oh sorry.
Carl. I can -- I can't
see you in the shadows.
Yes.
>> Carl Fleischhauer:
So you have been very,
very careful about being
non-judgmental in this talk,
which I think is wonderful
and appropriate.
I'll confess, I'm over
here scratching my head.
Is this change good or bad?
What should I think?
>> Anthony Seeger: Well,
this change is happening.
And, you know, one of the
things I've tried to do
as an ethnomusicologist is not
actually to judge everything
that people do, but try to find
out why they're doing it that way,
and sort of what they're doing.
I would say that there have
been some really positive things
that came out of this.
They had a contract.
They worked with -- they got a
truck, and the NGO got some money
out of it too to help replant
the headwaters of the region
that have been sort of
stripped of vegetation
and therefore are polluting the
main rivers, so that's good.
On the other hand, some of
these other things I would say
if I were -- they are
rather constricting
and they might not be good
for them in the long run.
On the other hand, they could
change their mind tomorrow,
and that's another
reason to go back.
And, yes, you had a question here.
>> Male Speaker: Oh, I wanted to
ask if you could parse a little more
of this notion of the master.
At one point you said
under some circumstances,
someone who learns a song
can become its master.
And I'm curious when
the learner might become
and when the learner might not
become the master of the song.
>> Anthony Seeger: All songs come
from enemies or animals or fish,
or birds, and so forth, and plants.
They can come from
all kinds of sources.
And the person who hears
it just is like a radio.
They pass it on to somebody else.
The person who sings it aloud
for the first time is the master.
>> Male Speaker: All right, so
that's a subsequent pupil --
>> Anthony Seeger: Yeah.
>> Male Speaker: --
would not acquire --
>> Anthony Seeger: No.
No.
>> Male Speaker: --
mastery of the song.
>> Anthony Seeger: No, no.
Somebody else?
In fact, these particular songs,
the individual songs don't --
nobody else really,
usually sings them.
It'd be very rare for somebody
to sing somebody else's songs.
Everybody would know it.
And they would say, "Oh
that's so-and-so's song,
why don't you have -- aren't you
smart enough to learn your own?"
[laughter] Or something like that.
And yes. Here and then there.
Okay.
>> Male Speaker: So this is a
communal sense of ownership, right?
When are they going to
discover a personal sense
of ownership and what is that like?
>> Anthony Seeger:
Personal ownership --
that's a really good question --
personal ownership -- when I was --
I had a pot they I ate all my food
out of and I was saying to someone,
"This is -- I'm going
to wash my pot,
in ogoui [spelled phonetically]."
And he said, "No.
No. You're talking like a child.
You don't say my pot.
You say our pot, agi ongui
[spelled phonetically]."
And so, back in the 70s,
they were trying not
to have personal property
be personal property.
Things that were yours, like that
pot, or if you're a man your paddle
and your bow and arrow, or if
you're a woman, all of the things
that you would have for
making food and your garden,
would be destroyed when you died.
So there was no passage of
property from one generation.
It was stuff was associated
with you.
They wanted it -- your
spirit to leave the village
and so they would destroy all your
belongings, dig up their garden
and then bury -- sort of bury you
with all your belongings broken.
That's a very different
kind of idea.
Personal property, too, then
they're beginning to develop.
Now when you have a gun and you die
actually somebody else really wants
it, they can't make their own.
So personal property
is also changing.
It hasn't and I thought that
would probably the biggest change
and perhaps the most -- if you want
to put judgmental damaging change
on a whole way of living that they
developed over hundreds of years,
perhaps thousands or
tens of thousands,
but so far it hadn't happened.
But I -- last trip was in 2010
so I will go back and find out.
Yes. You had a question.
>> Male Speaker: Yes.
I had a question about, basically
a long-running anthropological the
question -- who really
represents the community?
In other words, who decides,
this is our song, this is --
and when the money gets
distributed from the NGO,
who decides who shares in the money?
And I ask this because the last
10 years I've been involved
with conservation groups and in
the Congo and the problem we've had
in the field with the NGO
is, find an NGO locally,
at the Congolese [unintelligible]
and you work with them.
But then people who have
migrated to Kinshasa, the capital,
here there's money being paid to
trackers, to follow the bonobo
in the forest, and here
money's being paid.
Money's being distributed.
And then they contest a voice, a
local NGO, and they have connections
in the capital, with
[unintelligible].
Do you have any of
these kind of issues?
Who represents the community?
And who shares the
resources, who decides?
>> Anthony Seeger:
There are some issues,
but actually this is a
remarkably small community.
There are now 400 of them
instead of 120, so they're big
by their standards, but they're
really small by any others.
And they all live in one place.
And they're doing their
best not to leave the area.
They like living in their houses.
They like living in their village.
None of them lives in the
same city permanently.
They visit or go to school even.
But they're really -- what
they think is important is
that round village and the
ceremonies you can do in it.
They were all offered free
electricity by the mayor
of the municipality in which
-- that they're attached --
that they're sort of part of
next to, and they refused it,
saying that they preferred
to actually generate their
own electricity with --
even though they had to buy the
fuel because they wanted to be able
to turn everything off and sing.
They didn't want people to be
able to sit in their houses
and watch television when there
are community events happening.
So they have that kind of awareness
of the issues and that
kind of unity.
And when I ask, they say, "Well
it's the elders that decide this."
They have a women's
counsel as well that --
I mean, there are women
elders who are also powerful,
and there's an extreme -- there's
an online video of talking to all
of you whites, all of us whites,
about how we've destroyed
their territory, online.
And it's all women speaking
and they're absolutely furious
and eloquent, and it's
really quite remarkable.
So, it's men and women.
They sit down.
The older people decide,
"Well, yes, we're not doing
to say those words anymore.
Everybody agree?"
And everybody agrees.
There is a sort of a
charismatic leader,
who's been the most powerful
political leader has the most
relatives who go club somebody if
things really got out of hand --
who sort of directs that.
But he doesn't do it by himself.
He does it with a council of elders.
And they haven't so far
split on much of that.
Money, of course, is one
of the hardest things.
What they're mostly divided on
right now is who gets the cars,
because is this the person
who does the health care,
or is it the person -- and
so, one of the big issues
in Brazilian NGO's -- and they
have their own NGO, by the way,
as well so -- the Kisedje NGO -- and
that's where I now send my royalties
and things like that, because
finally it's really easy for me
to get things distributed,
because I just send to the NGO
and let them argue about it, if
there is any argument at all.
But, yes. So, got one here and
one there and we'll probably stop
with you, I guess, because we got
to get to lunch or back to work.
>> Female Speaker: Hi.
I'm delighted to hear that
[spelled phonetically] --
>> Anthony Seeger: Emmie,
how good to see you, yes.
>> Female Speaker: Hi.
>> Anthony Seeger: She, Emilia, and
I worked just about 20 miles upriver
from where I did, and
it was from her group
that the Suya took their captives
and taught them how to make pots.
[laughter] And also
from the group --
well not hers, but the
group that she worked with,
and the group that she worked
with also that they learned some
of those songs, so it's
nice to have you here.
Perhaps you can speak up for them.
Yes.
>> Emilia: Yeah.
Well, the thing that's
interesting, I was amazed to hear
that they have a different
attitude toward ownership of songs,
because in the Upper Xingu, you --
the only type of property that
you cannot just get from someone
by asking for it, is
intellectual property.
So, if you want to learn
a song, you need to go
and chop wood for an elder.
It may mean half a year.
Or help carry water for them, or
do some difficult, physical task,
to show that you're humble.
And if they take a liking to you,
then you pay them valuable goods.
The most valuable goods your parents
-- it's like a college education.
And you have to work hard
to learn these songs.
But it gets you a lot of
respect, and nobody would imagine
that they would be able to learn
these traditional songs and be able
to be a keeper of those songs
without paying handsomely.
But if I go to the same
elder, who's very respected,
and I look at the most
valuable object in their house
and I say, "May I have that?"
they have to give it to you or
they will be seen as not generous.
They have to be particularly
generous.
The other thing that amazed me
is that there's no stealing.
I mean stealing's an art form.
>> Anthony Seeger: It is an art
form with the Upper Xingu, yes.
I've experienced it.
>> Emilia: It's an
art form and it's part
of the redistributive economy,
because I have a choice.
I had like 200 batteries to last
me all through a long period.
And they said you don't
need that many.
We can use them to go fishing.
But I need them, you know,
every so many every day.
And I had a choice of giving
them away and getting points
for being a generous person,
or having them stolen.
[laughter] And I learned,
because it's the "Wauja IRS."
You're not allowed to
hoard all that stuff.
[laughter] But the other thing is
that the notion of keeper, I think,
is useful with -- like
a lighthouse keeper.
A lighthouse keeper
doesn't own the lighthouse,
but he's in charge of it.
And he fulfills a social function.
And he -- it's important to the
community that he does that.
So I think of the way the Wauja
used the term that you're talking
about is in terms of being
steward and a keeper, a custodian.
>> Anthony Seeger: That
would be master probably,
or something like that also.
>> Emilia: Yes.
Yeah. It also --
>> Anthony Seeger: The
interesting thing about Brazil,
is the indigenous societies
really are different.
And the CR part of a group that
speaks a language family called je,
who in general have a rather
inquisitive attitude toward
intellectual property, though they
do have things that you own by name,
by persons, by your name.
But they don't have keepers
like that for the most part.
So, you find differences and the
impact of things will be different.
And that's one of the
exciting things about studying
in any ethnographic region
is not just what you discover
but what you discover is not the
case, as close as 120 miles away.
The Suya also don't play flutes,
whereas Upper Xingu group,
they play a million kinds of flutes.
So they have chosen not to play
flutes and they have chosen --
I mean they make decisions about
what they think is essentially them.
And I guess I'll go from there.
They could have said, "Well
those are our flutes."
They said -- I asked them, they
said, "Flutes, that's not us."
[laughter] There was
another question.
Yes, in the back.
Yeah.
>> Male Speaker: You mentioned
just almost in passing
about the internet being in
the village, and I'm wondering
about the generational
effect that it has.
If you talk about what's going
on with the younger
generation and the internet?
>> Anthony Seeger: Yeah.
My daughter would do it better,
because I'm a really
lazy Facebook user.
[laughter] Now the Suya were
all on the Brazilian Orkut,
or something like that, which
was a Brazilian French system,
not on Facebook.
And now they're moving to Facebook.
And I just don't get it -- it's
mostly a younger generation
that thinks I'm much too old
to want to talk to anyway.
But I can ask them to pass
messages to their grandparents.
And my sister is keeping up more --
my daughter is keeping
up more with them.
So, I can't say exactly
how it's working.
When I was there before, they said,
"Oh, there's internet everywhere,"
but in fact, because
it was so smokey,
we couldn't reach the satellite.
And so it actually wasn't anywhere.
[laughter] Except for on
days when a little wind blow,
and then we all ran
and try to get online
and at least tell people
we were okay.
So I'm not sure how
it's working right now.
But that would be one thing
we could certainly find out.
And yes.
>> Male Speaker: Yes.
So my question is, you
had mentioned at the end
that the Suya had asked
you, for example,
not to put certain recordings on the
recording that came with the book,
because it doesn't
really represent them.
It's someone else's song that they
had borrowed before and so forth.
>> Anthony Seeger: Yeah.
>> Stephen Winick:
However you want to put it.
But the question I have then is,
that sort of opens up the whole,
you know, central problem that
ethnographers always have,
which is to what extent are we
presenting a picture of this people
as they want to be represented,
and to what extent are we
presenting a picture of these people
as one would encounter them,
or as I encountered them?
And could you talk
about that at all?
About how these notions of
ownership are effecting the ways
in which you can and do
represent them given that,
for an anthropologist or an
ethnomusicologist or folklorist,
it's very interesting
that they sing that song
and the way they sing
it might be interesting,
but now they don't want
it to be generally known
or to be presented
in that way, so --
>> Anthony Seeger: Well,
that's the interesting thing
about long-term field work.
You learn a lot about things
that people would rather
have forgotten later on.
And so that happens to me.
And I think then the question is,
well what is an ethical position?
And I think an ethical position, to
say what they say now, but not --
but then also say what
it was like before.
But take it off, because if
they don't want that thing
on I think it's an ethicical --
it would be unethical to put that
recording on if you're formally told
that it shouldn't be there.
On the other hand, I think
it's extremely important
that I tell people that they can
change their mind on that point,
otherwise you don't understand
really the processes going on.
And we have one more question and
that's it, because everybody has
to leave the room probably,
or turn into pumpkins.
Yes.
>> Male Speaker: Just
a quick question.
It's a linguistic question.
I work with [unintelligible]
ladies and gentleman.
>> Anthony Seeger: Great.
>>Male Speaker: -- as well.
And one thing that's been recurring
in family is that they look forward
to hear and to know
artisan groups, right?
>> Anthony Seeger: [affirmative]
>> Male Speaker: So maybe, I wonder
if that has any sort of consequence
in the way they sing songs.
You know, if you, by hearing,
you automatically know it's
kind of involuntary right?
You don't necessarily take
the effort to learn that song,
because it's just by hearing
you are learning this --
>> Anthony Seeger: No they can
hear songs once and sing them back.
I mean, that's why they can
say, "I was with the fish
and I learned all their songs,"
because it doesn't take them long,
partly because the fish happen
to be singing in structures
and languages that they understand.
[laughter] The word "hear"
is really interesting to me,
because among the Suya, it
actually has a moral component.
If you hear well, you behave well.
And therefore hearing is moral.
If you're an immoral person
they say you've got --
you can't hear or you've
got beans in your ears.
You've got something
stuck in your --
what they say is usually
frogs in your ears.
It's something that impedes
you from actually getting
that in your ear and
behaving correctly.
So, hearing is extremely
important, and I've argued elsewhere
that it's probably the
most social of the senses.
And speaking is the other.
And vision is far less important
in many ways and certainly morally.
It's -- that's what witches see.
Witches see very well.
Everybody else just sort of sees.
So it's -- the senses
are interesting
and certainly knowledge is as they
say -- sometimes they say it lies --
some people said lies in the ears.
Some people said it's just there.
In any event, we have a really
remarkable audience here.
I want to congratulate
you and thank you.
Some people are specialists
in the language family,
and some people are specialists
in music and in rights.
I thank you all for coming.
I think we've run out of time.
>> Nancy Groce: Thank you very much.
[applause]
>> Female Speaker: This
has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
[end of transcript]