Further Thoughts on Human Ecology

Further Thoughts on Human EcologyAuthor(s): Douglas KennedySource: Folklore, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer, 1966), pp. 81-90Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258534 .

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FOLKLORE - VOLUME 77 - SUMMER 1966

Further Thoughts on Human Ecology by DOUGLAS KENNEDY

Presidential Address delivered before the Society at the Annual

General Meeting on 16 March, 1966

IN a previous address to this Society, I advocated a much closer partnership between the intellectual critical faculties and the intuitive senses and processes, on the ground that human society would be the better for it. In an endeavour to align Folklore in general with more formal disciplines such as Anthropology, Archaeology, Psychology, I introduced the term Human Ecology, coined by Sir George Stapledon to cover man's general relationship to himself and to his environment. Recent history emphasises as well as illustrates the rapid growth of man's control over his environment. I am concerned to show the converse of this and with the need for man still to cherish and encourage his ancient adaptability, with his ability to respond to his neighbourhood using the subconscious perceptiveness inherited from an immensely distant past. In considering all aspects of folklore, we are brought into contact with much of the evidence of the workings of these ancient and subconscious processes. But this general evidence is echoed and amplified by the particular findings, not only of Anthropology, Archaeology and Psychology, but also of even more specialized disciplines such as Medicine, Musicology, Industrial Archaeology and of the educational implication of all forms of Art.

In setting out the profit and loss aspect of this mastery of man over his environment, one is tempted to undervalue or ignore the loss in the recognition of the profit. If I seem now to be under- valuing the profits, it is with the desire to review, revalue and perhaps recover some of the old ground lost.

In the earlier discussion, I dwelt on the relationship of man to his physical environment, to his crafts and the tools he fashions.

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FURTHER THOUGHTS ON HUMAN ECOLOGY

Now I want to turn to something rather more difficult and consider his relationship to himself and to his fellows. Much of our folklore is concerned with man's feelings about himself, his culture group and his ancestors. One of the most striking features of this relation-

ship is the degree of attachment and detachment of each individual personality. A truly individual man is by definition an undivided person, one who is complete in himself. Few of us deserve to be called individuals in this sense, for we are anything but undivided as any practising psychiatrist can tell you. We remain highly dependent upon others of our kind long after we become adult. It is a very unusual person indeed who can preserve himself uniquely, remote and solitary in the desert, in the forest or in the frozen regions. The vast majority crave at moments for company. But to live successfully in company demands something rather more than company manners. It needs practised company-keeping- talents and skills.

Surely, you may say, these are ordinary social problems rather fit objects for social studies than to be regarded as aspects of folklore. But my point is that a cultivated society should not be content to stand idly by, allowing the march of events to create more and more fragmented individuals who have been deprived of their company-keeping-talents, until society is forced to tackle them as social misfits.

Folklore and Anthropology and those other studies which grapple with such aspects of Human Ecology have all revealed symptoms of the connectedness, the oneness of folk-life patent in all primitive and peasant communities. Our personal experiences within our modern society provide us only with fleeting glimpses of our own ecology which might appear to be just phases in the process of our own individual maturing. The mother and child relationship can be looked on as an example of the gradual separation into individuals from the initial essential unity. At first the two are part of one another and this interdependence can persist for too much of the two lives. In primitive societies, the process of individuation rarely reaches levels accepted as normal in our own supposedly more advanced society. But we are too prone to assume that there is no essential difference. Descriptions of tribal life invariably convey the impression of group behaviour within a collective personality that broods over the daily life of the

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tribe. When any such group with its collective personality is detribalized by the impact of a civilization or by the adoption or acceptance of an alien religion the individuals are bereft and left, like the masterless men of the Middle Ages, without the natural context for their living. Lack of knowledge, and understanding, of the workings of the collective personality, and of the vulnerability and limitations of the so-called individuals who emerge as a result of its fragmentation may have been at the root of certain troubles between ourselves and peoples of other cultures and other colours living at different levels, but whom we persist in regarding as individuals exactly like ourselves as individuals. And yet the difference is mainly of degree. As I have said a very small minority of our own populace are undivided individuals. We, the majority, frequently need the comfort of congenial company, often returning to another level and seeking elementary methods of refreshment and recreation. It is the great attraction of our hostelries that the persons who regularly assemble there quickly acquire a collective personality. Folklore collectors have found that it is in such atmospheres that folk-feelings are easily aroused and expressed. For the 'regulars' it has become second nature to drop in and it may even be that there are some local characters who have retained their first nature with the native talent and ability to react to the collective environment. This ability, this ecological faculty, many of us lack and, lacking it, have to compensate with planning our amusement. But can a lack, or loss, of first nature and good feeling be made good by any process of cool planning.

To make good the dispossessed individual must re-possess his piece of the 'collective tissue', or he must be so truly educated, if there is such an education, that his inner being creates or replaces it under some kind of interior pressure.

It would be unfair to say that all intellectuals are blind to this urgent need of an emotional balance. Indeed, many of them have developed the instinct for a counter irritant. In this connection, I believe that during the last century, scientific Cambridge produced twice as many poets as literary Oxford.

When the Folk Ballads began to be published as poetic literature in the eighteenth century their stark simplicity gradually disarmed the high-brows of literary criticism, who, at first sight, had dismissed them as degenerate and rather worthless versions of

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earlier and supposedly composed works. But the 'folk' element in this traditional poetry kept getting under the skins of those intellectuals who were more and more affected by the ballad and by its uncanny power to move. Nevertheless they kept their opinion that these folk-songs were mere popular echoes of lost literary compositions, the inventions of forgotten minstrels of genius preserved in oral tradition by the people who humbly passed them down the generations without serious material change. Eighteenth-century poets, in presenting these popular ballads, therefore felt they had the right to alter and improve the material as they thought fit.

For a hundred years this process of so called 'improvement' by ballad editors continued without check. From the first edition of Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany through the vogue for Bishop Percy's Reliques, Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and for Robert Burns' poems, these and other editors were saluted as the acknowledged saviours of a dying literary inheritance. The first discordant note was struck by the editor of another Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, published in 1827. Instead of siding with his fellow editors and posing as a restorer and improver of the decaying fabric of popular poetry, Motherwell had the hardihood to point out that in one hour's editing, the 'improvers' could do more damage to this traditional inheritance than three hundred years of wear and tear in the mouths of the vulgar themselves. While Percy and Scott had apologetically called attention to the poverty of expression in folk-poetry, as illustrated by the continual use of common-places, epithets, repetitions etc., Motherwell suggested that these very devices sprang from the ecological necessities of traditional art, in which the oral process actually cut the cackle and came straight to the horses.

Motherwell's picture of the people reliably relating their heroic epics and faithfully singing their sagas was very different from that of Scott and others, but he did not go so far as to suggest that the method of oral transmission within a community might actually create balladry. It was not until 1875 that Andrew Lang with his surer instinct for Ecology let fall the simple idea that, after all, a people produced its own language, might not a people in much the same fashion, whatever that was, produce its own song and poetry.

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From that moment the folk-ballads and indeed all traditional matter have been fat in the literary fire. Lang's proposal was snapped up by the German poet, Herder, who pushed the discussion far over on a long swing toward communal creation. For him the poems of Homer were no longer a problem. 'Homer' was just a worked up collection of songs, lays, ballads etc. which were under- going the process of oral transmission; a nexus of folk-material which was just a reflex of the collective personality of the Greek people.

For anything approaching a modern parallel to Homer and the Greeks we have to turn to countries where the human ecology is in a similar natural state, where the method of oral transmission is the main mass medium for music and poetry, and history, and myth and legend etc. If we cannot now find any such natural communities in England, there are the scattered pockets among the Gaelic singing and speaking peoples of Ireland and Scotland, where the folk-tales and ballads are listened to raptly by an audience who know and follow every turn of the tale.

We can go further afield to Asia, South America or Africa, where oral transmission obtains widely and study the intimate relationship of singer or story-teller to his listener. There we develop a very clear picture of a unity, a collective personality, in which the individual is subsumed. A musical example which deeply impressed me is the use of hocket technique by singers and pipers of certain tribes in Ghana. For this experience I am indebted to Dr J. H. K. Nketia of the University of Ghana whom I heard speak at the Quebec conference of the International Folk Music Council in 1962 (Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. XIV, 1962). Anyone who has experienced African dancing and heard African drumming and chanting will have been impressed by what is to us a quite extraordinary sense of together- ness, of unanimity, which is not obtained as the result of planning or of thoughtful drilling: far from it. The oneness springs directly from their feeling as a group. The hocket technique in music uses, and must largely depend on, a high degree of feeling perception, for its success rests on the instant response, quicker than thought, of one musician to another. The method is to share out the music in small parcels, even single notes, which when arranged horizon- tally make a melody, or arranged vertically make a chord or

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harmony. The horizontal and the vertical arrangements are frequently combined. Each player comes in on his cue very like our hand-bell ringers do, and the trick is to know, or rather feel, exactly ones own part in the musical-rhythmical pattern. The creative impulse to improvise is strong, so that no one performance is exactly like another and something new is liable to occur, at certain moments, in every performance.

In the musical tradition of Africa one not only finds ensembles of instruments, but ensembles of players grouped round one instrument. As many as six men will play one xylophone or one percussion drum, each man operating within a prescribed range of action. Hocket-technique in Ghana is also much used in flute- ensembles. The flutes are simple pipes of bamboo or reed, or carved wood, with anything from one to six finger holes, but none having more than one octave range. Some of the simplest flutes only play response sections: others with two or three finger holes are graded in pitch so that they can be treated as treble, alto, tenor; the treble being usually the leading flute of the ensemble.

Even if the melodic scope of the music seems narrow, the rhythm is dynamic enough to enhance its interest to African listeners (according to Nketia). Each of the three flute parts by itself has only a limited interest, but when all parts are played together, their notes sometimes sounding together and sometimes sequentially, hocket-fashion, then the whole music comes alive in an astonishing way. For dance purposes the players use six or seven flutes plus drums. Here some of the flutes supply a chordal ground bass, each chord played by two or three men. The hocket- technique maintains continuity while allowing breaks, one group leaving off for another to come in. At Quebec Dr Nketia played recordings of this flute and drum music and also some hocket trumpet music, all of which was quite arresting.

The hocket principle is not confined to Ghana. It is found in other parts of West Africa and in South Africa, and, of course, is used widely in drumming. My object in referring to this interesting musical technique is to point out its utter dependence upon the intimate relationship and perceptiveness of the players, as of first nature. According to Dr Nketia, each player must have a general awareness of the totality of the resultant, as well as a rapt expectancy

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of his own right moments. Hocket can lead to music of high complexity controlled and interlocked, but essentially the hocket orchestra is a collective personality, rather than a collection of individual players who have learned to play as of second nature.

Such natural examples of human ecology as we find in the folk- music of Africa, while interesting for us to contemplate objectively, are really rather too remote from our actual subjective experience. If we are only able to appreciate such folk-music intellectually, we become quickly bored. I noticed at one of the public performances during the Commonwealth Festival that a considerable proportion of the audience were not only bored, but seemed positively to dislike some of the native music and dancing. This may have been because of an incapacity to participate. Participation called for the attitude of a child listening to a fairy tale. Those who have lost this child-like faculty or, as J. B. Priestley suggests (The Art of the Dramatist: 1957), have had to take the child within them and wring its neck, generally dislike dramatic action and are un- responsive play-goers.

Which brings me to a more familiar type of collective personality of which we all have some first-hand experience: I mean that of being in an audience at the theatre. Nearly all the arts make their appeal to us as individuals. Even music, although it may be played by a large orchestra to a large audience, receives not a mass perception, but each auditor listens and enjoys the music in a kind of loneliness. Now the drama has always depended on an organic audience responding by first nature. In one way this audience behaves like a crowd engrossed in a single collective experience; all of one mood. It is therefore more correct to speak of an audience than of some or many spectators (Allardyce Nicoll, The Theatre and Dramatic Theory, 1962). But there is a fundamental difference between a mob-spirit and a theatre-audience-spirit. At a theatrical performance the audience remains dimly conscious on the one hand of themselves as individuals, and on the other of the total assemblage in which they are incorporated. So in the theatre we have a double-barrelled enjoyment: when as individuals we surrender for the moment to the mass - but often not quite totally; we can also enjoy the ability momentarily to withdraw from the mass and contemplate the audience objectively. We can come into and out of the collective personality and wonder about,

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as well as feel, our environment. This is quite a valuable ecological experience. As the individual is drawn within the emotion of the audience his intellectual awareness grows proportionately less. As the late Mr Somerset Maugham puts it, the audience 'does not think with its brain, but with its solar plexus' (W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938).

But with this non-intellectual quality goes a strong emotional sensitivity in heightened degree of perception. J. B. Priestley says that 'nobody in his senses goes to the theatre to be told what to think'. And yet I once observed a mainly intellectual audience at a Who-dun-it? play and was acutely aware of a totally different kind of concentration; each individual spectator wilfully detaching himself from his surroundings so that, undistracted, he can indulge the mental exercise of finding the right answer.

In Folk-drama and such popular forms of theatre as Music Hall, the Pantomime or Melodrama, the audience was always as much part of the performance as the actors. In the so-called legitimate theatre there seems to have been a constant recognition of the different levels of audience involvement as shown by the actors' playing to the gallery, speaking their asides to the pit, or flattering the boxes which mechanically facilitated some physical degree of detachment from the common herd. Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists who excelled at addressing their play to the collective personality of the audience of their day, were careful to provide occasional special fare for the lordlings on one hand and for the groundlings on the other. Now all the great dramatists have through the centuries perceived that, uniting the various levels of audience, there are a handful of essential units of emotional impression. These units are eternally and invariably appropriate. These units are not intellectual ideas, but profound unifying passions or moods. The very use of the word 'idea' leads us astray. Ideas are legion. Passions are few. It is in the sharing of these unifying moods in a theatre performance that provides the resultant aesthetic relish. It is interesting to learn that in Sanskrit, dramatic criticism has a theory of 'rasas', impressions or emotional attitudes aroused by the drama. The critics were not, in their day, concerned with the emotions inspiring the dramatist, so much as the emotions aroused in the audience by his work (Allardyce Nicoll, The Theatre and Dramatic Theory, 1962). The eight 'rasas' or

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moods commonly recognized were love, anger, heroic ardour, disgust, laughter, pathos, wonder and terror. It was recognized that a play, to be successful, had to concentrate upon one or another of these channels to poetic relish. Without such dominance of mood it was doubtful if the audience would reach the emotional, unified, imaginative state of universal sympathy in which the individual personalities of the spectators became lost in the temporary collective personality induced by the drama. For the audience to be moved together, the playwright must ensure that the attitude, the dominant mood or passion is quite unmistakable. Dealing in these few universals ensures touching the human heart, ensures the finding of the folk-level of the individual, and achieving an ecological concord.

You may be saying to yourself that my label 'Human Ecology' is only another name for Crowd Psychology. I have to remind you and myself that among the various human studies and disciplines each has its esoteric specialist methods, even to the extent of creating a special vocabulary, and all tend to become more and more inaccessible to the layman. My aim within the Ecology is to bring together phenomena which are naturally related within the general folklore of human behaviour. The argument, that such phenomena are not all quite the same thing, justifies the specialist disciplines, but it also justifies any comparative and integrated discussion that sets them side by side.

The arena of popular sport viewed as a field of study provides other interesting cases of the player-spectator relationship: none of them deserving a facile dismissal as mere crowd psychology. The elements of mob behaviour certainly do appear at the sensational, melodramatic moments of cup-tie football games. At cricket, on the other hand, the play closely resembles ritual-drama with the element of contest now brooding in the background, now reaching a sudden climax that is almost pure theatre.

In referring to sports arenas and theatre auditoria I have been discussing the collective personality of a gathering of sedentary or mainly passive spectators, each of whom can yet be so moved at the supreme moments of the drama in action that he has the primal sensation as though his hair stood on end.

To be actually in movement in the ritual dance with each so- called individual now reunited within the ring or chain, and all

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subsumed by the prevailing rhythm is to come right out of oneself into the collective mood: is to be re-born.

It would seem from the evidence of Folk-Custom that there has

always been a need for periodic resumptions of the collective mood, to compensate for the fragmenting and isolating process of individuation; a process which now receives so much encourage- ment from education and from certain modern attitudes in our

society today.

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Further Thoughts on Human Ecology