Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People

Janet Chernela

Luso-Brazilian Review, Volume 46, Number 2, 2009, pp. 226-227 (Review)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: 10.1353/lbr.0.0089

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lbr/summary/v046/46.2.chernela.html

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226 Luso-Brazilian Review 46:2

Seeger, Anthony. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian

People. Urbana and Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Bibliography. Index. CD.
159 pp.

Poetic performance has often been relegated to secondary status by social sci-
entists who may consider it epiphenomenal to everyday life. This argument
is deft ly countered in Anthony Seeger’s acclaimed book, Why Suyá Sing, now
in paperback with accompanying CD. In impeccable, economic, prose Seeger
shows that performance is more than the artful use of music and language
(though it may be that). Grounding his argument in rich description gathered
in two years of fieldwork among the indigenous Suyá in the Brazilian Amazon,
Seeger demonstrates that performance is not only integral to social life, it plays
a crucial, generative role in its construction. A Kantian aesthetic that positions
art as independent of and isolated from the ordinary is not sustainable in light
of these insights and the data that support them.
Brazil is one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. When
Europeans first arrived there were some four million people belonging to more
than 1,000 denominations. In Brazil today about 370,000 individuals speak
over 180 different, native Amerindian languages. Among them are the Suyá of
the Xingu River basin, whose language belongs to the Gê family.
Seeger’s principal argument in this slim but densely packed volume is that
singing, an experience of the body, is a means of producing (and reproducing)
the social person and society. To spell this out Seeger uses the illustration of
the Mouse Ceremony, a fourteen-day event of embedded performative acts. He
shows how the ceremony establishes domains and transformations among and
across entities, as men are transformed into mice and back again in a process that
is simultaneously personal, historic, and symbolic. In this and other ways the
Suyá articulate the experiences of their lives with the processes of their society.
Performance, and song in particular, is a powerful vantage point for consid-
ering the musical life of society and the social life of music. As anthropologist,
ethnomusicologist, and musician, Seeger is exceptionally prepared and posi-
tioned for such a holistic enterprise. In exploring the matter of rising pitch, for
example, a phenomenon of considerable concern and mystery to ethnomusi-
cologists, Seeger drew on a combination of approaches. Comparing his original
recordings to archival ones and submitting both to laboratory tests, he located
a slight rising of the pitch in the middle of a syllable. Through participant-
observation Seeger was able to discern the roles of local specialists in pitch
changes, and to contribute to growing discussions among researchers on the
role of pitch change in coordinating unison singing.
While scholars have long shown interest in culture change and ethnogen-
esis, the mechanisms of these processes remain unclear. This is especially the
case when it comes to the role of discourse forms in identity formation. The
Suyá and other societies of the Upper Xingu eloquently demonstrate that eth-
nic identity is a dynamic process, not a state. Settlement in the region is fairly
Books Reviewed 227

recent, and the processes of borrowing and incorporation of discourse forms

related to ceremonial practices continue to be very active. The Suyá, like most
of the 17 indigenous groups in the area, were relocated in the 1950s and 1960s
when the Villas-Boas brothers created the Xingu National Park in Mato Grosso
state. Before arriving at their present village at headwaters of the Xingu, the
Suyá migrated hundreds of miles from what is now the state of Maranhão. Dur-
ing two centuries the Suyá fought enemies and incorporated their innovations,
including technology and song. In a strategy that may remind readers of the
twentieth century Brazilian literary discussion of antropofagia, the Suyá have
treated all powerful strangers alike, incorporating that which they value into
their own repertoires. At least ten songs performed by the Suyá originated from
interactions with outsiders. Seeger juxtaposes the songs and beer obtained by
the Suyá from the Tupian-speaking Juruna, with the songs and maize received
from the Mouse (and highlighted in Suyá myth and ceremony recounted here),
and the songs learned from Seeger himself, the North American anthropologist
the Suyá call “Our White man.” Seeger’s work contributes to an important and
growing corpus of internationally recognized literature on public performances
and their distribution in the Upper Xingu (see Basso for the Kalapalo; Seki for
the Kamaiura, and Franchetto for the Kuikuro). Comparative study of these
works should begin to answer some of the questions on the role of ceremony
and cultural transformation.
This impressive contribution to musical anthropology celebrates the achieve-
ments of collective life, from the mundane to the exalted. In it Seeger points to
the special role of the performing arts in societies without written traditions.
He reminds us that in non-literate societies codes – the norms that underlie
collective life – are produced and reproduced through performance. Why Suyá
Sing treats the production of Suyá song as total social fact, convincingly demon-
strating the central role played by musical performance in the transmission of
knowledge, practices, and values, as well as the reaffirmation and transforma-
tion of relationships. If this book is a model, then, understanding song, and the
contexts within which songs are produced, provides a fundamental basis for
understanding the formation of ideas about time, space, and social identity.
The paperback edition of Why Suyá Sing features an accompanying CD with
examples of myth telling, speech making, and singing that link to the descrip-
tions and discussions in the book. The text and CD together provide a rich and
rare resource for intertextual analysis. The new release also contains an after-
ward that further documents the continued importance of music in the lives of
the Suyá even as it is used now in conflicts with ranchers and soy growers. In the
afterward Seeger recounts the contents of a FAX he received two decades after
his fieldwork: “The corn is ripe,” the FAX read. “If you want to be in the Mouse
Ceremony come now” (148). For the reader this wording suggests a poignant
message of time, tempo, and friendship.
Janet Chernela
University of Maryland