Genesis and Fusion, Hinterland and City
Simon Sarris has been writing for a time about where culture comes from. He describes the commonly held assumption is that cities spawn culture. He also claims that this is wrong—culture comes from the hinterlands.
I agree with Simon (culture comes from the hinterlands), but I see where the common concept arises: culture is discovered, fusion-ed, and riffed-upon in cities. And it’s understandable that the world notices a new (musical technique) when it splashes into awareness in a big city. But it was actually born in a small place. (My toy case is folk music, but you can substitute whatever you care about for slängpolska.)
Creation
The creation of new forms and the honing of traditions, requires depth. I don’t want to say “boredom,” but it does require a deep familiarity with your peers. It requires hours and hours and hours spent riffing on the same ideas, starting from the same source materials. Cultural insularity is how you develop a tradition stack that’s deep enough to be worth strip-mining or blending later.
I tried real hard to make this song not sound like some other song I might’ve written before.
If I did it's because my style and style is based on limitations.-John Hartford, “Mark Twang”
A Parable from the Upper Klarälven River
I’m inventing the anecdote to describe outcomes that are real. 1
Fusion
Fusion, remixes, and blending of cultures happen in cities. The fast pace produces “I just met you, we have fifteen minutes to talk, but we will not meet each other again, so I can only learn the most obvious, salient sound-byte from you” interactions. You will get a snootful of Swedish dancing, but you’ll only get as much as you can learn in 15 minutes, before you’ve moved on to the next person at the party and sampled the most transmissible kernel from his culture.
And you’ll enjoy all of these, and you’ll remember parts and pastiche them together. But very little detail will have been transmitted. If a step-change was hard for a new learner, it’s omitted. Intricacies are lost and edges are sanded off in the rich, anti-boring environment. The five best soundbytes from the party enter your long-term memory, but without the context that bore them. You can mix and match because what was transmitted was simple enough.
Backwaters vs Doldrums
“Backwaters” is used pejoratively to describe places where time seems to move more slowly, where nothing much is going on. In the kayakers’ diagram above, you can see that backwater eddies make up in whorls and swirls what they lack in throughput.
“Doldrums,” in contrast, are seas without enough wind for sailing vessels to move in any direction at all.
In the draft phase of this post, a friend asked: What’s the difference between a ‘dead-end, boring, trashy/hopeless town with not much advancement going on’ vs ‘remote place where real advancement can happen, your place or Thoreau or Emerson’. What personalities, cultural institutions, drive that difference?
And the simple answer here to me is “where are attentions directed?” In the parable, Axel and Ingrid and Henrik play and dance more evenings than they don’t. They spend more time practicing their own skills and enjoying their own company, than they do watching/reading media that was developed for a broad audience. They’re spending real hours with their particular limitations and their particular creativity, inwardly directed toward having the most fun possible with the raw materials they’re given. They’re a small workgroup with a common goal.
What personalities drive that? The fiddle player asking the lady with the key to the dance hall if he can host dances on Saturday nights because he wants someone to fiddle for. The dance hall lady mentioning in the newspaper that if you want to dance, show up Saturday. Cultural institutions that encourage local businessmen to donate to the ‘refinish the dance floor’ fund keep things rolling once they have begun. Again, this is the toy case of dancing. (It works, I’ve done it.) One can extrapolate—and that works too.
Bottom Line
In the actual world this century, the pendulum seems to hang on the “strip mining and blending” side—and I definitely wouldn’t change that, since it’s tightly linked with freedoms and richness that weren’t present in the last “develop deep culture” era. These freedoms and riches are not to be taken for granted.
I think, in my ideal world, creation and fusion are co-occurring. Probably creating and fusion would be separated by geography, with people able to travel from one to the other for weekend visits or through seasons of life. (CAN you create things by bootstrapping small community “small workgroup” inside a bit city? For sure—it’s paddling upstream, but you can do it if you’ve got dedication and vision. But in a slower paced world, in a hinterland, creation tends to happen naturally. Dedication and vision are force multipliers instead of necessary for liftoff.)
To the extent that deep culture is being developed in this era, I believe it is primarily happening in the hinterlands. You can come visit today to see it happen, or perhaps in 20 years to check my hypothesis.
Henrik is just learning fiddle so he only plays in the key of D. But Axel and Ingrid have been dancing together since before Henrik was born, and no new tv show has been released this week or this century, so they dance even though Henrik’s playing only fills 10% of their focus capacity. To avoid getting bored, they add tiny flourishes, they nest rhythms. Give them a few weeks, and they’re dancing three different “dances” inside the same fiddle tune. A straight dance, a counterclockwise quick dance, and a gliding clockwise dance.
Axel and Ingrid are clearly having fun, and the other people in the village ask “what’s that counterclockwise thing?” Axel and Ingrid teach it, the 3-in-1 dance propagates.
(Some years later, an ethnographer comes by to archive the local dances. “What’s this dance?” they shrug, look at each other, “the polska we dance when Henrik’s playing, I guess.” Skeptical, the ethnographer furrows his brow and scratches “Bakmes och Slängpolsk från Övre Klarälvsdalen” into his field notes.)
