rhythm as logos in native world-ordering

8/13/2019 Rhythm as Logos in Native World-Ordering

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Rhythm as Logos in

Native World-Ordering

Sierra Mills Druley

University of Oregon, Eugene, USA

In his book, Te Dance of Person and Place, philosopherand scholar Tomas M. Norton-Smith defines a world-ordering process as one that creates patterns in senseexperience through space and time. He posits two majorworld-ordering principals within the Native American

worldview, relatedness and circularity. In this essay, I ar-gue that rhythm and its role in Native life serves as theimpetus for both of Norton-Smiths world-ordering prin-cipals. I will show how rhythm, as presented initially byLakota philosopher Robert Bunge, orders not only timebut space as well and so can be understood as the logos

that underpins the world-ordering principals of related-ness and circularity.Te indigenous peoples of North America had, and

continue to have, many diverse cultures that emerged inresponse to varied social and ecological contexts. For thepurposes of this essay I will speak of a Native world-


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view, but it is important to note that this worldview is aconstruct based on generalities made about a collectionof distinct and autonomous nations. Tese generalitieswill be just as flawed and circumspect as those madeabout European or Asian cultures, but they do serveto illustrate some of the common themes in AmericanIndian philosophy. Te authors that I draw from writeabout particular tribes but they also address AmericanIndian thought in general. What we find to be important,

here, are the common philosophical and cultural threadsbetween many tribes that, when taken together, consti-tute what we will call the Native worldview.

Part I: Norton-Smith and World-Ordering

Principals

Tomas M. Norton-Smith introduces world-orderingprincipals as part of the larger process of world-orga-nizing, which includes construction, deconstruction,weighting and ordering. ogether, these processes are themechanisms for world-creation through which culturesdevelop a functional understanding of how the world

works, and their place within it. For the purposes of thisstudy we will focus specifically on the process of order-ing: the sorting of spatial and temporal sensory data soas to create patterns in the world that make it livable andintelligible for human beings. Norton-Smith proposestwo world-ordering principals that he sees to be funda-mental to a Native American worldview: relatedness andcircularity.

Te world-ordering principal of relatedness is illus-trated in a phrase familiar to many American Indiantribes, We are all relatives. Tis statement does not ap-ply simply to the members of ones family, or to all of hu-manity. Rather, it implies that all living thingsall of the


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elements and organisms on Earthare inextricably wo-ven together, related, as a family is. In this view, findingnew information about the world involves seeking newpatterns of relatedness within it. Instead of investigatingthe nature of a thing itself, a native person, Norton-Smithclaims, would look for the connections that thing haswith the others that surround it, thereby gaining somefunctional knowledge about how that thing operates inthe world.

Te statement we are all relatives implies reverencefor the world that encompasses us. Norton-Smith writes,In the Native world version, everything is related andwe are all relatives, so all entities and beings are inter-connected, valuable by virtue of those interconnections,and due respect.1Here we see that the indigenous world

view that Norton-Smith describes is a fundamentally

ethical onea perspective wherein all things have in-trinsic worth because of their relatedness to each-otherand to the whole. So, an investigation must respect therelatedness of things by considering the impact thatinvestigation has on other members of the human andnon-human world. In this view, when we seek to gain

information about the nature of things, we must do socarefully and thoughtfullynever imagining that we aredetached, objective observers, but remembering that weare in fact deeply embedded in the world of experience,and accountable to it.

Te second world-ordering principal that Norton-Smith gives us is circularity; while creating patterns of

relatedness in sense experience, the Native worldviewis one that generates circular patterns as well. Norton-Smith writes, ...Hunter-gatherer societies had to ob-

1 Tomas M. Norton-Smith, Te Dance of Person and Place: OneInterpretation of American Indian Philosophy(Albany: State Universityof New York, 2010), 59.


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serve, create, and operate in accordance with seasonalpatterns, with cyclical patterns imposed on temporal ex-periencesthe ripening of berries in spring, late summercorn harvests, autumn migrations, and winter huntsinorder to survive. But such seasonal circular orderings arealso spatial orderingsharvests and hunts are events inboth time and space.2Here, we see that in the circularordering of experience, spatial and temporal spheres co-incide. For Native peoples, the natural cycles that order

life have time frames and locations (even in July, youwont find strawberries at the top of Mt. Hood). Spatio-temporal circular patterns diffuse through many areasof native lifeas Norton-Smith describes, tribes like theLakota associate seasonal changes with the cardinal di-rections, merging the categories of time and space withinone circular context with a distinct tribal center. So, the

indigenous concept of circularity is one that extendsthrough time and space to bring coherence to sensoryphenomena.

Tere is something that underpins the two world-or-dering principals that Norton-Smith gives usa drivingforce that animates and solidifies them. If, indeed, we are

dealing with a worldview wherein relatedness and circu-larity order sensory experience, then rhythm and its rolein native life can serve as a functional logos for under-standing these two principals--rhythm can demonstratehow these ordering processes shape the Native world-

view. For an initial account of rhythm in indigenous life,we will look at the work of Lakota scholar Robert Bunge

in his book,An American Urphilosophie.

2 Tomas M. Norton-Smith, Te Dance of Person and Place: OneInterpretation of American Indian Philosophy(Albany: State Universityof New York, 2010), 125.


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Part II: Rhythm in Time and Space

Robert Bunge explicates a Sioux Cosmology and Cos-

monogy that involves a view of humanity as a singleparticipant in a multi-faceted and animate natural world.In it, he includes a description of rhythm as an orderingmechanism for temporal experience, and a groundingforce in Native life. He writes that rhythm, for the Lako-ta, reflects the pulse or heartbeat of all that is.3SinceNative people view themselves as part of a living bioticworld, the beat of the drum can be seen as a connection tothe pulse that animates the entire universe. Bunge writesthat ime and rhythm are inexorably bound togetherin the Native worldview, and describes how the patternof the seasons and the cycles of the moon and sun arereflected in the rhythms of Lakota music.4 In this way,

rhythm connects Lakota people to the larger naturalorder of time in the universeit connects them tempo-rally to the world around them.

An implication of this understanding of rhythm thatBunge leaves out, and which I find essential, is the roleof rhythm in ordering spatial experience. If rhythm, asBunge claims, orients the Lakota people to the living

world around them, then it has spatial qualities as wellas temporal ones. And certainly, as we have seen throughNorton-Smith, the categories may not be clearly parsed.So, though rhythm occurs in time, one beat following theprevious one, it serves a spatial function by placing theLakota in an outward-looking position to the whole of

the pulsing world. A Lakota person listening and mov-ing to rhythm, Bunge writes, is akin to a kitten huddled

3 Robert Bunge,An American Urphilosophie: An American Philosophy,BP (before Pragmatism)(Lanham, MD: University of America, 1984),53.

4 Ibid.


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close to the breast of its mother.5Just as a child is part of(and comes from) its mother, the Lakota emerge as part ofthe animate universe through rhythm.

In his Sioux cosmology, Bunge describes how hu-mans, and indeed all life, are participants in creation. Temaking of the world, for the Lakota, is a continuous pro-cess wherein all of the creatures of the Earth must partic-ipate in an active and continuous process that maintainsthe balance and rightness of creation. Bunge writes, In

a very real sense the universe of the tribe was personallyupheld by the participation of every member in recreat-ing and sustaining [the] universe.6Rhythm, here, can beseen as one such participatory process wherein human-ity helps sustain the healthy heartbeat of the world. Tisnotion accounts for the perceived monotony of Na-tive drum beats, as Bunge puts it, If it is even, regular,

and monotonous, as the healthy pulse of a living organ-ism should be, then the drum in rhythm with this pulsehelps maintain this healthy state.7So, we see that Nativedrumming, insofar as it regulates and reinforces the peo-ples relationship to the breathing biosphere, can be seenas a kind of care for or maintenance of the universe. In

this way, rhythm solidifies the place of Native people as ademonstrative participant in the greater spatial universeto which they belong.

So, rhythm in the Lakota tradition represents an on-tology ultimately rooted in a kind of fractal logic. Whichis to say, just as the form of a fractal pattern is mirroredin the form of one of its parts (picture broccoli, where the

larger tree is made of many tiny trees), the shape andpattern of Lakota rhythms mirror the heartbeat of the

5 Ibid., 54.

6 Ibid., 53.

7 Ibid., 54.


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whole living world. Put differently, the peoples drum beatrepresents one musical line that is ultimately the same,though smaller and less complicated, as the greater mel-ody of the universe itself. Tis process orients the Lakotain spaceit places them as an interior part of a surround-ing whole, a whole that is reflective of each of its parts.Tus, the fractal relationship between Native rhythm andthe rhythm of the biosphere underpins a Native cosmol-ogy. As the early twentieth Century anthropologist Alice

Fletcher writes, the natives of America thought of thecosmos as a unit that was throbbing with the same life-force of which they were conscious within themselves.8Tis life-force operates in the same way on the levelof the whole as it does in Native drum rhythms on thelevel of a part. Tis is how, as Bunge writes, that throughrhythm humans can access a feeling of harmony or of

moving in accord with the universe and, conversely, feel-ing the universe move within oneself.9

So, we can see that Rhythm facilitates a reflectiveconnectivity between part and whole that constitutes aspatial ordering in the Native worldview that Bunge pres-ents. And, as we established before, it also serves a tempo-

ral ordering function through the biological patterns ofnative life. From this point, we can begin to understandhow rhythm can serve as an impetus for and connectionbetween Norton-Smiths world-ordering principals, re-latedness and circularity.

8 Alice C. Fletcher, Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs:Arranged from American Indian Ceremonials and Sports (Lincoln:University of Nebraska, 1994), 1.

9 Robert Bunge,An American Urphilosophie: An American Philosophy,BP (before Pragmatism)(Lanham, MD: University of America, 1984),54.


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Part III: Rhythm as the logos in Relatedness

and Circularity

Te first of Tomas M. Norton-Smiths Native world-or-dering principals, relatedness, places human beings in in-timate connection to the world around them. But related-ness by its nature also implies a kind of separation. If twoentities are said to be related, they must in fact be distinctfrom each-other in some way. For example, if object A

and object B have a relationship, C, then A and B cannotbe the samethey are related to each-other through C,which connects them as it holds them apart. A relation-ship, then, is something that occurs between distinct en-tities. We can see now how this is a rhythmic principal;each note in a musical line is related to the next, and it isthe spaces or pauses between beats that serve as the con-

nective tissue. A breath between notes sets them in rela-tion to each-other and helps shape the form of the musi-cal whole. So, as much as beats in a sequence are related,they are also set apart by a pause or breath. Tis creates atension between beats that pushes and pulls at the sametime, initiating a dynamic relationship--rhythm.

In describing his principal of relatedness, Norton-Smith claims that our relationship to other beings in thesensorial world requires respect and reverence for the restof the universe. Because our actions have implications forthe entities we are connected to, we must consider thoseimplications during our investigations into the world.Relatedness, for Norton-Smith, is the source of our desire

to know and care for the world. As an interplay betweenconnection and separation, between sound and pregnantsilence, rhythm can help us understand the desirous na-ture of relatedness. We have established that rhythm is aforce that lives in the anticipatory spaces between beats,as much as in the beats themselves. Tis necessary and


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incommensurable tension between the beats of a melodyform a rhythm that is always seeking to consummate therelationship between notes, just as we seek to consum-mate the relationship between ourselves and the world.o illustrate this concept, we can take Bunges example ofthe kitten and her mother; the kitten wishes to be close toher mother, but she can never be close enough so as to be-come one with her mother and so the connection remainsperpetually incomplete. As rhythm brings us closer to the

greater heartbeat of the world, it also reminds us that weare distinct from it as the part is distinct from the whole.It is our desire to be closer than we can ever really be tothe world that drives the need to find ourselves within it,and to find the world within ourselves. It is the resound-ing gap between notes, and between ourselves and theelusive other, that shapes the rhythm of our unrequited

love for the world.Finally, the world-ordering principal of relatedness

implies that in seeking knowledge about the world, wewill look for patterns that connect things to each-otherinstead of properties of the things themselves. Te ad-

vantage of this investigative strategy can be demonstrat-

ed through rhythm: in a rhythmic line or a melody, it isthe relationship of the beats and notes to each-other thatgives the line its meaning and tone. A single note, takenout of the context of its melody, is relatively meaninglessand uninformative. Te beats only mean something aspart of the phrase. Similarly, a sea otter taken out of itshabitat and studied in a lab will not demonstrate its role

as a keystone species. Te animal must be considered inthe context of its complex marine ecosystem before its es-sential role in that ecosystem can be understood.

Norton-Smiths second world-ordering principal,circularity, posits that the Native world is organized bynatural cyclical patternsthe turn of the seasons, the


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conditions cannot become truly intolerable because menare, at that time, at the source of Being Itself.11Here, wecan see that rhythm orients people toward the ultimatecenter of the hoop of the world, as it is commonly de-scribed in Native America. Insofar as rhythm connectsus to the pulse of the animate biosphere, it focuses ourphysical attention toward the source of life from whichmeaning emerges in the world. It places us in a spatialposition with the living worldas a part within its whole.

In this way, rhythm orients spatial, as well as temporalphenomena through circularity. Spatial, because it servesas motion toward a spiritual center that is located in thecontext of the land, and temporal because it constructsa basis from which to understand the passage of timethrough the natural cycles.

Rhythm, as we have applied it here, can be seen as a

revelatory, or magical entity. It helps produce tangibleversions of systems and patterns in the world that areunseen. It is an ontological tool that helps us know thenature of things, a kind of learning that is not explicit,literate, or visual, but visceral and real. Rhythm is a di-dactic demonstration of humanitys circular intertwin-

ing with the world, and, as such, serves as the funda-mental ordering principalthe functional logosonthe basis of which we can understand the principals ofrelatedness and circularity. Rhythm, in the Native world-

view, provides a subtle scaffolding for the flow of sensoryexperiencea temporal and spatial structure that placeshumanity in nuanced communion with the whole of the

pulsing world.

11 Robert Bunge,An American Urphilosophie: An American Philosophy,BP (Before Pragmatism)(Lanham, MD: University of America, 1984),54.


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Bibliography

Bunge, Robert. An American Urphilosophie: An AmericanPhilosophy, BP (before Pragmatism). Lanham, MD: Universityof America, 1984.

Fletcher, Alice C. Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs:Arranged from American Indian Ceremonials and Sports.Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994.

Norton-Smith, Tomas M. Te Dance of Person and Place: OneInterpretation of American Indian Philosophy. Albany: StateUniversity of New York, 2010.

Sierra Mills Druley is a senior undergraduate in environ-mental studies and philosophy at the University of Oregon.She is currently writing an honors thesis focusing on phe-nomenology, ethics, and the design of built space. Sierra'sadditional areas of study include music performance,dance, and community development.

rhythm as logos in native world-ordering

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