B. MESOFAUNA EDÁFICA
2. CLASIFICACIÓN FUNCIONAL DE LA FAUNA DEL SUELO
The introduction to this chapter raised questions about why a television program on Irish music in Australia conferred on Billy Moran the status of ‘a living treasure of Irish music in Australia’ yet extended the authority to speak about Irish music, not to Billy, but to young Australian musicians (The Planet 2001). Lucky Oceans’
ambivalence about where authenticity in Irish music lies — whether it is linked to an Irish ethnicity and nationality and to a repertoire and style continuous with the past, or whether it is in the commodified sound of contemporary Irish band
recordings that the young Australians emulate — is played out in Melbourne’s Irish traditional music scene. As the analysis above suggests, moments of disjuncture in the session reveal conflicting understandings of where the ‘Irish’ in Irish traditional music resides and how important it is. In the pub session, these understandings are translated into social hierarchies in which authority shifts according to whose sense of Irishness and whose musical values prevail.
In addressing problems of writing about cultural difference, Homi Bhabha calls such disjunctive moments interstices, and urges us to focus on them when writing about cultural identity:
What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the necessity of thinking beyond initial categories and initiatory subjects and focusing on those interstitial moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of ‘differences’. These spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood and communal representations that generate new signs of cultural
difference and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation. It is at the level of the interstices that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated (Bhabha 1994a: 269).
Elsewhere, Bhabha employs the term ‘third space’ as a way of conceptualizing an ‘inter-national culture’ based on ‘the inscription and articulation of culture’s
hybridity’, for what carries the burden of the meaning of culture is ‘the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between’ (Bhabha 1995: 209). For Bhabha, the importance of this hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges; rather, hybridity is ‘the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge’. This space is not so much one of identity as of identification, that is, ‘a process of identifying with and through another object, and object of otherness’ (Bhabha 1990: 211).
This process of identification, together with the concept of a cultural translation that lets go of the notion of a fixed ‘original’, is one that seems best to describe the negotiations that the older Australians undertake in playing music with Irish-born musicians. The younger musicians, however, bring to the session a confidence that they are equal in all ways to the Irish musicians. As I propose below, this
understanding of the equivalence of cultures, although attributable in part to their youthful optimism, is also related to the pluralist values of the multicultural society in which they had been educated. According to the social policy of multiculturalism as it was promoted in Australian schools during the 1980s, ethnic identities could be performed by dressing in ‘national’ costumes, eating ‘ethnic’ foods and
performing ‘folk dances’ — or music; that is, by embracing diversity without having to negotiate the difference of immigrant lives.35
The focal points in Billy Moran’s musical history relate to collective Irish identities: his family and village, the band he joined as a young man, and sessions among migrant workers in England and later in Australia. As an immigrant first in England and later in Australia, negotiating difference has been part of Billy’s continually evolving Irish identity, one aspect of which is his interactions with Australian musicians and audiences in the commercial context of pub sessions. In Stuart Hall’s formulation, his identity is ‘not an essence but a positioning’ (Hall, S. 1990: 226).
35 This situation was much more extreme in Canberra (where four of the young musicians grew up) than in Melbourne, where the population includes a far greater proportion of residents born outside Australia.
In contrast, the young Australian musicians speak of their individual progress as musicians and their experience of musical community among their own age cohort. The older Australians were more mindful of musical history and the sensibilities of the past, through their exposure to immigrant Irish musicians and the social circle of the session pubs, as well as from reading the biographical and ethnomusicological essays accompanying reissues of classic Irish recordings.
Although the two age cohorts differed somewhat in their understandings of Irishness, none of the Australian musicians performing at Fibber’s espoused any interest in their own ethnic origins; nor did their enthusiasm for Irish music extend to other areas of Irish culture. They did not learn Irish dancing or sports, join Irish community clubs or attend Irish community gatherings, cook Irish meals, research their Irish ancestry, wear Irish tweeds or learn to speak the Irish language. They saw themselves as producers of Irish traditional dance music — but not of Irishness. It was a musical, rather than ethnic, community that they sought to create. The younger musicians in particular were perplexed, even scornful, when audiences assumed they were Irish, or ‘had some Irish in them’ (Natalie, interview).
The older Australian musicians believed they had earned the label ‘Irish musician’, but on the grounds of musicianship rather than Irish ethnicity, which they regarded as irrelevant to their musical achievements. They identified with Irish music, and deferred to some degree to Irish musicians, but made no claim to be Irish, despite acknowledging some (unexplored) Irish ancestry. To banjo player Mike, who called Ireland and Australia ‘almost like cousins’, being Irish was very little different from being Australian. In Mike’s view, ‘anyone can learn to be an Irish musician’ (Mike, interview). There was no conflict of identity involved: they could be Australians and Irish musicians. This understanding of an Australian identity subsuming an Irish identity is an established part of Australians’ self-perception.
It is ‘common knowledge’ that one in three Australians have Irish ancestry, although, significantly, there is no comparable discussion of Australians’ (presumably greater) degree of English heritage.36 Similarly, both radical nationalist cultural critics and
more conservative historians have identified a significant Irish component in
Australia’s national identity. The notion that Australian values had been formed by
36 In June 2003 I received a (generic) letter from the director of Tourism Ireland Limited suggesting that I may be ‘one of the 6.8 million Australians who can trace family history back to Ireland in a fascinating journey of discovery’. Such claims are by no means limited to the tourism industry, but are widespread among genealogists, historians and
the rugged, independent-thinking, hard-drinking, rural workers of earlier generations, of whom the Irish formed a significant proportion, finds its articulation in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1966). In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes makes a parallel argument that the harsh punishment of Irish convicts, and an uprising instigated by Irish political prisoners in 1804, imprinted on subsequent generations of working-class Australians a belief in ‘English oppression and Irish resistance’ (1988: 195). Historian of the Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell, like Hughes and Ward, maintains that Irish values — anti-British, anti-authoritarian and Catholic — were imprinted on Australian society in general (O’Farrell 2000).
Historian David Fitzpatrick, however, argues that the proportion of Irish–Australians has been greatly exaggerated:
today there are few Australians of older vintages who could claim to be uniquely Irish, or indeed perfectly free of Irish forebears. Once intensive immigration from Ireland ceased around 1890, Irish–Australia gradually became a fiction sustained by Irish surnames and the profession of Catholicism. (Fitzpatrick 1984: 30)
It can further be argued that an Irish–Australian identity became an ethnic
identification of convenience as the relationship with Britain weakened. While for many Australians, England remained ‘home’ into the 1960s, Australia (and
particularly Melbourne) became home to ‘New Australians’ from post-war Europe. A government policy of assimilation responded to the perceived threat to national unity of large numbers of non-British migrants by encouraging migrants to adopt ‘the Australian way of life’ — English-speaking, masculinist and (despite the Irish influence) Protestant. Billy Moran arrived in Australia, and the older of the Australian musicians were born and educated, during this period.
During the 1970s, the more distant political relationship with Britain,37 the
emergence of a more secular and pluralist society and the imperative to define Australia against the increasing political, cultural and economic influence of the USA fostered nationalist feelings that emerged in cultural forms such as the bush
37 The sense of betrayal felt towards Britain following the fall of Singapore in World War 2 and Britain’s negotiations throughout the 1960s to join the European Economic
Community, in addition to the need felt by Australians to define themselves against Englishness, first in a colonial and later in a postcolonial context, all weakened
Australians’ notion of England as ‘home’, as did the impact of the post-war immigration program and Australia’s strengthened trade and military alliance with the USA, together with the diminished threat of a declining Catholic Church. At the same time,
Irish–Australia was well integrated into Australian society, with later generations of Irish heritage absorbed into the suburban middle class and into political and commercial leadership.
band. In their analysis of ‘folk’ as a popular musical genre, Graeme Smith and Judith Brett importantly point out the congruence of the folk movement’s understanding of culture (as emerging spontaneously from community) with theories of nationalism (which see nations as emerging from shared ethnicity, race or history). The folk- revival movement’s musical openness and inclusivity have allowed it to move beyond ‘ethnically-specific’ nationalist discourse to become a model for the accommodation of cultural diversity as it responded to the development in the 1970s and 1980s of multiculturalism as a new national ideology (Smith and Brett 2001: 45–6).
Bush bands and folk festivals adapted to multiculturalism (and government funding criteria) during the 1980s by including dances and music from other cultures. These were more likely to include Anglo–Australian groups performing ‘gypsy’, ‘Balkan’ or ‘multicultural’ music, however, than musicians from Australia’s dominant immigrant groups (from Greece, Turkey, or Vietnam, for example). Indeed, Smith and Brett estimate that sixty-five per cent of funds allocated to ethnic music in the late 1980s went to ‘Anglo–Australian’ musicians or administrators (2001: 49). Their
interpretation of this phenomenon can be extended to 1990s radio programs featuring a range of ethnic musics, a ‘music deli’ approach of which Lucky Oceans’ work is an example.38
The public performance of ethnic music can operate as a way of educating the public into accepting the more political implications of multiculturalism, as Smith and Brett point out. I further propose that such performances, by presenting a miscellany of ethnic musics in small, easily digestible (or assimilable) sound bites, imply that other cultures are insignificant and unthreatening. Just as Homi Bhabha has criticized multicultural policy in Britain (where it is more racially based) for its ability to silence cultural difference by disallowing political identities and
antagonisms while institutionalizing cultural diversity (Bhabha 1988), so
multicultural performances in Australia may be understood as silencing the music of immigrants while displaying the national ideal of unity in diversity.
In an essay on the connections between music, place and identity in a Melbourne multicultural street festival, Michelle Duffy (2000) notes that the musical acts are no longer described as the ‘music of migration’ but as ‘world music’. She concludes that
38 ‘Music Deli’ is the name of a long-running weekly Radio National (Australia) program presenting acoustic musicians from diverse backgrounds and genres. Lucky Oceans presents a daily program including ‘world music’, also on national radio.
in the ‘aural hybridity’ of a group performing a fusion of ‘African’ drumming and ‘Middle Eastern’ music, and more broadly in the festival, ‘the performance of cultural identity is not a simple retelling of some authentic sound in an alien space. Instead, it becomes a reworking of music, and so identity, to accommodate a new context’ (2000: 119). I would argue that in this context, difference is trivialized to a kind of generic diversity, similar in effect to what Kimberly J. Lau terms the ‘serial logic’ of ‘feel-good multiculturalism’, which operates by linking the marketing of commodities with that of cultures at folkloristic events in the USA (Lau 1999: 70).
Could it be that the authority to decide what and who is ‘Irish’ is being
appropriated in a similarly insidious way? Irish music is now presented as ‘the music of one of the ethnic streams that made up the rich tapestry of multicultural Australia rather than as the expression of a unified national character’ (Smith, G. 2001: 10).
In an essay on ‘Celtic Australia’, Graeme Smith argues that one effect has been that ‘Irish or Irish–Australian identity is “tried on” by groups of Anglo–Australians who are otherwise excluded from claiming an ethnic identity’ (2001: 14).39 Patrick
O’Farrell similarly proposes that, while most Australians are indifferent about ethnicity, many of those who were interested ‘chose to be “Irish”‘. Australians’ embrace of a collective identity more Irish than English, he suggests, might be:
a case of capitulation to the implicit pressures of multiculturalism: every Australian ought really to be something else, from somewhere else, which has a real history and aboriginality. (O’Farrell 2000: 330)
By the 1990s, one-quarter of the Australian population had been born outside Australia (Daniel 1994: 233), and an Irish heritage had become:
a fashionable asset, representing charm, sociability and conviviality, mild social radicalism, fun and entertainment, possessing some of the essential ingredients of the popular Australian self-image. By 1995 it was politically correct to call the Irish ‘delightful’. (O’Farrell 2000: 330)
Also during the 1990s, the international music industry was promoting its ‘world music’ bands at folk festivals on what had become known as the Australian festival circuit. Groups like the younger musicians’ band filled the ‘Irish’ slot, while
39 This ‘trying on’ has parallels with the concept of an elective ethnicity proposed by Mary C. Waters in Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America in response to her research findings that white, suburban, American Catholics chose to express an adopted ethnicity through symbolic forms such as food and family celebrations (Waters 1990).
immigrant Irish musicians like Billy Moran were rarely offered stage gigs. The 1990s also saw Irishness become internationally ‘cool’ — that is, marketable — in a confluence of tourism promotion, celebratory media coverage of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, Riverdance and similar stage shows, an increasing number of Irish backpackers arriving in Australia, and the success of Irish bands in the rock, pop and world music marketing categories. Perhaps the most influential marketing of Irish culture was undertaken by Guinness Brewing (as it was then known) in its highly successful campaign to become a dominant force in the Australian hotel industry.40
An important part of establishing Irish theme pubs was the display of Irish culture not only through the design and decoration of the pubs and their young Irish bar staff, but also in featuring Irish ballad bands, Irish dancing and traditional music sessions, meals featuring Irish dishes and, most prominently from a marketing viewpoint, the celebration of St Patrick’s Day, once a display of strength by the Catholic Church, now a day of national dispensation for drunkenness and the celebration of Irishness promoted by the distributors of Guinness.
The change from a social policy of assimilation and a national identity that incorporates an Irish identity to a pluralist policy of multiculturalism in which Irishness is one among many diverse ethnicities is reflected in the attitudes of the two age cohorts of Australian musicians. Edward Said’s distinction between filiation (cultural inheritance) and affiliation (cultural identification) articulates the difference between the two understandings of Irish ethnicity in Australian society (1983: 174–5).41 This is of particular relevance to the younger group, whose
schooling in the 1980s had featured ‘multicultural’ programs that de-politicized ethnic difference. Unlike Irish immigrants and their children, they had no lived experience of being ‘ethnic’ and assented to the ideological position of
multiculturalism that all ethnicities are equal.
While both groups of Australian musicians were sceptical of a commodified Irishness, the younger musicians evinced scepticism about Irishness in general,
40The Bulletin, an Australian weekly political journal, reported in 1997 that in the previous five years Guinness Brewing had helped establish 1300 Irish pubs globally. The Australian campaign began in the mid-1990s and in 1996 the company had reported an annual 43% sales increase (Kyriakopoulos 1997).
41 Said makes this distinction in the very different context of canonical, as opposed to ‘worldly’, readings of literature.
equating it with uncool Celtic-motif t-shirts and Irish theme pubs. Simon, for example, was ‘totally turned off’ by:
Australian people who are, like, sixth generation Irish, who claim Irish heritage and talk about their spiritual right to drink Guinness … It’s just this sad need to belong to another culture or something. It seems to me like a sort of backhanded cultural cringe towards Australian culture as well. (Simon, interview)
Irish ethnicity to them was a marketing ploy of Irish breweries or theme pubs, or a delusion they scorned in audiences for whom their music conjured up images of peat fires in Irish cottages (Natalie, interview).
Their understandings of who ‘Irish people’ were also differed from those of the older Australian musicians. In 1980, Irish musicians in Australia were migrants. In 2000, they were just as likely to be among the thousands of Irish backpackers working and partying their way around Australia. In their early years playing Irish music, the older generation of Australian musicians had encountered Irish musicians who were migrants from rural and working-class backgrounds, and whose music and
musicianship they had emulated. The younger musicians had had little social or even musical contact with these older migrant musicians, but instead had met younger Irish musicians who resembled themselves in age, educational background, uncertainty of vocation, desire to travel the world, and appetite for music sessions that turned into all-night parties.Playing Irish traditional music was for them an activity associated with their own age group, and with the status attached to being a musician.
In his book on Global Pop, Timothy D. Taylor links the rise of interest in ‘Celtic’ music in America to an increasing consciousness of ethnicity and ‘the concomitant commodification of ethnicity in music’ (Taylor 1997: 7). A commodified ethnicity is one way of theorizing the younger musicians’ performance of Irish music. Their aim was to ‘sound Irish’, a sound they accessed through recordings and reproduced by imitation, without having to be Irish, be in Ireland, or even play with Irish musicians.