Response to Marshall & DeAngeli and Hachmayer
LEE VEERARAGHAVAN
What a wonderful form and forum for scholarly engagement. My sincere thanks to the editors of Ecomusicology Review for creating the space for this conversation. It is a tangible positive intervention on multiple fronts, and I hope others will follow their lead in adapting a “slow conference” model to their platforms. I am also grateful to Kim Marshall and Emma DeAngeli for their vital research paper and Sebastian Hachmeyer for his thoughtful response. What follows is an attempt to articulate some of the stakes and implications of the exchange, as there are broad areas of agreement and real differences. I find myself asking three questions. What is gained by framing a model as either epistemological or ontological? What is the work of ‘social justice’ (intellectual and practical), and how does it relate to the political?
I believe that the main thrust of the critique levelled by Marshall and DeAngeli—ecomusicology would do well to learn from Indigenous ecological thought, and specifically the shift in perspective articulated by Kyle Powys Whyte from thinking of environmental crisis as a future threshold to understanding it as the result of colonialism—is constructive in several ways. It is intersectional in the best sense of the term: it highlights the intersection of what one might think of as two (or more) struggles and shows how they are actually the same; that a shift in perspective from the dominant political constituency to that of a less powerful group might make possible a productive and healthy alliance; it directs our gaze toward specific events, actors, and institutions; and it does not get bogged down in questions of what this means for any given sum of identities or movements of affect. It does the work of provincializing Europe and invites us to ask whether other drivers of ecocide might productively be re-historicized from an Indigenous perspective. (I am thinking here about how the enclosure of communally-used land in Europe incentivized colonialism by creating the grist for the capitalist mill—the need to sell one’s labor—but of course there are other examples.)
But this approach (let’s call it the epistemological/ontological shift for intersectional ends) is best suited to projects conceived to combat the drivers of climate change on an actionable level. It is fundamentally practical—that is, it makes possible a better political praxis by creating the conditions to build a coalition that might win. This is crucial, and Marshall and DeAngeli’s call for change in ecomusicological scholarship resonates on this level.
In contrast with this call to arms, I find the impulse to ontologize interesting. To be clear, I think Hachmayer is convincing when he says that Kyle Powys Whyte is describing an ontological difference rather than a purely epistemological one, but it’s worth pointing out that for those of us who do not share an Indigenous ontology, the desired action is in fact epistemological: how can non-Indigenous people shift our understanding of climate change so that we can learn from Indigenous ontologies? One person’s ontology, in this case, is another person’s epistemology.
Ana Maria Ochoa observes that “[i]t is not by chance that … studies [that question our concepts of sound and music] invariably have dealt with indigenous cultures in different parts of the world. This does not mean that suddenly it is time for all of us ‘to go native.’ To the contrary, indigenous ontologies from different parts of the world provide models even if, and especially when, they do not resonate with our own categories of knowledge and being” (2016). The challenge for non-Indigenous scholars, then, is to articulate a space of difference and resist the urge to assimilate (to) it. I believe this is Hachmayer’s worthy intention in framing the question as one of ontology versus epistemology. As a cautionary note, though, David Graeber has observed that the word ‘ontology’ often gets used in ethnographic disciplines as a substitute for ‘culture,’ presumably because the latter concept is thoroughly tainted (2013). The needle we must thread is neither to ‘go native,’ as Ochoa puts it, nor to slot ‘Indigenous ontology’ into the space of unthreatening difference occupied by ‘culture’ in a discipline and academy that largely understands politics as a function of diversity and inclusion, and the latter two through the lens of recognition.
But if we want our scholarship to serve the ends of environmental justice, say, in the realm of policy, different ontologies will be rendered through flawed and partial translation (strategic epistemologism?). Political coalition building requires us to look for commonalities across difference. This is one of the reasons that I do not think all ecomusicological scholarship should address itself to social justice. I would reframe Marshall’s call for an ecomusicology dedicated to social justice as one compatible with the goals of people and movements fighting ecocide. This is partly because I think there are plenty of times when scholars—especially music scholars—should simply get out of the way and not look for opportunities to insert ourselves into life-and-death struggles we might not have the stomach for, but I am also uncomfortable with the term ‘social justice’ (gone the way of ‘culture’ and become a shibboleth) and prefer ‘politics.’
In her response to Hachmayer, Marshall quotes Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd’s critique of the ontological turn, in which she states that to move away from approaches that reproduce colonial domination, scholars ought to “[engage] directly in…or unambiguously [acknowledge] the political situation, agency and relationality of both Indigenous people and scholars” (2016). Todd’s argument partly concerns the politics of citation, but this directive, quoted by Marshall, is to the point. We are all political actors, not necessarily dedicated to the same goals, and the same is true for Indigenous people and communities. Nor is it apparent that we are on the same page when it comes to the definition and desirability of social justice, and how those of us who think it would be a good thing ought to get there. In that regard, the epistemological/ontological shift called for in this exchange can occur only when certain political struggles within the music disciplines have already been won. Marshall and DeAngeli’s intervention is welcome because it demarcates a field of battle.