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Inculturation: Genealogies, Meanings, and Musical DynamicsJEFFERS ENGELHARDTThe richly textured perspectives on inculturation offered in this volume of Colloquium: Music, Worship, Arts ask us to revisit and reconsider what is meant by inculturation as an idea, practice, and process.1 Reading the accounts of Lawrence A. Hoffman, Michael Daniel Findikyan, Philip Tovey, Harold Miller, Bonnie Wade, and Pete Ward of the religious, social, and musical dynamics of inculturation in Armenia and its diaspora, England, Ireland, Japan, and Uganda, as part of global consumer cultures, and in spaces where embodied practices are changing in the face of disease or disability, one quickly appreciates the descriptive and critical value of thinking in terms of inculturation. Inculturation addresses important questions concerning agency, change, translation, consciousness, experience, and efficacy. At the same time, it raises questions about the exercise of power, the relationship of outward expression and inward belief, the nature of religious ideologies and the invariance of religious truths, and how the concept of culture is naturalized and deployed by those engaged in inculturation. So how have we come to think, hear, and write in terms of inculturation? And what are the possibilities and limits of thinking, hearing, and writing in terms of inculturation? Here I work through these questions by outlining some of the genealogies, meanings, and musical dynamics of inculturation from my vantage point as an ethnomusicologist. GenealogiesIn its conventional sense, inculturation is a thoroughly Christian project, although it can apply to any number of non-Christian contexts when conceived of more generally.2 Simply put, inculturation is the adaptation or transformation of Christian liturgical expressions and the gospel message under new or changing cultural conditions. In the Catholic Church, for instance, it is the claim, according to Fennela Cannell, “that local forms of approaching God may all be acceptable, and even necessary, as long as the presence of a transcendent deity presiding over all is acknowledged.”3 This often happens within the context of missionization, evangelization, conversion, renewal, migration, and displacement. Therefore, inculturation is intimately related to histories of globalization and encounter,4 the dynamics of colonial domination and missionization,5 the asymmetrical relationship between global North and South,6 and the meteoric growth of Pentecostal and Catholic Christianities outside the West.7 As the essays in this volume make clear, liturgical and musical practices register processes of inculturation wherever and whenever they occur, and those practices animate the transformative experience of inculturation across many differences. Modern ideas of inculturation have been shaped by the universal scope of Christian religious ideology, the gospel imperatives of witnessing and evangelizing, the global communication of Christianity through Western ecclesial, social, liturgical, and musical forms, the creativity of new or changing Christian communities, and contemporary discourses of multiculturalism, indigeneity, and rights. Modern practices and processes of inculturation have been shaped by historical moments of translation, adaptation, and exchange between charismatic individuals and non- or newly Christian populations—Saints Cyril and Methodius and their counterparts in ninth-century Great Moravia, Saints Herman and Innocent and their Aleut and Tlingit counterparts in nineteenth-century Alaska, and Roberto de Nobili and his Tamil counterparts in seventeenth-century South India, for instance. In these cases (and in Catholicism’s post-Vatican II emphasis on inculturation) it is important to recognize both the instrumental nature of the processes and relationships of power that reify normatively Christian and non-Christian cultures as well as the agentive, dignifying, and religiously meaningful possibilities that inculturation creates for all involved. Inculturation can also be related to the idea of enculturation, which is invoked a few times in this volume as well. In its classic formulations, enculturation (or socialization or acculturation) is the way a person comes to know and thereby reproduce cultural forms and norms; it is a technique for describing how cosmologies, values, taboos, linguistic codes, kinship patterns, expressive practices, and whatever else might fall under the catch-all “culture” are transmitted to children or non-native outsiders.8 While the idea of enculturation seems to describe how the observable continuities and tangible differences that make “culture” something real come into being, its critics point out its reified, deterministic nature, its lack of nuance in addressing the relationship of structure and agency, and its ambivalence regarding change. Bearing this in mind, there is, nevertheless, a shared, productive dimension to inculturation and enculturation. If inculturation is about the intercultural dynamics of religious translation and adaptation across differences, then enculturation can be about the intracultural dynamics of religious transmission and domestication within communities. In other words, enculturation can be understood as an extension of inculturation, the former being animated by charismatic “culture bearers” or in-group elites and the latter being animated by missionaries, evangelists, transnational religious formations, or states, for instance. While this approach does not circumvent the problem of “culture” latent in the ideas of inculturation and enculturation, it does move towards the kind of practice- and process-oriented approach I advocate at the end of this essay. MeaningsThinking, hearing, and writing in terms of inculturation bring ongoing debates in anthropology and ethnomusicology about the meaning of religious symbols and sounds to the fore. At the heart of these debates is a set of questions concerning the divergent theological, practical, and ethical approaches to inculturation: Is inculturation the expression of existing religious truths or the negotiation of new religious truths? Should religious practices be isomorphic across cultures or should they be similarly efficacious but formally different? Are similar practices the expressions of similar beliefs? To what extent is religious and cultural translation possible? One approach to inculturation reflects the idea that meaning is transhistorical and inheres in or is embodied by religious symbols and sounds.9 This kind of inculturation takes shape as a process of recontextualizing symbols and sounds within new or changing cultural conditions. Inculturation makes them meaningful by making them present, and isomorphism is taken as evidence of similar beliefs and efficacies. Another approach reflects the idea that meaning is enmeshed in social and historical particulars and is authorized collectively or institutionally through performance and repetition.10 Symbols and sounds are meaningful because there is consensus or contestation, efficacy or failure. Here, recognition and resistance attest to the power that accrues to these religious symbols and sounds. |
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