It is no secret that unconscious biases penetrate various realms of society; from hiring decisions (Lebowitz, 2015) to medical care (Blair, Steiner, and Havranek, 2011) and even foul calls in the NBA (Schwarz, 2007).
But what about implicit bias in our everyday lives? Does it really play a role in who we form relationships with, or the way we interact with others, or even the way we perceive a stranger?
Implicit bias refers to attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions and decisions in an unconscious manner, according to the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, which publishes an annual Implicit Bias Review . Unlike explicit bias, which reflects the attitudes or beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level, implicit bias is judgment and/or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control.
Recent claims of overt and covert discrimination on college campuses and in policing raise the question: How does someone’s unconscious reaction to people of a different race, religion or sexuality influence their judgment and behavior? Psychologists and social scientists working within this field do not have a concise answer to explain how implicit bias manifests in everyday life, as it is hard to rule out alternative explanations.
In other words, implicit bias can and does happen, but it is complicated to prove.
“Some biases seem obviously wrong, like treating equally qualified people differently when hiring or promoting,” said Calvin Lai, director of research for Harvard’s Project Implicit. “Every day biases are hard to wrap our heads around because they’re so much more personal, and you can point to other reasons.”
Similarly, structural factors beyond your control might come into play. If most of your friends look like you, or you tend to date people of the same race as you, it could largely be just a reflection of the demographics in your community.
However, research shows that those relationships, along with the interactions and experiences that come from them, are key contributors of implicit biases. These biases begin forming at a young age and are easily reinforced into adulthood through social settings and mass media.
“When you think backwards, what you think is normal is really cultural pressure that pushes you into bias, implicit and conscious,” said sociologist Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at LaSalle University in Philadelphia.
Hanging out with friends that look like you isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if they’re nice people! However, research suggests that implicit biases and stereotypes, both positive and negative, are maintained through persistent lack of contact with others beyond your “in-group,” that is people who share certain characteristics.
The good news? We are not helpless to combat implicit bias. It can be mitigated through intervention strategies, starting with recognizing where it might exist in your life and seeking exposure to people and experiences beyond your regular circles.
Psychologists and social scientist who study implicit bias are working to gather more data with the goal of making people more aware of their unconscious decision-making and its consequences.
Harvard’s Project Implicit features a battery of “implicit association tests” where participants can measure levels of implicit bias around certain topics based on the strength of associations between concepts and evaluations.
“The goal of the organization is to educate the public about hidden biases and to provide a ‘virtual laboratory’ for collecting data on the Internet.”
2015 State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review. (2015). Retrieved from; http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/my-product/2015-state-of-the-science-implicit-bias-review/
Blair, I. V., Steiner, J. F., & Havranek, E. P. (2011). Unconscious (Implicit) Bias and Health Disparities: Where Do We Go from Here? The Permanente Journal, 15(2), 71–78.
Grinberg, E. (2015). 4 ways you might display hidden bias every day – CNN.com. Retrieved from; http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/24/living/implicit-bias-tests-feat/
Lebowitz, S., Jul. 17, 2015, 9, 022, & 2. (2015). 3 unconscious biases that affect whether you get hired. Retrieved from; http://www.businessinsider.com/unconscious-biases-in-hiring-decisions-2015-7
Schwarz, A. (2007, May 2). Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls. The New York Times. Retrieved from; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/sports/basketball/02refs.html
In an effort to continually explore the interface between science and business, Tufts Biomedical Business Club recently caught up with Dr. Zach Scheiner, an Associate at RA Capital Management, for a discussion about his experience in the healthcare investment industry.
RA Capital Management is a crossover fund manager dedicated to evidence-based investing in public and private healthcare and life science companies. Prior to his current role at RA Capital, Zach worked as a Science Officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where he managed a portfolio of research programs concentrated in translational neuroscience. He holds a BS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and a PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior from the University of Washington.
As an Associate for RA Capital, Zach’s efforts are realized through the team’s core research division, TechAtlas. This division is a scientifically trained team that maps out competitive landscapes in a continual effort to survey the landscape and identify emerging therapeutics and technologies that will reshape how physicians treat disease. The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell me about the career path that led you to your job. How did you become involved with RA Capital Management?
My interest in biomedical science and research began as an undergrad, when I had several summer research internships and was exposed to a few different fields of research. At the same time I had my first opportunity to teach science classes at a local high school and quickly realized that I also had a passion for teaching. After graduating, I decided to teach middle school science and math for a year (which turned into three) before returning to research and going to grad school.
I attended the Neurobiology & Behavior graduate program at The University of Washington in Seattle. My thesis work focused on the molecular basis of memory and drug addiction. Though I enjoyed my time as a graduate student, by my fourth year I began to realize that the academic career path and spending more years at the lab bench were not for me. I really enjoyed reading primary literature, planning experiments, and reviewing/analyzing data, so as I finished up graduate school I began looking at alternatives where I might be able to incorporate these interests as well as leverage my scientific background in a non-research capacity.
I found a great opportunity at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco. CIRM funds stem cell research at institutions throughout California with the goal of advancing promising stem cell based therapies into clinical trials and ultimately to patients. I began as a science writer and quickly moved to a position managing a portfolio of translational research programs. In this position, I worked closely with funded scientists to help set milestones and success criteria, assess progress, and, however possible, facilitate success. In my six years at CIRM I learned a tremendous amount about the drug development process, gained experience reviewing and analyzing data, and developed management skills, all of which have been invaluable in my current role at RA Capital.
My move to RA Capital was the result of my wife being offered an assistant professorship at Brown University. In preparation for the move from one coast to the other I reached out to everyone in my network, including an old lab-mate I had stayed in touch with from graduate school who was now an Associate for RA Capital. I had a long-time interest in biotech investing, nurtured by my dad, and had been learning about this part of the industry in my spare time. Luckily, RA was hiring and the rest is history. For me, RA Capital was a perfect fit. I can put my communication and analytical skills from teaching, grad school and CIRM to good use and I love staying immersed in cutting-edge science while learning more about the investment side of the biotech industry.
What are the duties/functions/responsibilities of your job?
As an Associate with RA Capital, my primary role involves creating dendrograms (mind-maps) of specific diseases or capabilities within the healthcare industry. These comprehensive landscape maps take all the available drugs, both on the market and still in development, and put them into the context of current standard of care and unmet needs. They help our team fully appreciate and contextualize the market potential of assets and companies before making investments. Mapping out a disease landscape is a research-intensive process that involves surveying the literature, meeting with companies with assets in the space, speaking directly to physicians, attending scientific conferences, and analyzing data. The process can take several months to complete but the maps are never truly finished. Therapeutic landscapes are constantly evolving, new data are released and new licensing and acquisition deals are made. Our maps are equally dynamic and a lot of my time is spent staying up to date with the latest news and data coming out in the areas I cover.
In addition to mapping, Associates also join the investment team in diligence projects on specific investment opportunities. Our maps are a great way of contextualizing drugs and their competitors and can help our team identify potential new opportunities but it’s always critical to dig deeper before making an investment. One of the most rewarding parts of my job is seeing all the work I’ve put in researching and understanding a therapeutic space pay off with insights that are potentially investable, or that directly benefit a diligence project.
On a day-to-day basis I also survey industry news and the scientific literature not only to keep up with the science but to search for new investment opportunities that could be licensable for an RA Capital portfolio company or even form the basis for a new company. I also enjoy being involved in the recruiting process at RA and playing a small role in shaping the future of the company.
What is the most rewarding part about your job?
Personally, the most rewarding part of my work is knowing that we are investing in companies that are developing therapies for patients that really need them! These companies often have no marketed drugs and need capital to advance their assets through clinical trials and into the hands of patients. When I think about the work that I do, I know I am helping to identify great science, underappreciated drugs, and promising new opportunities. And I hope that by influencing where RA Capital’s dollars are invested, I’m impacting the whole healthcare ecosystem in a positive way.
What experiences best prepared you for your job?
I think all of my previous work experiences helped prepare me for RA Capital, the first of which was teaching. Communication is such an essential skill and getting an opportunity to develop this early in my career has been a huge benefit. Having controlled a classroom every day for three years definitely makes communicating with colleagues, companies and scientific experts a little easier. Effective communication is a vital part of this job.
The second experience is my time spent as a graduate student. In graduate school I learned how to rigorously analyze data, both my own and from the literature. I developed my critical thinking and analytical skills and the ability to quickly identify key questions, design key experiments, and understand the limitations of a study.
Lastly, at CIRM I learned the process of moving a drug from the lab to the market and everything in between. I also regularly participated in grant review meetings with panels of scientists, clinicians, and patient advocates. These meetings gave me the opportunity to learn what was truly important to each group. While the views and opinions would often vary between the groups, one key takeaway was that for a drug to succeed, doctors have to want to prescribe it and patients have to want to use it. My experience at CIRM taught me to evaluate drugs with the patient perspective in mind; new therapies are worthless unless patients will use them, and sometimes improvements that appear marginal can be very meaningful to patients.
What skills or personal characteristics do you feel contribute most to success in this industry?
Very often, investment firms require that applicants have a background in finance, an MBA, or prior experience in the industry. That is not the case at RA Capital. I wouldn’t say any particular background or degree is required, but there are certainly skills that are critical. Analytical skills, for example. The ability to rigorously analyze data and quickly get to the “meat” of primary literature or a clinical data set is invaluable. Another key skill is effective writing and communication. Much of my day is spent writing and talking. I am continuously expressing my thoughts and providing analysis and it is important to do so concisely and effectively.
In terms of personal characteristics, I would highlight skepticism. Being skeptical is a common trait among scientists due to the nature of research, but this skill is especially important when meeting with companies. Every company is trying to convince us that their assets or data are the best. Skepticism is required to separate the pitch from the quality of the science.
Humility is another important personal characteristic. To put it simply, in something as complicated as drug development, it’s easy to be wrong! There are so many variables to consider, and science changes so quickly; it’s essential to have an open mind and be humble about everything you do not know.
What are the biggest challenges you face as an associate for RA Capital Management?
I think the largest challenge I face is simply the pace of the industry and science itself. There is new data coming out all the time; from company press releases, new primary literature, scientific conferences—the amount of information can be overwhelming. Developing the ability to quickly assimilate and analyze new information is the biggest challenge. But it’s also one of the things I enjoy most about my job. In this field you have to enjoy constant learning and also get good at processing information quickly enough to inform an investment decision. The fast pace is challenging but exciting.
What are some other opportunities within RA Capital Management for scientists aside from the TechAtlas Research Division?
Most opportunities for PhD trained scientists are within our TechAtlas research team. This team is made up primarily of PhD trained scientists in either Associate or Scientific Writer positions. The Science Writers work closely with the Associates as they build the story of their map, acting as a thought partner to develop the key insights for standard of care, unmet needs, and investable opportunities for each disease. As members of the research team gain experience, they can specialize in one of several areas, including early-stage assets, strategic analysis of licensing and partnerships, and equity analysis.
For somebody interested in pursuing this career, what would be your advice to best prepare them?
I would highly recommend that PhD candidates supplement their education in three areas: biostatistics, clinical trials, and FDA regulatory pathways. These topics are not always emphasized or even addressed in many graduate programs. A working knowledge of biostatistics goes a long way; being able to understand statistical pitfalls and the pros and cons of different analyses is invaluable. I would also recommend becoming familiar with clinical trials: the general FDA requirements for advancing drugs into Phase 1 trials and the typical development path for new therapies in your field of interest. Few graduate students get exposed to these areas. I would strongly suggest looking beyond the specific questions of own research project to get an understanding of the broader context: the standard of care for the disease, unmet needs, and competing approaches. If your research isn’t disease or therapy focused, choose a disease of interest or imagine potential applications of your work and research those. Putting new research and data into a broad context is a lot of what we do, so the earlier you can start practicing, the better prepared you will be.
The Team Cathedral Project (TCP) started as a way to support the Cathedral High School athletic department through school physicals and sports medicine game coverage. It has since evolved to include mentorship between the Cathedral High School students and the Tufts medical students with a large focus on education.
Cathedral High School serves students all over the Boston area including Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and Hyde Park. They have an amazing 100% success rate in graduating seniors and every graduating senior has earned college admission for the last 12 years straight!
Every year, TCP brings the entire junior class of Cathedral High School to Tufts University School of Medicine where they participate in health care career exploration and even get to visit the anatomy lab.
This year we are hoping to diversify both the types of careers as well as the demographics of the professionals they will be meeting with. As graduate students conducting research in a wide range of topics in biomedical science you would contribute a valuable and outstanding perspective for these students. If you are interested in speaking to the junior class please let me know.
I can be reached at: Meagan.Alvarado@tufts.edu
The field trip will be held on Wednesday February 3rd, 2016 and we would need the speakers to be available from about 11am-12pm.
The Charlton Lectureship, named in honor of Mr. Earle P. Charlton, has been held annually since 1975. This celebrated lectureship has evolved over the years to include a student poster competition. Held in conjunction with the lectureship, the poster competition is a platform to recognize outstanding research work being done by Tufts graduate, medical, dental, and veterinary students. The Charlton Poster Competition and Lecture are sponsored and hosted by the Academic Research Awards Committee of the Tufts University School of Medicine.
This year’s lecture was held on October 27, 2015, in the Sackler DeBlois Auditorium. The 2015-16 Charlton Lecturer was delivered by Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD. Dr. Lee obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California in San Francisco (1973) and an MBA at the Wharton School of Business (1984).
Dr. Lee is the John H. Ware 3rd Chair for Alzheimer’s Research, and directs the center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Lee’s work was instrumental in demonstrating that tau, α-synuclein, and TDP-43 proteins form unique brain aggregates with a central role in numerous neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The poster competition was held on October 26, 2015 with finalists competing again the following morning. Students with similar levels of training are evaluated with their peers:
Sackler Senior Category: Sackler biomedical PhD students in years 4 and above, MD/PhD students in Sackler years 4 and above, and Sackler CTS PhD students
1ST PLACE – Kevin Goncalves, CMP
Angiogenin promotes hematopoietic regeneration by dichotomously regulating quiescence and expansion of stem and progenitor cells
2ND PLACE – Jennifer Shih, NRSC
Partial genetic deletion of the astrocytic glutamate transporter GLAST disrupts organization of the cerebral cortex and causes network hyperexcitability
3RD PLACE – Brian Lin, CMDB
Neuronally committed progenitors can dedifferentiate, become multipotent, and generate nonneuronal cell lineages following injury
Sackler Junior Category: Sackler PhD students in years 1-3, MD/PhD students in Sackler years 1-3, and Sackler MS students
1ST PLACE – Joseph Sarhan, IMM
Basal levels of Interferon β Regulates Necroptosis in Macrophages
2ND PLACE – Danish Saleh, NRSC
Kinase activities of RIPK1 and RIPK3 are required for GNB-induced IFN-I synthesis
3RD PLACE – Payel Ghatak, GENE
Digital ELISA Based Ultrasensitive Strategy to Detect microRNAs at Subfemtomolar Concentration.
Professional Category: All Medical, Dental, and Veterinary Medicine students and MD/PhD students in TUSM years 1 and 2.
1ST PLACE – Mary Tam, Medical
The HBP1 Gene: A Pre-clinical Model for Genetic and De novo epilepsies
2ND PLACE – Seda Babroudi, Medical
A Novel Compound, Membrane-Tethered E2, Selectively Activates the ER Rapid Signaling Pathway – Implications for Vascular Benefit
3RD PLACE- Marianna Papageorge, Medical
Cyst Aspiration of Endometriomas Prior to In-Vitro Fertilization
Congratulations to all participants, finalists, and award winners.
First awarded in 1901; The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the fields of physiology or medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, and literature. Nobel Prizes are awarded annually in recognition of outstanding academic, cultural and/or scientific advances. Each Nobel Laureate receives a Nobel Foundation medal, a diploma, and a sum of money, which is decided by the Nobel Foundation. As of 2012, each prize was worth approximately $1.2 million (USD).
This year, Nobel prizes in the fields of physiology or medicine and chemistry were awarded for: discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites; and mechanistic studies of DNA repair, respectively.
Novel Therapies for Parasitic Infections
Diseases caused by parasites have plagued humankind for millennia and constitute a major global health problem. In particular, parasitic diseases affect the world’s poorest populations and represent a huge barrier to improving human health and well-being. This year’s Nobel Laureates for the field of physiology or medicine developed therapies that revolutionized the treatment of some of the most devastating parasitic diseases. The Nobel was awarded ½ to Youyou Tu and ¼ each to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura.
Youyou Tu is recognized for her discovery of Artemisinin, a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from Malaria. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura are recognized for their discovery of Avermectin, the derivatives of which have radically lowered the incidence of River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, as well as showing efficacy against an expanding number of other parasitic diseases. These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually.
The discoveries of Artemisinin and Avermectin have fundamentally changed the treatment of parasitic diseases. Malaria infects close to 200 million individuals yearly. Artemisinin is used in all Malaria-ridden parts of the world. When used in combination therapy, it is estimated to reduce mortality from Malaria by more than 20% overall and by more than 30% in children. For Africa alone, this means that more than 100 000 lives are saved each year. Today the Avermectin-derivative Ivermectin is used in all parts of the world that are plagued by parasitic diseases. Ivermectin is highly effective against a range of parasites, has limited side effects and is freely available across the globe. The importance of Ivermectin for improving the health and well-being of millions of individuals with River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis, primarily in the poorest regions of the world, is immeasurable. Treatment is so successful that these diseases are on the verge of eradication, which would be a major feat in the medical history of humankind.
The discoveries of Artemisinin and Avermectin have revolutionized therapy for patients suffering from devastating parasitic diseases. Tu, Campbell, and Ōmura have transformed the treatment of parasitic diseases. The global impact of their discoveries and the resulting benefit to mankind are truly unfathomable.
The cells’ toolbox for DNA repair
Each day our DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances, but even without such external attacks, a DNA molecule is inherently unstable. Thousands of spontaneous changes to a cell’s genome occur on a daily basis. Furthermore, defects can also arise when DNA is copied during cell division, a process that occurs several million times every day in the human body. The reason our genetic material does not disintegrate into complete chemical chaos is that a host of molecular systems continuously monitor and repair DNA.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information. Their work has provided fundamental knowledge and insight into how a living cell functions.
In the early 1970s, scientists believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Tomas Lindahl demonstrated that DNA decays at a rate that ought to have made the development of life on Earth impossible. This insight led him to discover a molecular machinery, base excision repair, which constantly counteracts the collapse of our DNA.
Paul Modrich has demonstrated how the cell corrects errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division. This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousand fold. Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.
Aziz Sancar has mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism that cells use to repair UV damage to DNA. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. The cell also utilizes nucleotide excision repair to correct defects caused by mutagenic substances, among other things.
These Nobel Laureates have provided fundamental knowledge and insight into how a living cell functions. Their respective breakthrough discoveries have been applied and used for the development and advancement of novel cancer treatments.
The Central Square Theater in Cambridge houses two award winning and professional theater companies; The Nora Theatre Company and The Underground Railway Theater. This vibrant hub of theatrical, educational, and social activity, is where artists and audiences can come together to create theater that is both vital and captivating to the community.
Live performances for the month of November include:
Einstein’s Dreams (ending Nov. 14th)
Switzerland, 1905: A modest, newly-married patent clerk struggles to make ends meet while re-conceiving time. What happens when Albert Einstein completes his Theory of Relativity? Absurd, comic, and poetic, Einstein’s Dreams captures the poignancy of the human condition. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, Underground Railway Theater reunites the original 2007 world premiere cast, adapted by director Wesley Savick from the novel by Alan Lightman.
Copenhagen (ending Nov. 15th)
Copenhagen, 1941: Two brilliant physicists – fast friends from enemy nations – famously confront each other at the height of WWII. This award-winning psychological mystery unravels what transpired on that fateful night. Werner Heisenberg and his mentor Niels Bohr meet again in the afterlife, goaded by Bohr’s wife, Margrethe. Who will remember the truth that changed the course of history? Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, Eric Tucker cracks open Michael Frayn’s contemporary classic play.
Arabian Nights (beginning Nov. 27th)
Become enchanted by the power of storytelling one final time! The Nora Theatre Company and Underground Railway Theater revive their award-winning production of Dominic Cooke’s Arabian Nights. Based on One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of folk tales from the Middle East and Asia, Arabian Nights is rich with suspense, romance and hilarity—stories irresistible for all ages, and at its heart, the power of the imagination to heal, inspire, and transform.


|Cultural origins||African Americans|
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, Spiritual music, or African-American spirituals) is a genre of songs originating in America, that were created by African Americans. Spirituals were originally an oral tradition that imparted Christian values while also describing the hardships of slavery. Although spirituals were originally unaccompanied monophonic (unison) songs, they are best known today in harmonized choral arrangements. This historic group of uniquely American songs is now recognized as a distinct genre of music.
- 1 Terminology and origin
- 2 Religious significance
- 3 Alternative interpretations
- 4 Influence
- 5 Collections
- 6 See also
- 7 Footnotes
- 8 Further reading
- 9 External links
Terminology and origin
The term "spiritual" is derived from "spiritual song", from the King James Bible's translation of Ephesians 5:19, which says, "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." Slave Songs of the United States, the first major collection of negro spirituals, was published in 1867.
Musicologist George Pullen Jackson extended the term "spiritual" to a wider range of folk hymnody, as in his 1938 book, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but this does not appear to have been widespread usage previously. The term, however, has often been broadened to include subsequent arrangements into more standard European-American hymnodic styles, and to include post-emancipation songs with stylistic similarities to the original African American spirituals.
Although numerous rhythmical and sonic elements of spirituals can be traced to African sources, spirituals are a musical form that is indigenous and specific to the religious experience in the United States of Africans and their descendants. They are a result of the interaction of music and religion from Africa with music and religion of European origin. Further, this interaction occurred only in the United States. Africans who converted to Christianity in other parts of the world, even in the Caribbean and Latin America, did not evolve this particular form.
The slaves brought African cultural traditions with them. Many of their activities, from work to worship, involved music and dance. However, their European masters banned many of their African derived forms of worship involving drumming and dancing as they were considered to be idolatrous. The slaves were forced to perform their music in seclusion.
Field holler music, also known as Levee Camp Holler music, was an early form of African American music, described in the 19th century. Field hollers laid the foundations for the blues, spirituals, and eventually rhythm and blues. Field hollers, cries and hollers of the slaves and later sharecroppers working in cotton fields, prison chain gangs, railway gangs (Gandy dancers) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the call and response of African American spirituals and gospel music, to jug bands, minstrel shows, stride piano, and ultimately to the blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and African American music in general.
Spirituals were primarily expressions of religious faith. Some may also have served as socio-political protests veiled as assimilation to white American culture. They originated among enslaved Africans in the United States. Slavery was introduced to the British colonies in the early 17th century, and enslaved people largely replaced indentured servants as an economic labor force during the 17th century. In the United States, these people would remain in bondage for the entire 18th century and much of the 19th century. Most were not fully emancipated until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
Suppression of indigenous religion
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Slaves were forbidden to speak their native languages, and were generally converted to Christianity. With narrow vocabularies, slaves would use the words they did know to translate biblical information and facts from their other sources into song. While some slave owners believed that Christian slaves would be more docile, others came to feel that stories of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage were counterproductive. Forced conversion only worked to a point since church attendance might be required, but control could not extend to thoughts and feelings. Some slaves became Christians voluntarily, either because it helped them endure hardships or because membership may have offered other benefits. Many of the Slaves turned towards the Baptist or Methodist churches.
In some places enslaved Africans were permitted, or even encouraged, to hold their own prayer meetings. Because they were unable to express themselves freely in ways that were spiritually meaningful to them, religious services were, at times, the only place slaves could legitimately congregate, socialize, and safely express feelings. During these meetings, worshipers would sing, chant, dance and sometimes enter ecstatic trances. Along with spirituals, shouts also emerged in the Praise Houses. Shouts begin slowly with the shuffling of feet and clapping of hands (but the feet never cross because that was seen as dancing, which was forbidden within the church).
Drums were used as they had been in Africa, for communication. When the connection between drumming, communication, and resistance was eventually made drums were forbidden. Slaves introduced a number of new instruments to America: the bones, body percussion, and an instrument variously called the bania, banju, or banjar, a precursor to the banjo but without frets. They drew on native rhythms and their African heritage. They brought with them from Africa long-standing religious traditions that highlighted the importance of storytelling. Music was an essential element in communicating identity, shared social mores, traditional customs, and ethnic history. The primary function of the spirituals was as communal songs sung in a religious gathering, performed in a call-response pattern reminiscent of West African traditional religions.
African American spirituals may also have served as socio-political protests veiled as assimilation to the white American culture.
Several traditions rooted in Africa continue to the present day in African-American spiritual practices. Examples include the "call and response" style of preaching in which the speaker speaks for an interval and the congregation responds in unison in a continual pattern throughout the sermon. Speaking in tongues is also a persistent practice, as is "getting happy." Getting happy involves achieving a trance-like state and can be characterized by anything from jumping in one place repeatedly, running through the sanctuary, raising hands and arms in the air, shouting traditional praise phrases, or being "slain in the spirit" (fainting). In spirituals, there also rose what is known as the "straining preacher" sound where the preacher, during song, literally strains the voice to produce a unique tone. This is used throughout recorded spirituals, blues, and jazz music. The locations and the era may be different; but the same emphasis on combining sound, movement, emotion, and communal interaction into one focus on faith and its role in overcoming struggles, whether as an individual or a people group, remain the same.
The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence. Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Mabhreb and the Sahel.
There was a difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim Sahelian slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and Central Africa. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favoured wind and string instruments and solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening. Among the instruments introduced by Muslim African slaves were ancestors of the banjo. While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South.
Christian hymns and songs were very influential on the writing of African-American spirituals, especially those from the "Great Awakening" of the 1730s. As Africans were exposed to stories from the Bible, they began to see parallels to their own experiences. The story of the exile of the Jews and their captivity in Babylon, resonated with their own captivity.
From 1800 to 1825 slaves were exposed to the religious music of camp meetings on the ever-expanding frontier. Spirituals were based on Christian psalms and hymns and merged with African music styles and secular American music forms. Spirituals were not simply different versions of hymns or Bible stories, but rather a creative altering of the material; new melodies and music, refashioned text, and stylistic differences helped to set apart the music as distinctly African-American.
The lyrics of Christian spirituals reference symbolic aspects of Biblical images such as Moses and Israel's Exodus from Egypt in songs such as "Michael Row the Boat Ashore". There is also a duality in the lyrics of spirituals. They communicated many Christian ideals while also communicating the hardship that was a result of being an African-American slave. The spiritual was often directly tied to the composer's life. It was a way of sharing religious, emotional, and physical experience through song.
The river Jordan in traditional African American religious song became a symbolic borderland not only between this world and the next. It could also symbolize travel to the north and freedom or could signify a proverbial border from the status of slavery to living free.
Syncopation, or ragged time, was a natural part of spiritual music. The rhythms of Protestant hymns were transformed and the songs were played on African-inspired instruments. During the Civil War, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote down some of the spirituals he heard in camp. "Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, ...and were in a minor key, both as to words and music."
Some sources claim that songs such as "Wade in the Water" contained explicit instructions to fugitive slaves on how to avoid capture, and on which routes to take to successfully make their way to freedom. "Wade in the Water" allegedly recommends leaving dry land and taking to the water as a strategy to throw pursuing bloodhounds off one's trail. "The Gospel Train", "Song of the Free", and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" are likewise supposed to contain veiled references to the Underground Railroad, and many sources assert that "Follow the Drinking Gourd" contained a coded map to the Underground Railroad. The authenticity of such claims has been challenged as speculative, and critics like James Kelley have pointed to the lack of corroborating sources and the implausibility of popular accounts, such as the 1928 essay by H.B. Parks.
However, there is a firmer consensus that the recurring theme of "freedom" in the Biblical references was understood as a reference to the slaves' own desire for escape from bondage. Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave who became one of the leading 19th-century African-American literary and cultural figures, emphasized the dual nature of the lyrics of spirituals when he recalled in Chapter VI of his My Bondage and My Freedom:
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw or heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirits, and filled my heart with ineffable sadness. The mere recurrence, even now, afflicts my spirit, and while I am writing these lines, my tears are falling. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conceptions of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.
Noted African American literary critic Sterling Allen Brown, who had interviewed former slaves and their children, was firm in his assertion in a 1953 article in Phylon that
Some scholars who have found parallels between the words of Negro and white spirituals would have us believe that when the Negro sang of freedom, he meant only what the whites meant, namely freedom from sin. Free, individualistic whites on the make in a prospering civilization, nursing the American dream, could well have felt their only bondage to be that of sin, and freedom to be religious salvation. But with the drudgery, the hardships, the auction-block, the slave-mart, the shackles, and the lash so literally present in the Negro's experience, it is hard to imagine why for the Negro they would remain figurative. The scholars certainly do not make it clear, but rather take refuge in such dicta as: "The slave did not contemplate his low condition." Are we to believe that the slave singing "I been rebuked, I been scorned; done had a hard time sho's you bawn," referred to his being outside of the true religion? Ex-slaves, of course, inform us differently. The spirituals speak up strongly for freedom not only from sin (dear as that freedom was to the true believer) but from physical bondage. Those attacking slavery as such had to be as rare as anti-Hitler marching songs in occupied France. But there were oblique references. Frederick Douglass has told us of the double-talk of the spirituals: Canaan, for instance, stood for Canada; and over and beyond hidden satire the songs also were grapevines for communications. Harriet Tubman, herself called the Moses of her people, has told us that Go Down Moses was tabu in the slave states, but the people sang it nonetheless.
More recently, music critic Thomas Barker has critiqued definitions of freedom that separate its spiritual and material elements:
Following George P. Rawick's 1968 article on "The Historical Roots of Black Liberation," academic studies on the antebellum south have developed a more nuanced outlook on slave psychology. "Unless the slave is simultaneously Sambo and revolutionary," Rawick (2010) writes, "[h]e can only be a wooden man, a theoretical abstraction" (pp. 31-32). Within the liberal academy, this dialectical understanding of slave consciousness effectively broke the back of the simplistic Sambo-Revolutionary dichotomy, giving way to a plethora of treatises that examine the ways that slaves mediated the tension between passivity and insurrection (see Blassingame, 1979; Genovese, 1974; Levine, 1977; Stuckey, 1987). However, studies that examine the role played by music in articulating the concept of freedom have frequently reproduced this problematic binary. With those who see slave song as teaching freedom in the afterlife in one camp, and those who see it as a material call to arms in the other, this dichotomy ill befits Rawick's multifaceted analysis.
Consistent with the beliefs of slave religion, which saw the material and the spiritual as part of an intrinsic unity, "freedom", it is argued, should be seen as simultaneously spiritual and material. This broadly Hegelian-Marxist approach argues that the concrete experience of freedom (no matter how limited) was only possible because of the existence freedom as an idea, and, conversely, that freedom as an idea was only possible because it was available as concrete experience: "the ability of slaves to imagine freedom ('le conçu') was contingent upon their being able to experience freedom, and... the slave's capacity to experience freedom ('le vecu') was conditional upon their being able to imagine it."
"The African American spiritual (also called the Negro Spiritual) constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folksong." James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson presented Spirituals as the only type of folk music that America has. Spirituals were sung as lullabies and play songs. Some spirituals were adapted as work songs. Antonin Dvorak chose spiritual music to represent America in his Symphony From the New World.
Spirituals remain a mainstay particularly in small black churches, often Baptist or Pentecostal, in the deep South.
Jubilee Singers of Fisk University
In the 1850s, Reverend Alexander Reid, superintendent of the Spencer Academy in the old Choctaw Nation, hired some enslaved Africans from the Choctaws for some work around the school. He heard two of them, "Uncle Wallace" and "Aunt Minerva" Willis, singing religious songs that they had apparently composed. Among these were "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Steal Away to Jesus", "The Angels are Coming", "I'm a Rolling", and "Roll, Jordan, Roll". Later, Reid, who left Indian Territory at the beginning of the Civil War, attended a musical program put on by a group of African American singers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. They were singing mostly popular music of the day, and Reid thought the songs he remembered from his time in the Choctaw Nation would be at least as appropriate. He and his wife transcribed the songs of the Willises as they remembered them and sent them to Fisk University.
The Jubilee Singers put on their first performance singing the old captives' songs at a religious conference in 1871. The songs were first published in 1872 in a book entitled Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, by Theodore F. Seward. Wallace Willis died in 1883 or 1884.
In an attempt to raise money for Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the Fisk Jubilee Singers gave concerts in Europe and America and helped make African American spirituals become extremely popular. It sent some of its students from the choir program to perform. Ultimately, this became a fad and caused spiritual music to become mainstream. However, these groups sang spirituals in the white, European style.
Over time, the pieces the Jubilee Singers performed came to be arranged and performed by trained musicians. In 1873, Mark Twain, whose father had owned slaves, found Fisk singing to be "in the genuine old way" he remembered from childhood. By contrast an anonymous 1881 review in the Peoria Journal said: "they have lost the wild rhythms, the barbaric melody, the passion ... [T]hey smack of the North ..." Some fifty years later, Zora Neale Hurston in her 1938 book The Sanctified Church criticized Fisk singers, and similar groups at Tuskegee and Hampton, as using a "Glee Club style" that was "full of musicians' tricks" not to be found in the original African American spirituals, urging readers to visit an "unfashionable Negro church" to experience real African American spirituals.
A group of lyrics to African American spirituals was published by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded a regiment of former slaves during the Civil War, in an article in The Atlantic Monthly and subsequently included in his 1869 memoir Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869).
Dr. Arthur Jones founded "The Spirituals Project" at the University of Denver in 1999 to help keep alive the message and meaning of the songs that have moved from the fields of the South to the concert halls of the North.
- African-American music
- Deep River Boys
- Gospel music
- History of slavery in the United States
- Religious music
- "Negro Spiritual Singers". New Deal Network. Retrieved 21 March 2015.
- "5th Annual Negro Spirituals Heritage Day". All About Jazz. 16 June 2008. Retrieved 21 March 2015.
- Johnson, James Weldon; Johnson, J. Rosamond (2009). The Books of American Negro Spirituals. Da Capo Press. pp. 13, 17 – via Google Scholar.
The Spirituals are purely and solely the creation of the American Negro..." "When it came to the use of words, the maker of the song was struggling as best he could under his limitations in language and, perhaps, also under a misconstruction or misapprehension of the facts in his source of material, generally the Bible." "...this music which is America's only folk music...
- "Celebrating Black Music Month", National Museum of African American History and Culture Archived 2015-04-02 at the Wayback Machine
- "Why "Negro Spiritual"… A Note About Negro Spirituals". The "Negro Spiritual" Scholarship Foundation. Retrieved 21 March 2015.
In the United States we cannot seem to get enough of Negro spirituals; contemporary composers, arrangers and vocalists continue to explore and enliven this unique genre.
- "African American Spirituals".
- "Faigin, Tom. "Negro Spirituals: Songs of Survival"".
- Pitts, Walter F. (1996). Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 74. ISBN 0195111451.
- Murray, Albert (1976). Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo. pp. 64–65. ISBN 0-306-80362-3.
- African American Spirituals. Online Text. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197495/. (Accessed January 26, 2018.)
- Curiel, Jonathan (August 15, 2004). "Muslim Roots of the Blues". SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on September 5, 2005. Retrieved August 24, 2005.
- Shaw, Arnold (1978). Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm & Blues (First ed.). New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. p. 3. ISBN 0-02-061740-2.
- "African-American Religion: Getting Back To You - Divining America: Religion in American History". National Humanities Center. October 2000. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- "connectED". spotlightonmusic.macmillanmh.com.
- Pershey, Monica Gordon. "African American spiritual music: A historical perspective", The Dragon Lode, Vol. 18 • No. 2 • Spring, 2000
- Faw, Bob (May 4, 2012). "African-American Spirituals". Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. PBS. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- Abernethy, Bob (August 26, 2005). "African-American Spirituals". Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. PBS. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- "About the African-American Spiritual". Charleston Spiritual Ensemble. 4 August 2012. Retrieved 20 November 2018.
- Tottoli, Roberto (2014). Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West. Routledge. p. 322. ISBN 9781317744023.
- Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. pp. 172–177. ISBN 0-393-95279-7.
- "History". Retrieved 2010-02-15.
- Smith-Christopher, Daniel L. "River Jordan in Early African American Spirituals", Bible Odyssey, National Endowment for the Humanities
- Negro Spirituals by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic, June 1867.
- "Jubilee", Merriam-Webster.com
- "Jubilee", Dictionary.com
- Coded Slave Songs Archived 2008-07-24 at the Wayback Machine
- "The Official Site of the Negro Spirituals, antique Gospel Music". www.negrospirituals.com.
- ""Follow the Drinking Gourd"—African American Spiritual". www.eduplace.com.
- Kelley, James. Song, Story, or History: Resisting Claims of a Coded Message in the African American Spiritual "Follow the Drinking Gourd". The Journal of Popular Culture 41.2 (April 2008): 262-80.
- Bresler, Joel. "Follow the Drinking Gourd: A Cultural History". Retrieved 2008-05-05.
- Frederick Douglass (1855). "My Bondage and My Freedom". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 6 June 2013.
- Brown, Sterling Allen (Winter 1953). "Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and Work Songs". University of Illinois, Department of English. Retrieved June 6, 2013.
- Barker, Thomas P. "Spatial Dialectics". Journal of Black Studies. 46 (4).
- "Salt Lake Tribune: Utah News, Religion, Sports & Entertainment". The Salt Lake Tribune.
- Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (2001-04-01). Army Life in a Black Regiment. ISBN 978-1-58218-359-6. Retrieved 2008-03-03.
- Ball, Edward, Slaves In The Family, Ballantine Books, New York 1998. See chapter 17 which references the Society for Preservation of Spirituals.
- Baraka, Amiri (1999). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0688184742.
- Barker, Thomas (2015). "Spatial Dialectics: Intimations of Freedom in A ntebellum Slave Song." Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 4 (2015).
- Barton, William Eleazar (1899/1972), Old Plantation Hymns: A Collection of Hitherto Unpublished Melodies of the Slave and the Freeman, with Historical and Descriptive Notes, reprint, New York: AMS Press.
- Bauch, Marc A.: Extending the Canon: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and African-American Spirituals (Munich, Germany, 2013).
- Nash, Elizabeth (2007). "Autobiographical Reminiscences of African-American Classical Singers, 1853-Present". Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0-7734-5250-8
- Work, John W., compiler (1940), American Negro Songs and Spirituals: a Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular, with a Foreword. New York: Bonanza Books. N.B.: Includes commentary on the repertory and the words with the music (harmonized) of the spirituals and other songs anthologized.
- The Spirituals Project
- Sweet Chariot: the story of the spirituals
- Fisk Jubilee Singers
- Marian Anderson: A Life in Song
- Historical Notes on African American melodies, including 75 African American spirituals with downloadable arrangements for solo instrument
- Free Gospel scores
- The Spirituals Database, searchable discography of Spirituals for solo voice
- Listen to "Pharaoh's Army Got Drowned," artists unknown (765 KB)
- Gordon Collection; performed by unknown persons in the Bay Area of California in the early 1920s
- Download recording of "Deep Down in My Heart", from the Library of Congress' Gordon Collection; performed by W. M. Givens in Darien, Georgia, on about March 19, 1926


Culture Shock: The misleading term "culture contact" doesn't begin to express the dramatic effects of changes brought by outside
Culture Shock: The misleading term "culture contact" doesn't begin to. express the dramatic effects of changes brought by outsiders
The shock of "contact" has taken many forms, initially, at least, to indigenous people just the physical presence of outsiders was shocking. Missionaries, slavers, miners, lumbermen, ranchers, agriculturists - all have "visited" indigenous homeland, literally battering and badgering the inhabitants first into interaction and then submission.
For some indigenous groups, the disastrous effects of contact have been felt before any actual physical communication. Outsiders' diseases - smallpox, measles influenza - would spread rapidly from village to village, leaving decimation in their wake, it is this rampant spread of disease and death prior to physical contact with outsiders that has prevented us from determining the exact numbers of indigenous groups in the world.
Weakened and decimated by foreign epidemics, many indigenous groups then experienced the onset of actual contact with outsiders. On cultures already in crisis, the impact were, predictably, disastrous. Some native groups embraced the apparent power of the religion, politics, or economics of the outsiders. When others resisted, they were subjugated, displaced, or killed. Rarely did outsiders treat them as equals. Once contact was made, often groups sought further communication with the encroaching society. They wanted employment and education, a chance to improve their economic lot by becoming, at least for a time, a part of the dominant society.
Recently new hazards have threatened indigenous areas, often without the inhabitants' knowledge. Mining and refining minerals are poisoning lands, rivers, food, and, of course, the people themselves. Frequently such operations have been moved onto native lands because, while Western countries have determined that these activities pose serious health risks and have banned them at home, Western consumers still demand the products. Pesticides, drugs, and radioactive and toxic wastes that are dangerous, severely regulated, or even banned in the United States are deliberately sold or dumped onto the lands of unknowing peoples. (The president of Benin recently signed a contract with a European waste company to dump toxic and low-grade radiate waste on the lands of his tribal opposition.)
Although tourists introduce the most striking contrasts in culture contact, the most seriously threatening contacts continue to be between indigenous peoples and their neighbors in the unceasing conflict over rights to land and resources. The excerpts reprinted here are small samples of the patches that make up the crazy quilt of contact between indigenous peoples and outsiders. Brief as this section is, it gives one food for thought the complexities of such contact are dizzying. And all of these stories are even more sobering when we realize that contact among all peoples is increasing exponentially in this age of global communication.
THE ROAD TO EXTINCTION
The sad fate of the Yabgan and Ona peoples of Tierra del Fuego serves to encapsulates the devastation that contact with Westerners can bring to a native group; they experienced virtually every catastrophe brought by the West to other:, similar indigenous group. Just 100 years after the first European settlement was established on Tierra del Fuego; the last Ona Indian died.
Missionaries attempted to work with the Yahgan but there is little evidence that they helped them survive. After establishing a permanent mission on the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego in 1869, SAMS (Church of England) attempted to bring individuals to the mission to be educated and to work as laborers. Instruction lasted two or three hours per day. The rest of the time the men living at the mission were expected to cut timber, build, fences and houses, construct roads, and tend livestock and gardens. They were not paid wages. Instead they were given food for themselves - not their families - and sold Western clothing which had been donated in Europe. Nor was the health of those at the mission better off than that of the Yahgano population at large. An observer wrote that between 1881 and 1895 every child in the mission village had died, whether in the orphanage or on Yahgan homes. Not one child in dozens born survived its first year…
By 1900 regular steamship traffic allowed the export of wool from Tierra del Fuego and within 20 years frozen mutton was being shipped from the island. By 1904 a road had been built to connect Ushauaia and the north coast of Tierra del Fuego (and all the ranches in between). By 1909 there were three lumber camps employing hundreds of men to cut timber in the forest where the last Ona had been permitted to live without being in permanent contact with whites. As in the nineteenth century, assimilated Yahgan and Ona provided most of the labor for these enterprises. For examples, the road that was built from the south to the north of the island was reported to have required the labor of 100 Indians for a year.
In a matter of 60 years, the Ona and Yahgan had been victims of successive waves of sailors, whalers, sealers, miners, missionaries, sheep herders, soldiers, and lumbermen. Those who did not die as a result of contact with these outsiders had to work for others on what had once been their land. The European incorporated the lands of these once self-sufficient hunters and gathers into the world economy. By 1932, the island supported only one-third as many people as it had before the settlers arrived.
During the twentieth century the individuals that survived contact were left on their own to find accommodation with the colonists. In 1973, only 100 years after the first European settlement was established on Tierra del Fuego, the last full-blooded Ona died.
THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
The efforts of missionaries to Cbristinazie an indigenous culture often are in that culture's worst interests - they change a community's political structure and undermine the status of traditional leaders, as well as Westernizing the values of the community's younger generation, its next leaders. This excerpt is from Cultural Survival Quarterly's special issue on religion and indigenous cultures ("Keeping the Faith?" vol. 7, no.3, 1983).
The missionary arrives. He orders the construction of a landing field for the airplane, a church for the religious services, he establishes a school and begins to relocate outlying villages into one large community. Missionaries use the name of the indigenous community to receive governmental consent for these activities without having asked the community itself for permission…
Along with "education," missionaries import regulations such as the appointment of headmen and commissaries, which directly affect the political affairs of the community, stratifying the community and its members. This ... radically splits a people who had been essentially equal - a people whose leaders and intellectuals (shamans, historians, and knowledgeable elders) shared in the daily affairs, subsistence activities, and communication with all members of the community.…
Accompanying the missionary installations and the newly created social inequalities are the creation of rich and poor factions. These differences are reflected in the physical layout of the community, where the church and religious infrastructure occupy much of the area (the church, residence for the priests, school, infirmary, stables, etc.) and the indigenous members find themselves in the periphery with less land to themselves. Traditional leaders lose their power of influence. They are no longer sought out for advice; now people go to the missionary house. Visitors also go directly to the parsonage, leaving the indigenous sector to one side, subordinated to a lower slot.
Perhaps the most subversive form of culture contact is in the areas of pesticide poisonings, toxic waste dumpings, mercury contamination (as a result of gold prospecting), nuclear testing - activities that have been banned in the West, only to be transplanted to the Third World, Back when Cultural Survival Quarterly was still a newsletter, we were reporting on such injustices in our "Poisons and Peripheral People" series.
Pesticide poisonings have increased. World Health Organization officials estimate that one Third World resident is prisoner by pesticides every minute; of these approximately 500,000 poisoning per year, 5,000 are fatal…
In some cases, villagers are unaware of the danger posed by pesticides. In 1977, 44 deaths occurred in South Africa after people handled agricultural chemicals. In most cases people did not wash themselves properly, did not clean food that had been sprayed, or used pesticide containers for drinking or cooking. In Iran, butchers are reported to have sprayed carcasses with insecticides to keep the files away. In 1972, 400 Iraqis died and 5,000 were hospitalized after consuming products made from 8,000 tons of wheat and barley coated with an organic mercury fungicide. Initially the seed was preferred because loaves made from it were pink. In Pakistan, Guatemala, and the US Southwest mercury poisoning occurred after eating similarly treated seed. In Papua New Guinea, an aide at Mt. Hagen Hospital brought an empty Paraquat bottle, clearly marked "poison" in English, to be filled with cough syrup. He did not read English. Throughout the world pesticide containers are sold as water containers and plastic pesticide bags are used as raincoats…
Herbicide use in the Guaporé Valley [Brazil] is not well documented. However, in the early seventies, defoliants sprayed from airplanes killed Indians' mangabeira fruit trees, about a kilometer from the area being converted to pasture. The rancher simply stated, "When pastures are sprayed, the wind always carries a little towards the Indians' villages." If there are cumulative effects later on, no one will be able to trace it to the use of Tordon [a herbicide used to clear forest].
In 1975, Fazenda Amburana received permission from FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, to develop the lands whether Indians lived on them or not. In fact an Indian village was and is still on the land. Regardless, the ranchers began clearing the land, using Tordon 155. A FUNAI agent requested that federal police stop the clearing in 1979. At that time police confiscated cans of Tordon 155, which had been banned in 1977.
Indians are not aware of the dangers. They use contaminated cans for drinking water which they take from contaminated streams where they swim and bathe. Crops are planted beside the same streams. By 1980, the FUNAI agent noted increasing numbers of stillbirths, miscarriages, infant deformities, and adult kidney problems even in environments distant from the areas of Tordon use. Even the supposedly "safe" Tordon 101 (2,4-D) can cause damage.
Our series an poisons continued with the first issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly. This section is on chemical wastes and mining.
The shift of Benzedrine dye manufactures abroad endangers the health of workers throughout the world. In the Third World, worker health regulations are lax…
A dyestuff industry in Bombay dumps untreated chemical sewage directly into a river, contaminating the drinking and bath water for downstream residents. The firm is 47 percent Italian owned; but in Italy both Benzedrine dye manufacture and dumping of this type is against the law.
As many tribal and ethnic groups move away from the use of natural dyes to cheaper, synthetic ones in producing their own clothing, they begin to expose themselves to even greater risks than workers in textile plants where operation are mechanized…
By 1975, waste from one Canadian chemical company polluted the English and Wabigoon Rivers with mercury. Some 1,300 Indians on two remote reserves near Kenora have been affected. The government has warned them to fish and had brought in supplies from other areas, but the mercury has also contaminated other animals and plants that are important in the Indians' diet. The mercury will remain in the area for years to come .…
Quechua Indians in Bolivia, who mine the country's number I export, tin, generally do not live more than seven years after going to the mines. For their efforts they earn $1 per day and the lowest life expectancy (42 years) in the Western Hemisphere. Their children have the highest infant mortality rate in this hemisphere.
Culture in this half of the century frequently occurs through tourism. Cultural Survival Quarterly has published several issues on tourism, the first, in 1982, entitled "The Tourist Trap: Who's Getting Caught?" (vol. 6, no. 3). these two excerpts, the first from a theoretical essay and the second from an article on Native American, illustrate how tourism often masks a culture in order to make it "palatable" to Westerners.
Much more typical is the situation of tourists in a Senegal resort who are offered the opportunity to "fish in the native style" and cheerfully lend a hand helping the natives haul in the nets. What the visitors don't know is that the authentic local fishermen have been ordered away from this part of the coast; in fact, the people they help are employed by the hotel to give the requisite degree of native flavor.
The pre-tourism lifestyle of local residents is usually modest. When visitors descend, however, they require numerous amenities to re-create aspects of their homelife. This leads to rising expectation and new lifestyles among the locals. Ironically, it may also lead to a decline in tourism as visitors find that the locale no longer offers unique attractions.
In order to maintain or increase the flow of tourist monies, a contrived and artificial "folk culture" is frequently staged. It may even be invented as locals respond to the expectations of visitors. Townspeople will invent a "traditional blessing of the fleet" to attract visitors; an "old town" will be newly built (complex with hired locals dressed in the costumes of some archaic and often mythical "olden times"); new "folk crafts" will be designed and taught to the natives by outsiders. The American Southwest Indians, for example, discovered that travelers frequently bought their more crudely made pottery because those "looked more handmade and authentic" than the more perfectly fashioned items. They began to manufacture such pots deliberately; few kept the old standards.
In our second issue on tourism. "Breaking Out of the Tourist Trap: Part One" (vol. 14, no. 1, 1990), Margaret Byrne Swain examined the working of ethnic tourism in China's southwest region. Even though such tourism brings China's ethnic group into the country's economy can these groups maintain their uniqueness when the state "markets" their culture? The author finds some hope in this scenario - if the indigenous groups can control their "commoditization."
These ethnic groups are incorporated into tourism through the commoditization of ethnicity - the production and exchange of ethnic goods and behaviors for consumption by others, a process found worldwide. I use this term, rather than "cultural commoditization," because ethnicity can be defined with a political power dimension critical to my analysis. As ethnic goods and behaviors are transformed into commodities for tourist consumption, the interplay of cultural and political factors in the economy affects just how sustainable this tourism development can be. Some argue that tourism perpetuates inequalities between an indigenous group and its dominating nation and also between rich and poor countries (Lea 1988:11). In stable natural and political environments, ethnic tourism can promote economic development for an indigenous group if the group owns the process in terms of its own cultural continuity and power (Swain 1989). In China, power dynamics among the ethnic group, the socialist state, and multinational tourist capitalism create a complete picture. The role of the state is critical in defining China's ethnic tourism industry through its regulation of tourism investment, production, and consumption.…
All of China's ethnic minority groups have a history of conflict and negotiation with the Chinese state.…
The state is the arbitrator of relations among producers, marketers, and consumers in China's ethnic tourism. It is the state which defines the commodity and who and what constitutes an ethnic group. There are definite an ethnic group, There are definite economic advantages to promoting ethnicity for commoditization. It stimulates the national economy and attracts foreign capital. Official Chinese ideology both protects national minority groups and promotes their ultimate assimilation. From this perspective, ethnic tourism is intended to be used economically as a temporary cultural phenomenon, not as a vehicle for ethnic group sustainability. The Chinese state is also a primary factor in affected the flow of consumers, as the dramatic change from a booming to a virtually dead domestic and foreign tourism market in the wake of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre illustrates. Although an indigenous group can make its own tourism plans, it is the state which channels funds and allows foreign investors access. Flourishing informal tourism activity such as the Sani women peddlers exists at the wish of the state and the availability of consumers.
For indigenous groups in China, ethnic tourism reinforces their separateness from the majority while integrating them into the state economy. Whether tourism promotes cultural continuity of touristized ethnic groups of ethnic group assimilation depends on the state's allocation of control in the process of ethnicity commoditization. If the ethnic group, through individual actors, has no control over tourism activity - as seems the case on Hainan Island - then it is likely that their participation is exploitative and devalues their culture. If the ethnic group can take control - as the Sani have through their own actions and programs - then ethnic tourism can well give the group economic power to reinforce its identify as it adapts to new definitions and cultural values for ethnic markers. They type of "indigenous tourism" development validates the power of the autonomy or self-government that the groups - in theory - have from the states.
A LESSON IN MANNERS
Cynthia M. Dagnal-Myron is a writer who lives with her husband, a Native American artist, in Hopi Country. Here she shares some of her frustration at being cornered by tourists in the Indian Market, as well as her anger at visitors' bad manner regarding religious practices.
Our two-year-old cannot sit still all stay in the sun and the crush of gawking art "enthusiasts." And if one more gaggle of blue-haired grannies in Madras Bermudas comes grinning up to her and asks me, "Is this little doll for sale?" they're going to have to call the riot police. Some day, I'm going to walk up to a white woman with a baby in her grocery cart and cry, "What a darling little white child! Is he a fullblood? May I take his picture? Could you stand over by the Wonder Bread, please - my Hopi friends will just die when they see this!"…
It's no less annoying when the wild questions come from farther away, though. Recently, a film crew for a German public television station visited one of our schools and, upon discovering a real live medicine woman in its midst, inquired whether she might "do one of her ceremonies for us" to be shown all over western Europe.
I doubt your priest has ever been asked, "And please if you don't mind, could you just do ... what is it? Your ... little Mass thing for us in a few minutes here? Could you wear perhaps your little costume and ... well, whatever you wear."
THE "NEW MIGRATION'
Although migration has always been a part of the human experience - a way to hold on to or improve certain parts of life - the industrial age brought about migration imposed by outsiders, when people migrate in search of jobs. This "new migration," in which people go from lesser developed to more developed countries or regions, has introduced its own form of culture shock for those who migrate - and those who are left behind. Here is what happened in many Garifuna Indian villages in Belize; Guantemala:, and Honduras.
By 1975 the only Carib village in Guatemala had changed in many ways. Many houses were boarded up and had fallen into disrepair. Both men and women were leaving the community to find jobs as soon as they could pay their fare to Guatemala City or to New York. Many expressed hopes that they might not have to live there again. Small children were left with grandmothers, sometimes even before they had come to know their own mothers well. Now, as they approach their late teens, they grow increasingly restless, and begin to talk about when they too will leave. Until their great opportunity arrives, they spend their time in idleness, and often become involved in petty crimes such as marijuana traffic, theft, and prostitution. The elderly complain that the young no longer help with domestic chores, do not know how to fish or garden, or even prepare native foods. Disputes among siblings over the small properties left by recently deceased parents are increasingly common, each heir claiming that it was his or her remittances which had permitted the construction of the house or the purchase of consumer goods left behind.
Gradually, many towns become old peoples' homes, but with youngsters - usually grandchildren - hanging about on the sidelines - uneasy, undisciplined, and increasingly illundisciplined, and increasingly ill-prepared either to live at home or in the outside world. Some parents now prefer to raise their children in New York, where schools and public health facilities are superior. Although filial loyalty is still strong, the increased presence in New York of wives and children has meant a decline in the remittances sent back to Central America. Unless a child remains at home with its grandparents, people tend to let the months slip by without mailing a check.
Here is an example of the effects of labor migration in Peru - with some positive notes in migrants' efforts to keep their culture alive in the city.
Labor migration has introduced a package of contradictions to the cultural identity of highland peasants. On the one hand, the new urbanites acquire city culture - with scarcely a backward glance. They join unions, strike, hustle, and dance the salsa. They become permanent residents by turning their bamboo squatters' huts into brick and concrete houses of substantial proportions.…
At the same time, however, in Lima and all other large cities in Peru, migrants of all backgrounds constantly organize "provincial" representing their home communities. In Lima there are more than 5,000 such clubs dedicated to glorifying the "homeland," celebrating its festivals, encouraging its development through cash donations, gifts, and lobbying [Doughy 1972; Lobo 1982:266-76; Osterling 1980:157-84]. Like "alumni associations," caravans of migrant club members and others return to their native villages for feast days and to exhort their friends to improve their lifestyle and develop the land. Yet, by exalting their own successes in the city, they further encourage migration to Lima.
This excerpt gives a view of what it is like for Amuesha Indian girls from the community of Miraglores in Peru when they are sent by their parents to Lima to work in middle-class homes. Their parents do not send them willingly; the Amuesha have been squeezed economically by the presence of jungle colonizers, and outsiders' racial prejudices regarding the Amuesba's "inferiority" have prompted these Indians to actively seek ways to change their identities.
Servant girls usually live in, for all practical purposes, captivity. In one case, the patron allowed the girl to leave the house only on one weekly trip to the market. She was punished if she returned late. When the girls wanted to return late. When the girl wanted to return to her father's house, she had no way of informing him because the patron controlled all correspondence.
When Amuesha girls leave home to work as servants in the city, they lose contract with their own culture and its values. In Lima their world is limited; the family of the patron serves as their only model for social values. From this new family, Amuesha servant girls learn that their own culture is backward and savage…
Today [in Miraflores] there is not one unmarried woman older than 12 living in the community, and there are 29 young men between the ages of 18 and 30 who are looking for wives. If this situation continues (there is no indication that it will not) there will be no new generation of Amuesha in Miraflores. They will not be able to reproduce themselves either biologically or culturally.
LIVING LIKE A REFUGEE
The cultural "fallout" that indigenous groups can experience when they are thrust into a refugee camp is compounded by their homelessness. the kawthoolei Woman's Organization (KWO) is an outgrowth of the Karen national liberation struggle in Burma, first promoted by the Karen National Union (KNU). The war referred to here is the ongoing struggle for democracy that is still taking place in Burma.
The war situation has, according to several KNU officials, led thousands of Karen girls to compromise their "traditional moral character." Forced to flee with other villagers across the Thai border to escape the atrocities committed routinely by Burmese Army soldiers, they have been tempted into the Thai service industry in towns such as Mae Sot as an alternative to life in the Spartan refugee camps. Naw Paw Nay, the leader of the Wangkha KWO committee, said it was difficult to prevent the girls from choosing this path: "They want to earn money to buy all the material goods they see in Thailand, but in the refugee camps they can't earn anything." The problem is apparently increasing, because when the girls return dressed in Thai finery to visit their village across the border, their friends see how easy it is to make money and follow them back to Thailand.
The lack of money or the means to earn it, in the Karen refugees camps along the Thai border is a major obstacle to KWO's activities. For example, part of KWO's social duties - which also include hospitality to visitors and marriage counseling - are to arrange for traditional Karen costumes to be woven and worn. In Wangkha refugee camp, however, which has a population of more than 2,000, few of the refugees are to be seen wearing traditional Karen clothing. Naw Paw Nay, who was seeking refuge in the camp together with several hundred other KWO members during the 1989 Burmese Army offensive against the Karen stronghold of Kawmoora, said it was impossible for them to raise money even to buy the thread to weave the garments. Aid to the nine refugee camps along the Thai border, with a total populations of more than 20,000 consists only of rice and a few other basic food necessities, provided mainly by a consortium of Christian agencies. The aid is channeled to the camps through the Karen Refugee Committee, based at Mae Sot.
The Sabrawis of Western Sabara, a land currently being contended for by both the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sabrawi nationalist Polisario Front, are an example of how a culture can thrive despite the homelessness and hopelessness of a refugee environment.
After 16 years of war, one might expect to see the all-too-familiar tragic camp scenes. Instead, the Sahrawis have turned the harsh desert of their exile into an enabling environment. In the midst of another drought in the African continent, the Sahara is blooming. In a daily struggle against their bleak surroundings, Sahrawis have planted garden in their refugee camps as well as inside Western Sahara. Some of the food needs for the camps' 165,000 residents grow out of these small oases of hope. The vegetable gardens are one of many self-supporting programs initiated by Sahrawi exiles.…
Fifteen years ago, conditions in Sahrawi camps were similar to those in northern Iraq, coastal Bangladesh, and the southern Sudan. Today, while refugees and displaced persons in much of the Third World are suffering from starvation and disease, most Sahrawi exiles are healthy. In the hanada there are no listless faces, no blank gazes. The Sahrawid have implemented a self-supporting, comprehensive health-care system, the main thrust of which is preventive medicine.…
The World Bank and other non-governmental organizations only recently have begun to make development projects people-centered; the Sahrawis, on the other hand, have focused on building human capacities throughout their 16 years in exile. With a minimal supply f books, paper, and visual aids, the Sahrawis have created pubic schools (from the nursery through secondary levels), vocational training programs, and adult education classes. For the Sahrawis, developing human resources is a way of clearing the roadblocks for the journey home.…
While may African countries remain tied to foreign aid, the Sahrawis have opted for self-sufficiency. Emphasizing grassroots participation, indigenous training, and the informal sector, the Sahrawis have created an enabling economic environment out of their otherwise harsh surroundings. In November 1975, within the first months of exile, the Sahrawis decided that they could not entrust their fate no outside donors. They organized themselves, even without supplies, using whatever resources were available. Because they channeled energies at the local level, everyone became involved in the daily life of their communities. People felt empowered rather than overwhelmed. Sixteen years later, the Sahrawis are meeting the most basic needs of food, clothing, and housing through local production. By encouraging individuals to show the way, the Sahrawi development strategy has produced a vibrant labor force…
During the afternoon hours of intense heat, Sahrawi men gather to play desert chess (dama) while the women take up another traditional game, es-sig. The afternoon is also the time for tea; in the desert, one does not live on water alone. As the proverb goes, the first glass it as bitter as life, the second as soft as love, and the third as sweet as death.
CASH AND CUSTOM
Kava is the Pacific's indigenous drug, and it has spawned a growing number of kava bars in the country of Vanuatu. In the capital, Part Vila, alone, more than 60 nakamals (Kava bars) are doing business.
In Vanuatu's rural, outer islands, people in the main continue to drink kava in a more traditional, ritualized manner; in town, however, there has been a brisk transformation of kava from sacred substance to recreational drug. Ironically, during the same years that this commodification of kava and the drug's shift from gift to market economy were under way, kava also flowered as a conspicuous emblem of Vanuatu's tradition and identity. In local political discourse and ceremony, kava drinking has come to stand for the value and endurance of island kastom - the distinctive traditions that politicians like to evoke in order to foster sentiments of national unity and identity. People in Vanuatu today are debating kava's contrary functions: traditional sacred substance on the one hand, and cash crop and contemporary political icon on the other.
Western culture's long arm reaches some unlikely place, as this excerpt illustrates. Video and audio technology can be seen as the corrupter, or - since its influence on all cultures is not only inevitable but also beneficial - it can be used for art and education within communities.
My first exposure to that quintessential hero of American pop culture, Rambo, came in 1988 while I was in Buala village on the island of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands. Although I had missed out on the first epic Rambo movie, fortune would allow me to catch up on this latest film phenomenon, by seeing the second Rambo film. Rambo, at a village video open to anyone willing to pay the 60 cents admission price (about 25 cents US). The video showings run almost nightly on a VCR powered by a gasoline generator in a small house built out of corrugated iron and thatch, Insides, several rows of benches and the earthen floor accommodate an audience of 25 to 30 people. So it was that in 1988, while I was in Buala researching local recollections of World War II, my wife, four-year-old son, and I decided to see firsthand this new addition to village life. Here, after all, was a kind of latter-day cultural invasion not unlike that brought on by the military forces that flooded the Solomons during World War II with new kinds of people, technologies, and images on a scale unknown before or since.…
There is an obvious and important connection between [the] duties [of the Council of Chiefs]. "Reviving and promoting traditions" will require that young people take an interest in local culture. In particular, if the knowledge of local history and ancestry - the basis for collective identification with the land - is to be reproduced, storytelling, feasts, and ritual celebrations will have to contend with newer pursuits. Thus, for example, at a village church-day feast I attended not long ago, the custom dancers performing in the village plaza who are normally the center of attention on such occasions were competing with "fundraising" cardgame activities under way in an adjacent house. People crowed in to play and watch betting games, all to the accompaniment of recorded rock music and some been drinking. On the other hand, the electronic gadgets that bring a taste for rock music and Rambo may also be put to use in the service of custom, as in the now popular tape-recording and videotaping of custom stories and performances.
Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.