Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation / Edition 1

by David W. Samuels

Overview

As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernization—spiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity.
 
For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the community—as well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country band—David W. Samuels explores the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity.
 
Samuels analyzes how people on the reservation make productive use of popular culture forms to create and transform contemporary expressions of Apache cultural identity. As Samuels learned, some popular songs—such as those by Bob Marley—are reminiscent of history and bring about an alignment of past and present for the Apache listener. Thinking about Geronimo, for instance, might mean one thing, but “putting a song on top of it” results in a richer meaning. Samuels also proposes that the concept of the pun, as both a cultural practice and a means of analysis, helps us understand the ways in which San Carlos Apaches are able to make cultural symbols point in multiple directions at once. Through these punning, layered expressions, people on the reservation express identities that resonate with the complicated social and political history of the Apache community.
 
This richly detailed study challenges essentialist notions of Native American tribal and ethnic identity by revealing the turbulent complexity of everyday life on the reservation. Samuels’s work is a multifaceted exploration of the complexities of sound, of language, and of the process of constructing and articulating identity in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816526017
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	09/15/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David W. Samuels is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	ix
	Introduction: The Problem with Identity	3
1	A Sense of the Past	37
2	Quotation and History	67
3	The Band Era	96
4	Earmarks of Past and Place	123
5	Boe Titla's Idiosyncratic Authenticity	149
6	Meaningful Openings and Open Meanings	177
7	The First Intertribal Battle of the Bands in a Very Long Time	200
8	Everyday Ambiguities, Everyday Identities	232
	San Carlos Apache Pronunciation Guide	267
	Transcription Guide	271
	Notes	273
	References	297
	Credits and Permissions	315
	Index	317

Editorial Reviews

Samuels offers fresh ideas in a heart-felt writing style that should appeal to ethnographers, anthropologists, and anyone interested in the many functions music performs in human societies.”—Journal of the West
 
“This book fills a gap in the anthropology of contemporary music in Native North America. . . . Samuels offers a nuanced account of the centrality of ambiguity to identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation.”—Western Historical Quarterly
 
“Superbly written.”—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

From the Publisher