'Tenor in Culture'

Ivo Strecker

      The paper follows the lead of Stephen Tyler, Anne Salmond and others who have alerted us to the pitfalls of visual metaphors, and have urged us to pay more attention to the role of sound in culture. It also is inspired by Pierre Maranda's intimation of a 'resonant anthropology', and a number of ethnographic monographs such as Ellen Basso's 'A Musical View of the Universe', and Steven Feld's 'Sound and Sentiment', as well as ethnographic films like the Turkana trilogy by David and Judith MacDougall, or the Hamar trilogy by Joanna Head and Jean Lydall.
      The move towards hearing/listening/sensing rather than looking/viewing/seeing is supported by George Kennedy 's argument that rhetoric is a form of mental and emotional energy. Now, what pertains to rhetoric in particular also holds for life in general . We may therefore go ahead and study social relations and cultures as 'energetic fields'. This would involve concomitant concepts such as polarity, attraction and rejection, pulse, beat, rhythm, sound, vibration , resonance , tune, tuning and attuning, tone and tonality, dissonance, consonance , harmony, polyphony, and in fact the whole repertoire of musicological terminology.
      'Tenor' is one of these terms. First grounded in music where it was defined as "the voice part that was continuous", it was later metaphorically extended to mean a "general tendency, general drift of thought; purpose"(Collins). With regard to rhetoric, 'tenor' has been used by Ivor Richards to designate the primary subject of a metaphor, and by functional linguistics to refer to the interpersonal use of language.
      The usefulness of 'tenor' as a concept for social and cultural analysis is explored by focusing on: a) tenor prevailing in individual social relationships, or what James Fernandez has called the "electricity of the other 'you'"; b) tenor in specific social situations involving social groups and processes of tuning, attuning, synchronisation and persuasion; c) tenor in larger cultural configurations, involving a re-evaluation of Ruth Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture'. Most of the empirical examples used in the paper come, needless to say, from Hamar, Southern Ethiopia.

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