The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan coined the expression “pathways of urban life” to describe the musical practices of a small British town. These pathways are made up of the web of social acts of those taking part in that musical life, and they hold so long as the relationships, and the habits they produce, retain their force and continuity. It is … Read more →
No single material defines our era. Stone and iron are still used in massive quantities, on a scale never before imagined; the same goes for sand, all the other metals, leathers, wood, and so on. And we have added, as a novelty, plastic and all the derivatives of petroleum. The last of these has led some to think of ours … Read more →
The perennial tradition — perennial philosophy, perennial wisdom, or eternal tradition — is supposedly the common substratum of all historical knowledge from the very origin of human culture: that which links together the great philosophical, religious, ethical, moral, and spiritual ideals, and so on. Well, this tradition does not exist. There are, of course, contents that may be shared, or … Read more →
When El Fary appeared on television, my grandmother used to say: “That man is a great artist.” I will not deny him his talents — who lacks them entirely? — but what interests me here is the heterogeneity of contexts in which the label artist gets applied. El Fary is one, of course, and so is every imaginable Spanish folclórica … Read more →
In ancient Rome, Greek was the language of culture, so much so that even the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in it. The empire, however, was Rome, and Rome gave its tongue to the lands it conquered — one of whose descendants, through another empire, the Spanish, reached further still. English too has had its empire, and still has … Read more →
Traditionalism is an ideology that regards certain past institutions as the most perfect and effective and links them with truth. It is a modern ideology, first explicitly formulated in the political circles that, in nineteenth-century France, reacted against the ravages of the Revolution. The concrete forms to which they appealed were those of the Ancien Régime: throne and altar. Since … Read more →