The Sound of Navajo Country

One can “hear” Navajo voices threading throughout Kristina Jacobsen's The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging. This monograph explores how Navajo musicians negotiate the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as Diné people through expressive cultural forms. These forms need not be precontact cultural practices to engender a sense of cultural continuity. Country music is considered in many respects the unofficial national music of the Navajo nation. In this respect, Jacobsen's book is akin to ethnographies by David Samuels (Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, University of Arizona Press, 2004) and Aaron Fox (Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture, Duke, 2004), which also explore how identity emerges at the intersections of speech, song, and the country music genre as it is practiced in local contexts. As with Apache country musicians, aesthetics of voice and musical sound are intimately tied to a Navajo politics of belonging.While anthropologists have long understood that cultural identity and language use are separable but interrelated social processes, The Sound of Navajo Country illustrates how embodying (or not) discursively constructed markers of cultural authenticity can have tangible impacts on people's lived realities. Jacobsen identifies the operant ideologies circulating among Navajo people that connect language with other intersecting identity categories such as ethnic phenotype or race, gendered bodies, and class. She systematically unpacks the multilayered semiotic web of meaning that performers navigate with respect to how Navajo people should and should not sound.Recognizing that comedy and humor can articulate shared cultural understandings that go unstated in other contexts, Jacobsen incorporates into her text the “voice” of legendary Navajo comedian Vincent Craig. Throughout the book, Craig functions as an unofficial master of ceremonies, and his inward-gazing humor is a launching point for many of Jacobsen's own keen observations. Craig's comedic rendering of the jaan (from the generic English “John”) stereotype of a Navajo person perceived to be lower-class (rezneck) provides a foil for Jacobsen's exploration of what Michael Herzfeld (2014) has termed “cultural intimacy,” whereby someone fulfilling the jaan role is perceived by cultural insiders as a distinctive kind of Navajo person but seen as embarrassing when presented to an outward gaze. Jaan indexes several intertwined concepts: ethnic/racial phenotype connected to blood quantum (full blood versus diluted with white blood or polluted with black blood); language (speaking a lower prestige form of Navajo or heavily accented English/Navadlish); location (a “deep” reservation dweller out of place off the reservation); and class (an uneducated lower-class person).The jaan concept is central to Jacobsen's theoretical frame because jaan is the “standardized” sound against which many Navajo musicians define their own voice and musical sound. Jaan adjectivally attaches to aesthetic features and music-making practices associated with a narrowly construed genre of country music that Navajo reservation bands have reproduced with “rez” sonic features since the 1960s. These features include the booming echo of the chapter house, loud amplification and shoddy gear, muddy mixing techniques, and sounds associated with Navajo singing voices. The jaan sound, or “rez band sound,” is thus a sonic chronotype around which generational nostalgia and felt attachment to form coalesce for middle-aged and older Navajos. The rez band sound is actively cultivated by some bands—including the one Jacobsen performs with as a part-time singer and lap steel player moonlighting as an anthropologist—as a means for garnering fans among the middle-aged rez-dwelling population. Cultivating this “authentic” jaan sound can (re)produce a kind of social citizenship that carries privileges for musicians such as access to gigs at reservation events.By contrast, Jacobsen's other case studies demonstrate that performers who stray from listener expectations for rez bands risk “civic estrangement,” resulting in their exclusion from certain public spheres. For example, Chucki Begay and Radmilla Cody must navigate tricky cultural expectations of how Navajo women's voices should sound, what (and if) they should sing, and how their bodies should appear in performance. Begay eschews the rez band sound in favor of a more blues-like sound and thus pursues more opportunities “off-rez” and in border towns. Cody adopts vocal practices that index her blackness on the one hand (using R&B stylings and vocal timbre) and her Navajoness on the other with her choice of songs and her social positioning as a fluent Navajo speaker belonging to her maternal grandmother's clan. These performers embody a physical and sounding challenge to essentialized cultural constructions of phenotype, gender, and language.Finally, the voices within this ethnography hint at the trauma and anxiety indigenous communities are experiencing due to widescale language shift and perceived culture loss. How then are ethnographers to document and engage with the visceral affective and embodied experiences of indigenous community members as we explore sounding practices that are iconic of group identity? Jacobsen herself would likely offer up the creative process of collaborative songwriting as a form of applied scholarship that can bridge the gap between ethnographer and subject as we approach difficult topics (cf., Jacobsen, “Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice” 2017). Ethnographic songwriting can be a process of healing in trauma recovery as well as a deeply humanized form of documentation.Jacobsen connects her case studies to broader Navajo politics with respect to language and place forming a tightly woven and richly detailed text. Her companion website (www.kristina-jacobsen.com) provides several musical examples to illustrate the points made in the book. The Sound of Navajo Country should be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of vocal anthropology, popular music, the social construction of genre, and the contemporary expressive practices of indigenous peoples. It is also a fine teaching instrument for debunking the myth that Native American expressive practices are rooted only in the distant past

Aesthetics · Art · Identity (music) · Ideology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Navajo · Onomatopoeia · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology

• The Sound of Navajo Country

  Sara Snyder Hopkins•Ethnomusicology•2022

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• Cultural Intimacy

  Michael Herzfeld•Cultural Intimacy•2016

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• Cultural Intimacy

  Michael Herzfeld•Cultural Intimacy•2014

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• The Sound of Navajo Country

  Sara Snyder Hopkins•Ethnomusicology•2022

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