'Good Learning'
The PAATI masterclasses
'Good learning' is that which is in advance of development.'
-- Lev S. Vygotsky
By MATTHEW ISAAC COHEN
Folk wisdom has it that you never know as much about your field as you did when you were a graduate student. There is some truth in that: the atmosphere of intense debate, concentrated reading, singular concentration, and barely sublimated aggression heightens critical awareness and invests scholars-in-the-making with a buoyant sense of professional dedication. Maintaining this atmosphere requires constant effort. Teaching gives an excuse to keep up with general developments in the field, as long as one makes it a point to assign newly published books and articles. Attending and organizing workshops and seminars can also go part of the way. Inter-disciplinary faculty reading groups provide solace and stimulation for scholars in many universities. 'Think tanks' and institutes for advanced study likewise provide inspiration for limited numbers of people for limited periods of time. New models are needed, however, for experience shows that there are clear limitations to all of these approaches.The PAATI programme sponsored three masterclasses during 1998 and 1999 as a pilot project for a new kind of 'good learning.' Outstanding scholars in the field of Asian expressive culture were invited to submit a required reading list of 400-600 pages (including their own recent work) and then present on this reading and their research interests (past, present, and future) over three days of intense discussion at IIAS with the PAATI researchers and 8-12 additional faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and advanced graduate students. Stuart Blackburn (SOAS), a folklorist and anthropologist; Martin Stokes (University of Chicago), an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist; and David Shulman (Hebrew University), an Indologist and scholar of comparative religion, each brought their individual approaches and current passions to the attention of a highly eclectic group of literary scholars, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, philologists, and area experts from the Netherlands, France, Israel, Germany, the United States, South Korea, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Basic assumptions were queried, particular findings debated, soapboxes quickly erected and just as quickly knocked out from under participants, voices raised and silenced, and knowledge shared and built upon.
Each masterclass defined its own set of issues and had its distinctive tone. Blackburn concentrated on the usefulness of 'performance' as a research topic across cultures, and took his own two major projects on South Indian bow song and shadow puppet theatre as examples of how to operationalize theoretical questions in the definition of performance. Ethical issues about who owns and represents performance texts were central to the discussion. Stokes presented the early stage of a major work-in-progress on music as cultural intimacy. Examples ranged far and wide, from Country and Western to classical Javanese gamelan to Egyptian popular song to Sardinian folk music, and the theoretical discussion was constantly enlivened by looking at videos and listening to CD recordings. Shulman presented the case for an affective approach to understanding myth, art, literature, and celebration, with reference in particular to his work on South Indian civilization. Building on his own and other's explorations of framing, masks, and games (including his recent book on Shiva's game of dice and the Satyajit Ray film, The Chess Players), Shulman argued strongly for the importance of coming to grips with the emotional registers invoked in the reception of art, as a level of comprehension beyond structure.
Investing the time necessary for a significant amount of reading in a field not entirely one's own, placing one's trust in a 'master' to lead discussions over several days time, and taking the chance to voice an opinion on a topic which one might not have yet mastered: all involve a temporary renunciation of professional authority and a possible risk of injury to one's dignity. But as with the legendary kings of South and Southeast Asia, who had to become medicant ascetics to achieve virtue, such apparent regressions are necessary in the service of good learning. Shared prior texts, a discursive event, and plenty of time: this is where true dialogue begins. *
Dr Matthew Cohen is a member of the PAATI Research Programme at the IIAS.
E-mail: mcohen@let.leidenuniv.nl