Abstract
This paper outlines the relevance of the idea of rhythm to cultural anthropology, with specific suggestions for a medical anthropology of rhythm. By reconsidering the fluid nature of the concept of rhythm in ordinary language, the paper defines rhythm functionally in terms of a temporal order that anticipates, suspends and fulfills on the level of the visceral, physical, ecological, institutional as well as the moral. Although the paper identifies most explicitly the link between the bodily and social rhythm, it tries to suggest a cosmic background in the interaction of the social and bodily rhythms. The paper is divided into three parts: 1) the general problem of defining rhythm, 2) the concept of rhythm from its origin, and 3) the concept of rhythm in cultural theory since Durkheim. Further readings in particular reference to medical anthropology are often indicated in the notes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Asad, Talal 1987 On Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasticism. Economy and Society 16(2).
Aschoff, J. 1954 Zeitgeber der Tierischen Tagesperiodik. Naturwissenschaften 41: 49–56.
Bastide, R. 1985 Le candomblé de Bahia. Paris: Mouton.
Bataille, G. 1962 Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo. New York: Walker and Company.
Benveniste, E. 1971 Problems in General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press (French edition 1966).
Bergson, H. 1970 Oeuvres. Paris: Presses Universitarires de France.
Bourdieu, P. 1963 The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Towards Time.In Mediterrean Countryman: Essays in Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean. J. Pitt Rivers, ed. Paris: Mouton.
— 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
— 1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bourguignon, E. 1976 Possession. San Francisco: Chandler.
Bünning, E. 1973 The Physiological Clock. Third edition. New York: Springer Verlag.
Condon, W. 1986 Communication: Rhythm and Structure.In Rhythm in Psychological, Linguistic and Music Process. J. Evans and M. Clynes eds. Springfield: Charles Thomas Publishers.
Cooper, G. W., and L. B. Meyer 1956 The Rhythmic structure of Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Crapanzano, V., and V. Garrison, eds. 1977 Case Studies in Spirit Possession. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Daniélou, A. 1967 Sémantique musicale: Essai de psychophysiologie auditive. Paris: Hermann.
Derrida, J. 1974 Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
— 1987 The Postcard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— 1982 The Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— 1992 Given Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Devisch, R. 1993 Weaving the Threads of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dewey, J. 1989 Art as Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dickinson, J. 1961 Monastic Life in Medieval England. London: Adam & Charles Black.
Durkheim, E. 1965 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Eliade, M. 1957 Time and Eternity in Indian Thought.In Man and Time. J. Campbell, ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
— 1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
— 1971 The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fabian, J. 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Feld, S. 1982 Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Foucault, M. 1979 Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.
Fox, J. J., ed. 1988 To Speak in Paris: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. New York: Cambrige University Press.
Fraisse, P. 1982 Rhythm in Music.In Psychology of Music. D. Deutsch, ed. New York: Academic Press.
— 1974 Psychologie du rythme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Gabrielsson, A. 1986 Rhythm in Music.In Rhythm in Psychological, Linguistic and Musical Processes. J. Evans and M. Clynes, eds. Springfield: Charles C Thomas Publishers.
Geertz, C. 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gell, A. 1992 Anthropology of Time. Providence: Berg.
Glasser, R. 1974 Time in French Life and Thought. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Granet, M. 1934 Le pensée chinoise. Paris: Editions Albin Michel.
— 1932 Festivals and Songs of Ancient China. New York: Dutton.
Gurevich, A. 1985 Categories of Medieval Culture. London: Routledge.
Gurvitch, G. 1964 The Spectrum of Social Time, Dordrecht: Reidel.
Halberg, F. et al. 1967 Circadian System Phase: An Aspect of Temporal Morphology.In The Cellular Aspects of Biorhythms. Von Mayersbach, H., ed. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Hassard, J. ed. 1990 Sociology of Time. London: Macmillan.
Heidegger, M. 1962 Being and Time. New York: Harper&Row.
Heisenberg, W. 1958 Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row.
Holm, N. ed. 1982 Religious Ecstasy. Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell.
Hubert, H. and Mauss, M. 1909 Mélanges: D'Histoire Des Religions. Paris: Félix Alcan.
Husserl, E. 1964 The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jakobson, R. 1987 Grammatical Parallelism and Its Russian Facet.In Language in Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jeanmaire, H. 1951 Dionysos: Histoire du culte de Bacchus. Paris: Payot.
Jousse, M. 1974 L'anthropologie du geste. Paris: Gallimard.
— 1925 Le style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs. Paris: Beauchesne.
Klages, L. 1974 Von Wesen des Rhythmus.In Ludwig Klages Sämtliche Werke. Bonn: Herbert Grundmann.
Kleinman, A. 1980 Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley, University of California Press.
— 1986 Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kramer, J. D. 1988 The Time of Music. New York: Schirmer Books.
Kuriyama, S. 1994 The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the Chinese Conceptions of the Body.In Body, Subject and Power in China. T. Barlow and A. Zito, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krieger, D. 1979 Endocrine Rhythms. New York: Raven Press.
Laderman, C. 1987 Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Landes, D. 1983 Revolution in Time, Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Langer, S. 1953 Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Leach, E. 1961 Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone Press.
Leroi-Gourham, A. 1993 Gesture and Speech. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1981 The Naked Man. New York: Harper & Row.
— 1983 The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— 1987 Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge.
Lewis, I. 1989 Ecstatic Religion. 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge.
Lex, B. 1979 The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance.In The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. E. D'Aquili et al., eds. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mauss, M. 1969a Oeuvres 2. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
— 1969b Oeuvres 3. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
— 1967 The Gift, New York: Norton.
— 1979a Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, London: Routledge.
— 1979b Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge.
Meschonnic, H. 1982 Critique du Rythme. Paris: Verdier.
Moore-Ede, M. C. et al. 1982 The Clocks That Time Us. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mumford, L. 1934 Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Nietzsche, F. 1967 The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Vintage.
North, J. 1975 Monasticism and the First Mechanical Clocks.In The Study of Time, vol. 2. J. T. Fraser and N. Lawrence, eds. New York: Springer Verlag.
Oesterreich, T. 1966 Possession, Demonical and Other, Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. Secaucus: University Books.
Pittendrigh, C. 1960 Circadian Rhythms and the Circadian Organization of Living Systems. Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology 25:159–182.
Pollitt, J. 1972 Art and Experience in Classical Greece. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ricoeur, P. 1984–88 Time and Narrative. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Roseman, M. 1991 Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rouget, G. 1985 Music and Trance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sachs, C. 1953 Rhythms and Tempo. London: J. M. Dent and Sons.
Sargant, W. 1974 The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism, and Faith Healing. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Seeger, A. 1987 Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sorokin, P. 1943 Sociocultural Causality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sorokin, P., and R. Merton 1937 Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis. American Journal of Sociology. 1937, 42:615–29.
Thompson, E. P. 1967 Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present 38: 56–97.
Turner, B. 1984 The Body and Society. New York: Oxford Unviersity Press.
Wehr, T. and F. Goodwin, eds. 1983 Circadian Rhythms in Psychiatry. Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press.
White, L. 1962 Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Yeston, M. 1976 The Stratification of Musical Rhythm. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Young, M., and T. Schuller, eds. 1988 The Rhythms of Society. London: Routledge.
Zerubavel, E. 1979 Patterns of Time in Hospital Life: A Sociological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— 1981 Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— 1988 The Seven Day Cycle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
I want to thank Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman for their unfailing support and comradely criticism throughout my reading and writting for this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
You, H. Defining rhythm: Aspects of an anthropology of rhythm. Cult Med Psych 18, 361–384 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01379231
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01379231