[Tango-L] What is Tango? (Or Tango Categories) - Part 1

[Trini y Sean (PATangoS)]

Peter Esser sent me an excellent email that he was unable to post on Tango-L due to formatting.  With his permission, I am posting it with some formatting modifications.

Hi Trini, sure, if you can figure a way to send it to the list, go right ahead. Could serve as "field research" if there are any thoughtful responses.  As a btw, I did some of this work as part of my dissertation (I went back to school after I retired).  What I sent you is an abbreviated version and, of course, the tango part is new.

Please add my name,
Peter Esser
(July 2009 -- Buenos Aires)
peterwesser at oregonducks.org


What is tango?
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What is our conception of tango?
What would  a category called “tango” look like? 
Is the traditional Argentine tango music an important element of the dance?
Is there such a thing as “the real, authentic, prototypical tango?”
Is all tango rooted in the Argentine tradition?


Why even ask such questions?
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The point is, we do ask such questions directly and often inferentially, sometimes generating word fights and turf fights.

So, can we not simply defer to authority, in this case, let a venerable milonguero, or tango poet, or tango musician/composer steeped in the tradition, tell us – this is tango, and this is not; and this is this style of tango?

Conversely we could go along with Humpty Dumpty who famously said: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

Such an anything goes approach would, of course, render the concept tango meaningless. Yet, how can we deal with what seems a confusing situation, namely, that many different styles of dancing (even to different genres of music) are blithely lumped together and are called tango? 

Let’s take a look at what contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have to say about the why and what-fore of categories, and then try to structure a category tango.  This might go a long way to answer the above questions.


A little background on category research (in a somewhat short hand manner).
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Most of the following is motivated by George Lakoff’s book “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.”   (This is the place to go for digging deeper into the subject).

Human beings must categorize, we couldn’t deal with all the myriad details without lumping together things “that belong together,” that have certain properties in common.

We reason and make inferences on the basis of categories.  For the longest time, going back to the time of Aristotle, categories were thought to be unproblematic, one looked for the essential X that certain things have in common and this commonality then defined the category.  Interestingly, it was readily assumed that things out there in the world were already organized, already categorized and we could learn by and by this organization, put things in the proper category boxes.  There was no human contribution to this organization, the human mind did not contribute to understanding, to categorizing – other than finding the ready-made. 

(In the case of tango, what would that common X be, what is the essence of tango, what do salon style, milonguero style, canyengue, nuevo tango, international/ball room tango, alternative tango, show tango, Finnish tango, etc. have in common?)

Ludwig Wittgenstein broke with the established notion of looking for “the necessary and sufficient conditions” that supposedly define all members of a given category.  He argued for the “family resemblance of things.”  In other words, instead of categorizing on the basis of a priori speculation we need to look and see.

According to Lakoff, Wittgenstein made a move in the right direction, but didn’t go far enough.  More recently, how we categorize has become a major field of study thanks to the pioneering work of Eleanor Rosh which started in the 1970s. 

Empirical research by cognitive scientists shows that our somatic interactions with the environment play an important role in how we categorize.  John Dewey anticipated this insight, for he argued that we humans are not a transparency, but we are a force.  We actively shape our world, our understanding of the world.   Some of us (individuals and groups large and small) sometimes do a good job, sometimes not.  

Back to Lakoff in our breathless manner.  Many categories, and consequently our concepts, are greatly influenced and shaped by culture and may change over time.  Not all members that inhabit a category (there are prototypes, ideal types, exemplars, social stereo types, and others) have equal weight from a cognitive perspective.  There are members that are better examples of a category.  These are called prototypes.

Prototypical examples of the category fruit are apples and oranges.  
Saws and hammers are prototypical tools.  Let’s not forget the cultural components and hemispheric view points of our categorizing. 
(What would be a prototypical member of the category tango?)

Part 2 to Follow