Dr. Norman Stanfield

I will be reviewing Heaney’s book alongside John Forrest’s hardback devoted to the same topic because they cover the same historical ground and interestingly, come to many of the same conclusions. But their differences are so diverse that in the end, each book illuminates topics not covered by the other.

Their differences of approach are stated up front in the first few pages of their books. Forrest makes a case for a modern socio-cultural point of view; he champions the cultural evolution theory as opposed to the genesis model. The latter suggests that the original form of a cultural movement was in its purist form which then became diluted and misunderstood (and polluted!?) by several succeeding generations of followers. More often than not, the first stage was even forgotten in its original form. It became “lost in the mists of time…” The former model favours evolution where change is the only constant as morris dance adapts to new sociological conditions, each one as optimal as the last because of its new cultural context. The mechanisms of change become the point of interest, rather than the untainted beginnings of morris dance.

Heaney takes an entirely different point of view. He says, “(The history of morris dance) is primarily a narrative history without an overarching framework of socio-cultural theory”. Still, he occasionally makes a socio-cultural observation, such as the thought that morris dance “renews itself in each generation”. He also describes “the taming of morris” in light of its past unruly behaviour, which I referred to as misrule in my dissertation: Rough Music, Rough Dance, Rough Play: Misrule and Morris Dance (2008).

On now to the business of reviewing Mr. Heaney's book.

Beginning with the very mundane, I was astounded by the weight of the paperback book as I pulled it out of its mail envelope -- almost three pounds! The equivalent 500-page paperback is less than half that weight. I’ve received other academic books from England that were also unbelievably hefty. I wonder why they print their books on such heavy paper?

In addition to the paperback copy of Michael Heaney's book, I also received a digital copy which turned out to be a real boon. After installing it on my iPad I was able to mark it up with profuse underlines and marginal notes, leaving my physical copy in its pristine state. Thank goodness for the Apple pencil! The online copy is also brilliant because it allows the reader to search its text at a whim, instead of laboriously sifting through the index at the back. Bookmarks are a breeze, and, it is much easier to carry around my less-than-one pound iPad than a three pound book!

In addition to the books by Heaney and Forrest, there is a third morris dance history book by John Cutting. Entitled History and the Morris Dance (2005), it’s a a breezy listing and light-hearted description of many of the same historical facts, acting rather like a Coles Notes.

Heaney and Forrest set out to meticulously provide a comprehensive view of morris dance as seen in the historical record. Each book is heavy going, at least for me. Although some may have issues with Cutting’s light-hearted presentation, I found his book a delight to read (albeit with a pinch of salt). I occasionally cross-referenced some of Cutting’s facts with the same information in Heaney and Forrest, and on the whole, the descriptions of all three authors was in fairly close agreement.

In regard to the fertility origin theory, Cutting sits on the fence, suggesting that the theory, despite being unfounded, may be a misunderstanding of a prehistoric culture of communal celebration, now obscured by time. I described a variation of this explanation in my post of July 7, 2023.

Although there are many articles and essays that debunk the origins of morris dance as a vestige of a fertility ritual, there are only two book-length studies that look at the myth in the context of a much broader, historical point of view. Each author dismisses the theory in relatively short order.

The two books are The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750, by John Forrest (1999), and The Ancient English Morris Dance by Michael Heaney (2023), the subject of this book review.

Interestingly, Forrest and Heaney have collaborated on the same topic in previous years. Annals of Early Morris (1991) was one of their first joint efforts and they have shared the stage on several occasions at conferences devoted to the history of morris dance. For example, The Histories of the Morris in Britain (2018), edited by Michael Heaney, is a collection of essays by both authors and a number of other contributors that came out of a conference of the same name in 2017.

Despite its obvious flaws, the fertility explanation of the origins of morris dance also implied a kind of positive, unrestrained, unmediated regeneration that is found in human nature and mirrored in the natural environment, especially during Spring. This Dionysian point of view originated in the Romantic Era of the 17th and 18th Centuries. It began as a response to the advent of scientific method, linear logic and critical points of view which arose during the previous Age of Enlightenment and its modernist agenda. But the fertility theory was also misguided and myopic.

I grant that some morris dancers speak lightly, and even jokingly, about the fertility theory when explaining morris dancing to the public. Although I understood the humour and the double-entendres, I have experienced an unfortunate side effect where members of the general public and the media believed the truth of the fertility theory, even as the morris dancers joked about it. Also, and most interestingly, the fertility theory is antithetical to female morris dancers who entered the morris dance world in the 1970s.

Be that as it may, the support for the theory continues, despite the historical evidence to the contrary. A proviso is sometimes added to the theory suggesting that we will never know the truth of the matter because the facts are ”lost in the mists of time”. Such hedges allow some (male) morris dancers to tacitly support the fertility-origin myth instead of actually abandoning it altogether.

It is this contradiction that may have partly inspired historians like Michael Heaney to set the record straight.

Ever since morris dance was revived in the late 1800s by elements of the English middle class, its performers and especially its advocates in England and elsewhere have described their new-found recreation as a folk custom with deep psychological and historical roots. Their explanation of its origins and meaning usually consisted of a fertility theory and an expression of national identity.

The fertility theory they espoused, whether in pamphlets, public announcements between dances, or on their websites, was understood to be a pan-European phenomenon. And its distinctly English character was seen as a marker of England’s historic national identity, embedded in its rural villages and byways.

The alleged origin of the Morris dance as a vestige of a pagan, prehistoric fertility ritual has been picked apart by many scholars since at least the Seventies, and yet the arguments of historians have been largely ignored. In my dissertation, I suggested that one of the reasons for the general reluctance of the rank-and-file morris dancer to question the fertility theory was the lack of an alternate theory. Others have noted that the theory favours the males point of view.

For that reason, I proposed a theory of misrule which has a demonstrable presence in English history and was equally exercised by men and women, albeit in differing manifestations.

Mr. Heaney’s book is an enormous historical undertaking with a profuse and likely definitive description of the history of morris dance from a historian’s point of view, as opposed to a cultural theorist. He examined and discusses countless archival sources although he rarely speculates on their cultural context. More on this later.

My question, as I poured over his book, was simple; did it support or refute the thesis and narrative of my dissertation, “Rough Music, Rough Dance, Rough Play: Morris Dance and Misrule”? It is freely available from the library of the University of British Columbia.

I had proposed an alternate theory of the origins of morris dance that was derived from the ancient culture of misrule, rather than the prevailing yet embattled theory that the dance is a vestige of a pre-historic fertility cult, unknowingly sustained by the folk, with characteristics that contributed to the national identity of England.

Interestingly, misrule is also a major, historical cultural marker in England, Europe and even other parts of the world.

It’s been exactly a year since my last post to this page, dated June 2022.

However, I recently got wind of a new publication that piqued my interest. Since receiving a physical and digital copy, my ethnomusicological and ethnochoreological interest in morris dance has been reignited. The book is The Ancient English Morris Dance by Michael Heaney, recently published by Archaeopress in the UK (Summertown, Oxfordshire, 2023).

I read the book as somewhat of an insider, having been a morris dancer and musician with the Vancouver Morris Men from 1986 to 2000. I am also an ethnomusicologist (UBC, 2008) with an interest in ethnochoreology. My PhD dissertation, entitled Rough Music, Rough Dance, Rough Play, was devoted to an alternate explanation of the cultural roots of morris dance.

In the coming weeks, I plan to review Heaney's book, in part to see if it agrees with my dissertation.

Thanks to my renewed interest in the shakuhachi (See my page, “Zen Shakuhachi Lessons”) I find myself revisiting Buddhism in this Page, “Dr. Norman Stanfield”. I launched the latter page after I retired from teaching at the school of music at UBC, thinking that some of my students may be interested in following me.

Like so many young people in the late 60s, I got hooked on Zen Buddhism. But unlike so many, I had access to Buddhist Studies in the UBC Religious Studies department, under the tutelage of Dr. Shotaro Iida. My coursework became a minor stream during my bachelor of music studies, replacing psychology.

When I enrolled in a university school of music, I was looking for answers to the sort of questions young people have asked from time immemorial, but with a distinct musical slant. No surprise there, given that I was learning to become a professional classical musician. I had doubts about the purpose of playing classical music to modern audiences, not to mention its reputation as an unreliable career path and unsteady source of income. And then there was the enigma of stage fright.

Being enrolled in psychology as a minor convinced me there were no ready answers to my music angst there, only endless case studies and double binds. Freud and Jung, not to mention everything published in the latest editions of Psychology Today, seemed a long way off, if ever. Although I acknowledged that the first years of psychology were devoted to learning the tools that would be used for later studies in the study of the mind, I wasn’t a Psychology major so the value to me was dubious.

Then along came Alan Watts during my third year of undergraduate studies. I wasn’t alone in my discoveries; the “age of Aquarius” set the stage for all of us baby boomers in the 60s.

Little did I know that so many years later, I would still be exploring Buddhism, or more properly, Buddhology, still pondering enigmatic concepts like the non-self, the emptiness of all “things” (i.e., nothingness, or is it no-thingness?) And what about the existential gulf between the music messenger and the audience receiver?

I decided it would be interesting to revisit the world of Buddhism by reading a couple of books that provide overviews for beginners. As somebody who has studied Buddhism for many years, I was curious to see what the authors choose to describe, given the severe limitations imposed by their publishers. Would I choose the same information? Would I learn something new?

The books I chose are Stephen Asma, Buddha for Beginners (1996) and Damien Keown, Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction (2000). The former is a graphic novel with multiple black-and-white illustrations to supplement the sparse text, and the latter is heavy on the text, but very economical with its words. They are 145 pages and 132 pages, respectively.

What struck me about both books is how much Buddhist beginner books have moved on from the books that fed my curiosity decades ago. They both explore Buddhist ethics and morality instead of focusing almost entirety on enlightenment in a successful balance that was missing from popular books of long ago. Each author also decries the earlier descriptions of Buddhism, especially Zen, as inscrutable and esoteric and go to some lengths to find parallels in Western philosophy.

Those readers who have an interest in Zen may be surprised and disappointed to see their passion is barely mentioned. The authors present Buddhism’s universal, basic concepts from the home of the Buddha and Buddhism, South Asia (India and Sri Lanka). All the prime texts originate in these countries before they travelled and transformed throughout East Asia.

Keown’s classic Buddhologist’s viewpoint is concerned with basic definitions and the flow of Buddhist philosophical history. He does not shy away from the western scientific skepticism surrounding karma and rebirth, while acknowledging their centrality in the Buddhist belief system. Asma also presents Buddhism’s origin story and later history, but he also tackles big issues like the non-self and the double-bind of reincarnation of the non-self, also referencing the earliest texts in Pali.

Interestingly, Keown spends quite a bit of time on meditation (vipassanā) and its mechanisms, whereas Asma simply gives us an overview.

Both come down rather hard on the later Mahāyāna stage of Buddhism in Tibet and East Asia, and Buddhism in the West. Both authors are most definitely not Buddhists with an agenda, but neither are they free of any bias, given their Western social science roots. Buddhists will be quick to point out that their revelations about Buddhist spirituality stem from study, not first-hand experience.

I recently Googled "Buddhism and Postmodernism" on a whim and discovered a vast amount of interest which took me completely by surprise. I have followed postmodernism since I started teaching at ethnomusicology and sociomusicology at UBC. Postmodernism is a complex theory that questions the "upward" moving, constantly improving evolution of culture and humanity. "Not so!" says Pomo. "Oh yes, it is," says Modernism, and on it goes. It also questions the truth of "the truth:".

I picked out one article from many because it encapsulated the struggle between both sides of the argument. Ann Gleig (The Emergence of Buddhist Postmodernism? Journal of Global Buddhism, 15 (2014): 15-33) sees a battle being waged between the first Western adopters of Buddhism, which she lumps together with the Hippie Generation (now boomers) and the Gen X and Y cohorts who emerged from the punk rock scene and Nirvana.

Among the millennials are modernists who are techno savvy and see the endless possibilities of improving Buddhism with “borrowings” from other religions, western philosophy and digital technology. They describe "hacking" the brain to achieve Buddhist insight. And then there are the postmodernists who question the very core of Buddhism while recognizing there might be some useful bits.

Boomer Buddhists are left standing at the side of the road, saying, "What’s going on!?"

“As the world turns”. The latest edition of the English Dance and Song magazine (winter, 2021), published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, features some comments that reflect the changing nature of English Folk Arts.

The CEO of the EFDSS reminds the readers that the society is intent on changing their society’s name to reflect its desire to be more inclusive, and that suggestions would be appreciated. In a column entitled Rethinking Folk Singing, the author expresses doubts about the far and recent past of conceptions around English Folk and its music while expressing a hope that it can be redefined for the sake of inclusiveness without being tainted by the familiar English far right nationalist politics.

We also learn that the EFDSS is redefining social folk dance to accommodate Covid distance requirements and a new emphasis on genderless dance instruction, avoiding all references to “ladies” and “gents”.

On a less contentious note, a woman columnist who is both musician and mother ponders the striking similarity between folk music and children’s songs, especially lullabies. Cut from the same cloth, but what exactly is that fabric, asks the new EFDSS?