The Mediation of Cultural Memory: Digital Preservation in the Cases of Classical Indian Dance and the Cherokee Stomp

Dance
ELLEN CUSHMAN GHOSH
AND

SHREELINA

INDIAN dance comes to be preserved with digital technologies and wherein cultural memory is codied for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. At least thats the story on the face of these images. Be it representing and learning classical Indian dance through images and emoticons or an online educational resource for a sovereign indigenous nation, the question of how cultural expression will be transformed by mediation is indeed vital to any effort to preserve cultural heritage. On the one hand, digital preservation of cultural heritage can serve in a positive way to pull old objects into the limelight of cultural recognition and understanding (Straw 4). But for some cultural practices, a strict demarcation exists between what can and cannot be mediated, a demarcation that rests on the understanding that mediation can do damage to that which it hopes to preserve. In
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this article, we explore how digital preservation of cultural danceforms inuences the enactment of cultural memories. We begin by dening mediation, then illustrate this denition of mediation using two cases: mediated forms of Indian classical dance and Cherokee stomp dance. Our rst case concerns the preservation of classical Indian dance that is considered to be a divine art that was revealed to humans by God. Transmitting knowledge of this art involves a great deal of respect for the art and also a God-like reverence for the Guru. For Indian classical dance to persevere in the cultural memory, the corporeal presence of the Guru as teacher and student as performer has been a traditional necessity in learning the performance. Shreelina learned from her guru to consider the body and each movement made by the body as an offering to God. This is aligned to the devadasi philosophy of performance. In digitizing the dance for preservation on a CD and through Second Life avatars, these relationships and coordinates of the guru, performer and audience become redened. While digitizing dance and using software to re-create movements may be a great way of having cyber-presence, the presence of the body is believed to be essential and irreplaceable in the practice of the art. Our second case centers on the educational resource, The Allotment Era in Cherokee History, which was made for and with the Cherokee Nation in order to present a counter-narrative to the history of the settlement of Oklahoma. In making this piece, controversy among the collaborators arose about the types and kinds of cultural information to be included. Though the Nation sanctions this new media installation, the representations of certain tribal practices were deemed too deeply rooted in the everyday enactments of cultural memory to be shared with outsiders. This interactive history preserves only what the Nation wanted outsiders to see, and in so doing, it marks the differences between the cultural memories of the Cherokees as a tribe and the Cherokee Nation as a sovereign government. While such tensions between tribes and nations are nothing new, scholars rarely glimpse the behind-the-scenes negotiations involved when determining what cultural memories are too sacred to be digitized and resist preservation. We nd that these examples mark the places where digital preservation disembodies cultural memories to the point that they no

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longer enact the spiritual and social relationships central to these dances. With such compromise to the cultural integrity of the dances, those who embody these cultural memories (gurus and Cherokee tribal members) resist their digital mediation. When enacted as embodied practices, classical Indian dance and Cherokee stomp dance create cultural memories that exist as moments of cultural perseverance. As a potential other to digital preservation, cultural perseverance requires a signicant shift in how we understand media and the act of mediation. As stakeholders in the cultures whose knowledge we hope to represent in our mediations, we share how we address the demands and limitations of new media technologies using the local esthetics of our respective cultures as guiding frameworksthe representations of cultural knowledge, history, and memory we produce thus honor local perspectives of mediation; and these local perspectives on new media technologies help to build understandings of mediation as embodied practice that is at once traditional and popular.

Mediation as Sign Use and Social Practice

We dene mediation in two senses because doing so allows us to characterize both the semiotic and social aspects of representation: rst, mediation includes the sign technologies or representational tools which humans use to create meaning (e.g., language, writing systems, digital media, etc.); and second, mediation represents the in-between place where negotiation between micro and macro social formations have been successful in stabilizing practices. We recognize that both senses of our denition have long been studied. This denition of mediation is experienced at multiple levels of social action and proves especially important for the local cultures whose practices, memories, and perspectives we hope to represent. In the rst sense of our denition of mediation as sign technology, we attempt to recognize how the tools we use to make meaning inuence those people, activities, and objects being represented. Mediation as sign technology has been studied as linguistic semiotic (Derrida), simulacra (Baudrillard), remediation (Bolter and Grusin), and as intermedia (Hayles). While these ideas have inuenced modern understandings of meaning making processes of interpretation and

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production, were particularly interested in the ways that digital media offer a reform of previous media, further distancing and decontextualizing the sign from that which it signies. And though this distancing occurs when remediating objects into digital media, we do not take this distancing to the extreme that Baudrillard does with his notion of simulacra, where the copy becomes the real. Mediation, as a process and product of meaning making, is always an embodied act that is located in time and space, even when the products created are digital mediations of cultural memories. For, as Hayles correctly points out, there remains a complex transaction between body and text in any digital mediation: in refusing an either/or choice between media effects and a human lifeworld, [she] again invoke[s] the necessity to think in terms of multiple causalities, complex dynamics, and emergent possibilities (7) that occur in the events and products of meaning making. Hayles focuses attention on the activities and processes that inform the digital works. The shift, then, is not merely from analog to digital subjectivity, both of which could be described as realist entities. Rather, the more profound change is from form to process, from preexisting bodies to embodied materialities that are linked to one another by complex combinations of processes based in analog resemblances and coding relationships (211). When digitally preserving cultural practices held in high esteem by our peoples, we understand that the material reality of the cultural memory becomes volt and code, through processes that distance the cultural memory from practice while remediating this cultural memory into a different embodied materiality. This process of distancing through remediation presents a tension implicit in any act of remediation, a tension that begs the question: Why and how does mediation work to bridge current practices of digital preservation into stabilized practices of cultural memory? To answer this question, a denition of mediation must also account for the social practices involved in the process of representation. Mediation unfolds in the social practices of individuals as they navigate between micro and macro social formations; this understanding of everyday practice as mediation has also long been studied: Giddens calls this nexus of micro and macro social practices a praxis; Bourdieu a habitus; Foucault a statement (Archaeology); Scott infrapolitics; and De Landa an assemblagewhatever its name, the location is roughly the same in the logic of everyday activity: it is the place

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where people act within structures, where these actors dispositions both follow and lay the tracks of organized behavior, where their discursive practices become solidied as knowledge structures, where their daily struggles push at and reproduce larger systems of regulated behavior, and where micro material realities and practices meet the macro of stabilized behaviors. Mediationcentral and necessary to the practices that unfold in these spaces of stabilized behavior can be understood as both sign technology use and enactment of stabilized behavior at once. Technologies of the Self, Foucaults later work undertaken just before his death, reveals how mediation, or discourse, forms these social wholes through technologies of production, sign systems, power, and the self (18). The four technologies of the self are each situated within a matrix of practical reason and are therefore traceable in everyday acts of mediation. These four technologies of the self include decisions to: (i) produce, transform, or manipulate things; (ii) use signs, meanings, symbols, or signication; (iii) determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends; and (iv) permit individuals to effect by their own means so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (18). Responsibilities to self and others as well as positive transformations of self and others are made possible through mediation. His last understanding of technologies of the self, as we suggest later, is particularly helpful in explaining why digital preservation can do damage to the cultural memories it seeks to preserve. To demonstrate this twofold denition of mediation, we briey explain our involvement in digital preservation of Indian classical and Cherokee Stomp dance, to show the degrees to which these cultural memories have been mediated practices. In tracing the evolution of dance from its most immediate forms, to the body as mediator, to the digitally mediated forms, we reveal how cultural perspectives on appropriate forms of mediation have limited the extent and scope of digital mediation. We will explore the presence and absence of the body and how body has been mediated and hypermediated in performance. Hypermediation of performance has often led to disembodiment of the cultural practice, rendering it in effective as a preservation of the cultural act. These examples reveal a vexing conundrum for those interested in digital preservation of cultural

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heritage: the greater the mediation of the performance, the greater the disembodiment of the performance. As the practice becomes more disembodied through mediation, the resistance to its digital mediation increases as its value as an accurate, fair, and valid representation of the cultural memory decreases. From the local perspective, the more mediated dance is, the less likely it is to enact cultural memory, adequately represent the heritage, or allow for cultural preservation. Certainly digital preservation has its benets, but it should not be mistaken for the cultural perseverance necessary to enact cultural memory.

Classical Indian Dance

The evolution of Indian dance can be traced from folk to classical to its current digital mediations. Classical dance began as a spiritual performance in the temples as an offering to God and the memory of Indian classical dance is associated with sacredness. The knowledge of the art is handed down from generation to generation by the Guru or the teacher. Guru is derived from the Sanskrit root [gr ], which means, to praise or invoke. Guru is considered to be the human form of abstract divinity that helps in illuminating ones knowledge and helping one realize God just as he himself has realized. Odissi dance, which is believed to be one of the oldest dances of India, has survived through the generations of the Guru-Shishya parampara or master-student tradition. Learning in the Guru-Shishya method involves complete surrendering to the Guru and absorbing the knowledge of the Guru in ones self. The Shishya or disciple is expected to embody the knowledge offered by the Guru. However, digitization of the dance and dance music is slowly creeping in with the availability of CDs for learning classical Indian dance, especially since thousands of diasporic Indians resort to long-distance learning through CDs, software and video sharing. Ethnographical inquiry into the teaching practices in the quaint town of Raghurajpur in Orissa (east India) and interviews with Odissi dancers in the US and India revealed both positive and negative reactions to projects to digitize a sacred cultural memory in the name of preservation.1 Originally, the practices and traditions of the ancient Odissi dance were seldom textually documented (Chatterjee 143). What is known about

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the origins of the dance was mostly transmitted orally by the guru (guide) to the shishya (disciple), thus preserving the sacred art alive in the memory. Stone carvings on the cave-walls of Udaygiri and Khandagiri reveal some practices of dance by women as early as 100 BC in the state of Orissa in east India. By rst and second century BC, Odissi dance started being performed in the temples of Orissa. These temple dancers, known as Maharis or Devadasis, were married to the deity of the temple and given the special privilege of dancing and singing in front of the image of the God, thus embodying the sacredness of the dance in an immediate fashion. The Muslim and British colonization was a major setback for the Devadasis who started being misunderstood as prostitutes and the patronage they received from Hindu kings dwindled too. Temple dancing stopped. But in order to keep the tradition alive, the practitioners of the temple dance in Orissan temples taught the art to young boys, called Gotipuas, who would often perform in front of the Lord or patrons dressed as girls. In the late twentieth century, Odissi dance was revived and given the status of a classical dance. Dance is a practice of everyday folk life as well as an instrument of the unique cultural identity and ethos of a group. In India, dance is an integral part of folk lives, and we have dances for every occasion. The birth of a child, sowing of seeds, harvest, marriage, mating, nding a mate, death, evoking the rain, missing ones lover, curing of an illness and numerous other occasions in different parts of India are celebrated with their unique dance ceremonies. One surviving folk dance is the Karakam practiced in South India where the dancer dances with a pot on his head in acrobatic movements in front of the Goddess to ward off epidemic. Other dances such as the Bhangra, or the Northeastern war dances, are integral to culture and a part of the ritual just as any other everyday practice of life. The presence of body is fully immediate in these dances. The folk dances are not set to any grammar of performance. They are spontaneous expressions of love, joy, reverence, sadness and so on. Odissi dance is a highly embodied practice that remains an immediate connection to God, a technology of self that allows individuals to, as Foucault nds, transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, [and] perfection (18). As an embodied practice, without any sign technologies it immediately enacts a relationship between person, God, and audience. However,

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the projects to preserve classical Indian dance have at times disembodied it. While re-mediating a sacred practice into a non-traditional medium has opened up a gamut of possibilities, it has also met kudos and criticisms from the gurus of Odissi dance in both the US and India. While some of the tribes vigorously tried to retain their cultural identities through their folk dances, some of the folk dances vied for the stature of classical dance or high art. At around 400 BC Natyashatra was written by Bharatmuni, a sage, apparently under the guidance of the mythical dancers and Hindu deity, Lord Shiva (Vatsyayan). The classical dances are those dances that adhere to the theories of movement, expression and performance, as prescribed by Bharatmuni. According to the Sangeet Natak Academy, which is the Academy of Performing Arts of the Government of India, the Indian classical dances include: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Manipuri, Mohiniaattam and Odissi. These classical dances are esoteric art-forms and require intensive training for perfection. Shiva, the Hindu god of creation was bestowed the credit of being the originator of the artistic expression of dance. When he performed the masculine dance of Tandava, his expressions took the shape of rivers, tress, mountains, air and so on. Every particle created is therefore a manifestation of a mood of Shiva. Shiva is also the virile god of procreation; his dance of union with goddess Parvati might have engendered the creation of life. Thus a series of myths regarding this ancient practice of humankind was formulated and transmitted down the generations orally. The divinity associated with classical dance inspires the quest for pristine perfection and rooted-ness to age-old tradition that is associated with classical dance. Classical dances almost always prescribe a set grammar, which contains the unwritten laws governing the nuances of physical movement of each classical dance. As the form of the dance evolved over hundreds of years, the knowledge of the grammar of the dance was transmitted by the Guru to the Shishya orally and through practice. Mediation of the sacred knowledge into written texts probably came much later. The grammar that Odissi follows was written down by Nandikeswar, the third-century Indian author of the dance text Abhinaya Darpana. They may be innovated over time, however, in some cultures (such as mine) neglecting the geometrical purity associated with the art, which is its very essence, is seen as a disrespect toward the art.

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So some would see traditional Odissi dance as disrespectful; it neglects the geometry of the body in its written mediation. Even though the gestures ceased to be a spontaneous spurge of emotional outbursts and began to be dened and strict, the memory of the dance still had an embodied mediation that allowed for rening and changing the nuances of the dance. Adhering to a grammar is important to preserve the pristine nature of a classical dance. Thus, the practice of oral knowledge transmission was slowly replaced by dependence of the book of grammar and the expectation of strict adherence to it. The oral practice of cultural preservation being the original method of the Guru-Shishya method of dance education, allowed the practice to change over time. Present day Gurus like Gangadhar Pradhan of Konark and Aloka Kanungo of Kolkata still impart their art through the Guru-Shishya method. In an interview with Pradhan, he demonstrated how a student might alter a piece of Odissi to suit him/herself. However, Pradhan feels that remediation of the oral knowledge into written text did not replace the original Guru-Shishya method of face-to-face interaction. Textualization of the nuances of the dance in the revered Sanskrit language probably also helped Odissi be accepted as a classical dance. In other words, these texts were not a replacement of the dance or the Guru-Shishya relationship, but served a mnemonic purpose for prompting the guru-shishya relationship and allowed for variation of the dance to be performed as the student gained expertise with the grammars of the dance. Classical dances were also re-mediated into temple gurines, solidifying the gestures and the perfect geometry of the dance forever. While dancers adhered themselves to the codes, the art of the dance became mediated into the stone sculptures. This also marked the emergence of semantic signiers in the dance coded in Natyashatra. For instance, the moon is depicted with the ngers of the left hand spread like a lotus and the index nger of the right hand pointed upwards and the tip of the middle nger lightly touching the tip of thumb. Many classical dance-forms started to be performed in the presence of an esoteric audience, often behind the closed doors of temples. In the practice of dance, body was present, as well as absent when depicted in the sculpture. Often regarded as dances to evoke Gods, they started to be organized into cults or gharanas that followed their own unique styles of performance.

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Cultural memory was preserved in these practices because they continued to embody the practice of dance and to rest upon the Guru-shishya relationship, even though these practices were guided by conventionalized forms mediated through writing and stone sculpture. Digital preservation of Indian dance, however, disembodies the action in ways that render it less potent as an enactment of spiritually transformative relations. Modern practice of classical dance involves various ways of assimilating secular and deviant themes in its rendering. The different styles developed from the classical form, often termed as modern dance, with denite inuence of western dances. Evolution of dance over the years moved from the strict adherence of the body to the codes on Natyashatra and the temple walls into an imbibing of grammars from other languages of movement, such as ballet and hiphop, and developing unique styles of Indian dance. Shreelina performs classical Indian dance in the webscapes of Second Life, as the image that opens this article depicts, and these performances reveal a subtler, yet more important deviance of performance in the digitalization of dance. To her, digitization of dance happens in various forms. She used her Second Life avatar and the gravity-defying possibilities of performance to try various online dances. Online dancing tries to adhere to the denitions of classical dance, though it is characterized by an absence of body. Digitalized dance involves human project in recreating the moving human bodies. For instance a Second Life dancer can buy the codes to perform a coordinated dance-like movement of the body of the avatar. The result is the simultaneous association and dissociation of the spiritual and organic self. The body is replaced by a cluster of binary codes of on and off, complete presence or complete absence, a nality that is impossible to achieve in a real scenario of dance, where the body and mind may be present and absent at the same time. Dance, especially classical dance-forms of the east and west are sublime arts, are embodied cultural practices. The embodied arts of classical dance are disembodied in virtual performances and consequently hypermediated dance evolves beyond the theoretical conventions of performance. The effect of the digital cultural creeps into Shreelinas teaching of dance, too, much to her surprise very much unlike how she and her own Guru had learned the art. Digitalized representations of facial expressions, for example, give rise to new equations of relationships

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between the dancer, the audience, and God. What an artist feels inside him or her during the act of performing dance or theater is called bhaava. What an artist expresses in front of the audience or the emotion that the audience shares with the artist in the course of the performance is called Rasa. For instance, when the heroine waits for the lover, she feels Rati bhaava in her. Her dance movements will therefore express Shringar Rasa. Rasa is the feeling that the audience shares with the artist. Without the presence of the audience, rasa will not gain fulllment, it will remain a bhaava or just the emotional state of the artistes mind that fails to touch the audience. Shreelina learned the Rasas and Bhaavas by imitating her Guru. However, her young Indian student, a child of the digital age, promptly put IM-like emoticons that she believed corresponded to the particular bhaava. Her way of memorizing the Rasa did not involve any embodied imitation at all. The body and mind are in a continuous and deliberate state of absence and presence, however, there never comes a time when it is completely replaced by an external entity. Rasas and emoticons function in very similar ways. Both emoticons and Rasas represent the bhaava of the artist or person trying to convey the message. Emoticons and Rasas are both esthetic manifestations of emotion. Both are essentially mimetic (silent). However, while Bhaava gives birth to Rasa concurrently, an emoticon is alienated from the body, which produces the emotional state of mind. Emoticons are the technological tools that apparently substitute the body for emotion. When such a separation occurs, then, the cultural memory of the dance is compromised; the reason for the dance, the relationships enacted by the dance, and the need for the dance, all become mitigated by the digital preservation. What is preserved, then, is a hollow image of culture, Baudrillards simulacra in material reality of code and volt, a text without a reader written by an absent writer that compromises the guru/shishya relationship as well as the dancer/God relationship. In an attempt to popularize Odissi, the dance is also being recorded onto CDs and sold to people interested to learn all over the world. Digitization of Odissi dance has been hailed by renowned gurus of the Odissi Gotipua tradition like Maguni Das of Raghurajpur and Gangadhar Pradhan of Konark as a wonderful means of not only preserving a cultural memory, but also giving it better visibility in the international cultural arena. However, Basanta Pradhan of Raghurajpur was skeptical about the absence of the interactivity

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associated with this way of learning. He said, In the acrobatic Gotipua dance the young performers need to be given regular massages in a particular way. You can watch a CD for entertainment, but if you try learning from it, it might not be a good idea. Gangadhar Pradhan said, Yes, it is alright to translate the movement of into a digital medium (CDs) and learn from it. However, only a guru can tell you when you have attained perfection. Dancing by looking at a CD might be too mechanical. According to him, only advanced students should use CDs to learn some Odissi pieces, only if they have received full training of the basics from their Guru. There is an apparent deviation from the accepted form when there was the re-mediation of representative gestures from a different culture. While watching the digitalized bodies performing Indian classical dance in a digital space, Shreelina feels the same sting of the performance being deviant as the semantic body of the dancer is re-mediated into an artifact from a different culture, the cyber culture. The displaced body can still perform human expressions. Emoticons might be, what Umberto Eco would call, hyperreality, because these are not completely fake (they can be faked, but that is a different issue). Bhaava is the reality, and Rasa in the emoticon is the expression of the replaced reality. The subtle association of the Bhava and the Rasa is lost. When digitally mediated, dance is performed in the absence of a body of esh and this is deviant as a cultural practice. A practice that arose out of the human reverence and desire to appease the divine through codied movements may not be represented without the body. Dance is considered to be a divine art that was revealed to humans by God. Transmitting knowledge of the art involves a great deal of respect for the art and also a God-like reverence for the Guru. To further illustrate the vexed and vexing relationships between performance of cultural memories and digital preservation efforts, we turn to the case of the Cherokee Nation online educational materials.

The Cherokee Stomp Dance

In collaboration with representatives of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma (CN), Michigan State University students enrolled in Multimedia Writing, along with the instructor, developed a website

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titled The Allotment in Cherokee History 18871914 (http://www. cherokee.org/allotment).2 The collaboration included Dr. Gloria Sly, then the Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource director, the webmaster, Tonia Williams, and Richard Allen, the Cherokee Nation Policy Analyst. Together, we agreed that online educational materials about the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 were needed to show how this federal policy of parceling out Native Americans commonly held land into individual units of private property has shaped current perspectives on Cherokee citizenship, identity, sovereignty, and the geographic dispersion of the tribe.3 One of our aims was to recover stories of the allotment process from as many perspectives as possible, to extend the histories that were already told about and from the Nation, and to link these past events to the present. The Nation had three goals for this work: Satisfy the need for educational materials that present in-depth, accessible understanding of the allotment period in Cherokee history for any learner interested. Distribute widely these digital products to citizens of the tribe, educators, non-citizens of the tribe, and anyone who visits Tahlequah, Oklahoma, during the CNs National holiday. Relocate the typical histories of Oklahoma from the vantage point of Indian Territory.

The allotment period was a time in the tribes history that was equally important to the Trail of Tears, though not treated as often in published histories. The allotment era is important because it has shaped the Cherokees current views on citizenship, identity, sovereignty, and the geographic dispersion of the tribe. As is the case with most federal legislation in relation to Native peoples, this too was touted as an effort to civilize Native Americans; the Henry Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898 legislated that all Native-American tribes were to split their commonly held land on reservations into individually owned private property. Land that was not allotted was then opened for settlement. Our work for this project tries to re-place the stories of allotment from the vantage of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where the Cherokee Nation is based in Tahlequah. This vantage relocates the story of the progressive era, showing the detrimental effects of

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allotment policy for the Cherokee in Indian Territory who suffered an erosion of sovereignty, land holdings, and economic bases for their tribe, as well as forced assimilation through re-education and dissolution of their tribal governments. This counter-narrative is one that the CN wanted to present to their web users, teachers, and students as a corrective to the myths of the progressive era narrative and to show that a strong Nation with a distinctive cultural identity exists within the state of Oklahoma, despite the omission of this fact in most of the states centennial celebration sites. Weve presented this counter-narrative with digital stories, cut-and-paste text, audio recordings, and images, as well as links to primary sources, such as legislation and public documents. The project has grown to include an installment for the Nations online history that explores the treaties and laws that shaped the tribe from the early 1700s up to the allotment (the second installment is available at http://www.cherokee.org/culture/treaties/toc.htm). At rst blush, it seems the project was a success because it was reviewed by the Chief and released to the public on the Cherokee Nations site. To create the site, we worked rst and foremost with primary and secondary texts about the history of the Cherokee. One of the difculties with this immersion process, however, was that although we were situating ourselves directly in the written discourses of the time period, there was still the tendency for it to feel disconnected or un-authentic. At this point in the course, our immediate goal was still an academic articlesomething that, although required for the institution and useful for our work as University students, was hard to conceptualize as part of our nal product. The practice of immersing in the historical knowledge base felt disconnected to the nal project and the people it was meant to represent. This immersion in the textual representations of the history also seemed to give some students the false impression that they were learning about the culture of the tribe as opposed to the history of the Nation. Certainly our readings covered ways in which Cherokee culture changed as a result of allotment, but reading a text about the history of a culture does not translate into a license to represent cultural knowledge. This distinction became apparent as the students began to create content related to religious practices that have continued to be maintained. One student in particular became deeply interested in the Cherokee stomp dance as a tradition that has been maintained despite

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allotment and the increased importance of the Cherokee Baptist church to the tribe. He created a digital video describing the stomp dance, piecing together additional research that he found on the Internet and from books in order to describe the dance. Because the Cherokee Nation representatives had already endorsed the inclusion of religious practices and the placeholder content that indicated we were going to talk about Cherokee Baptists as well as stomp dance, we thought it would be strong content to add. However, the Cherokee Nation decided that they didnt want this sort of information published, since it dealt a little too closely with practices that they considered sacred and private. Thus, whole pages of that sub-node were removedincluding the video le describing stomp dance that one student had spent weeks developing. It was his main contribution to the entire node. Their reasons for this decision were made evident to Ellen as she worked with the CN collaborators in Tahlequah. They debated for some time the possible inclusion of this stomp dance video and the text surrounding it in this node. Recognizing the hard work the student had done, they still were not comfortable with the level of nuance in the videostomp dance differs from ground to ground and it seemed that this representation was both revealing too much and not enough at once. Where did he nd video of a stomp dance? referring to a clip the student had found online. I told them I couldnt trace the site precisely because I didnt know myself. Its not supposed to be videoed at my ground. And others agreed noting that only in the tourist grounds were video cameras even allowed, and then only rarely. Their next question had to do with his voiceover in which he describes a process of building the sacred re around which men and women dance. Thats not how they build a re at X ground, Gloria quipped. And that kind of information really shouldnt be part of the Nations website, should it? she asked the two other representatives. From there a discussion that clearly delineated the tribe from the Nation unfolded. Tribal practices, such as participating in stomp, are sacred enactments of relationships that restore balance to all things and these relationships when performed under the auspices of highly trained groundskeepers and led by trained singers. The dances as embodied enactments of Cherokee cultural memories are not to be mediated in most grounds, unless in Cherokee script. This is

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particularly true at the longest running, most traditional ground, where old Cherokee is spoken. Those who have trained and attended the oldest grounds report that these texts written in Old Cherokee do exist but are rarely shared and are never reproduced. These texts are shared only between the men who are training to be the grounds keeper. Video and cameras are forbidden on the oldest stomp grounds as well. Unlike these sacred texts and dance performances, the history of the nation could be preserved digitally. These histories were already mediated in print and publicly available though not necessarily accessible. Thus, we could and did include many of the ways in which the Cherokee Baptist church still prints hymns and sermons in Cherokee as a source of pride and evidence of language preservation for the Cherokee Nation. But the digital preservation of this cultural memory was not the same as the tribal enactment of stomp dance. The historical representations we developed in the remainder of the site were strong enough and accurately reected the immersion that students had in the history of the Nation and were allowed to go forward. We were immersed in and representing the history of the Nation and the history that the Nation wanted us to represent; we were not immersed in nor representing the culture or the tribes cultural practices, particularly those that should not be mediated in print or digital video. The practice of attending stomp is an embodied enactment that creates harmonic relationships between men, women, children, and the universe. Print and digital video decontextualize the cultural memory from its enactment in embodied performances, and thus damage the relationships that might otherwise allow the culture to thrive. Digital preservation in this case, worked very well to represent the history of the tribe, to create a National version of that history available to the public, but there remained a resistance to digital mediation and the ways that it disembodies practices that keeps in check the efforts of digital preservation of cultural memories.

Digital Preservation and Cultural Memory

Classical Indian dance has moved from one phase of mediation to another and one context to another, from folk to classical and then to digital. Indian dance has journeyed from immediacy, to codication,

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to the oating signiers of digital media that deviate from the ritualized, codied 2000-year-old cultural practice. The journey of performance of a very orthodox and ritualized culture such as India, dance has begun to be preserved by the digitized disembodied expressions that are the representation of the art in a way very different from how this dance came to be. Unlike classical Indian dance, the tribal practice of Cherokee stomp dance resists digital mediation altogether, though it does allow for textual reproduction of the conventions for keeping a ground and building a sacred re written in Sequoyan. The embodiment of these dance practices represents an important aspect of cultural memory that is neither easily nor lightly reproduced in digital media. These evolving equations of relationships between bodies and mediated performance call for ne-tuning of the theories of mediation as it relates to cultural memory. Our cases reveal a tension important to understanding the effects of digital preservation of cultural memory: the boundary between body/mediation is sometimes strictly identied with cultures and reinforces how they articulate themselves within the complexity of social arrangements and material exigencies. In the case of the Cherokees, the cultural memory of stomp dance must be immediate and embodied enactment, even while historically rooted in conventions of practice that have been written in Sequoyan. The history of the Nation is distinct from this mediation and is something that can be legitimately preserved digitally in the educational resource on allotment. When applied to these cases, the denition of mediation were working from reveals that any act of digital preservation must take into account the ways that sign technologies relate to the embodied cultural practices of creating distinctive identities. The we represented in any act of mediation reveals cultural articulation. Anthropologist James Clifford, following Stuart Hall, offers the idea that cultural tradition is an articulation, a mediated act that marks a distinctive group of people persisting and persevering. In articulation theory it is assumed that cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade. Communities can and must recongure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts. The relevant question is whether, and how, they convince and coerce insiders and outsiders, often in power charged, unequal situations, to accept the autonomy of a we. (479)

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Mediation of cultural acts alters them irrevocably, but also allows cultures to exibly draw upon and conventionalize their remembered pasts. Indian dance, once immediate expression of joyful relationship with God and people, became mediated and codied through writing and stone sculpture, but this did not alter the signicance of the relationships that were still embodied in the dance and in the guru/shishya relationship. Likewise, Cherokee stomp dance was not and is not mediated with alphabetic literacy and digital video because such mediations would so disembody the practice as to render it unrecognizable and illegitimate to Cherokee tribal members. In both instances, digital preservation of cultural memory articulates a we even when and especially when that digital mediation is resisted. In the case of Cherokee stomp, the distinction between tribe and nation became clear as the merits of various mediations were weighed. Mediation, as an articulation of a distinctive, autonomous we, also suggests the ways that cultural preservation through digital mediation might be seen as distinctive from cultural perseverance through embodied practice of cultural memories. Cultural perseverance, then, would be viewed as mediations that cultures use, for example, to enact part of their sovereigntya process that allows them to name who they are, what practices count, what structures govern, and what technologies allow for adaptation and preservation. Thus, Clifford might see the Cherokee Nations attempts to use the Internet for cultural preservation as the articulation of reconguration; new technologies and popular cultural artifacts are developed in an ongoing process of writing a national history as distinct from tribal culture. Another important implication of these cases: the use and impact of meaning making technologies must be assessed and weighed in mediations of cultural memories. If the medium is the message (McLuhan), then we must search the medium for what it indexes about the knowledge, culture and identity of its users and audiences. In whichever theoretical instance we choose, cultural studies theorist Ileana Rodriguez nds, it is clear that tradition cannot be discussed separately from the subject that bears it; from the technologies that inform the logic of its production; from the mediations or spaces where hegemony refunctionalizes everything to actualize or modernize it (5758). Rodriguez would have us understand how the medium of cultural preservation, in itself, indicates the logic of its

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production. When respecting the rights of those representing themselves, scholars, art historians, and museum curators are involved in serving multiple communities by mediating those practices that enact and embody cultural memories. When we help tribal and cultural representatives digitally persevere in ways that honor their understandings of mediation, then we do much to respect their embodied cultural memories. Digital mediation and its grammars can unintentionally distort, disembody, and decontextualize the very cultural memories that it strives to protect and represent. Only when we recognize how mediation acts as both sign technology and marker of a logic of practice can we develop best practices for digital preservation. Though folks may be skeptical and careful when they involve digital technologies in 1000-year old cultural practices, hypermediation does not have to be destructive, especially since more tribes and cultural communities turn to this mediation to persevere in enacting their cultural memories.

Notes
1. Shreelina received lessons of the ancient art of Odissi dance for 25 years in its autochthon in east India. While her learning has adhered to the rigorous guru-shishya tradition, as a teacher of dance based in the US she has used new media in her own pedagogical practice of this ancient art. She watches and performs dance in Second Life, too, attempting to experience disembodied dance. 2. This collaboration began with a qualitative study of Cherokee language and identity that continues today. To begin this study, Ellen attended the Cherokee National Holiday in 2004 and learned about the kinds of digital mediations the tribe was undertaking in order to reach its citizens who live away from the tribal cores in Oklahoma and North Carolina where the language is spoken and Cherokee traditions and religion are still practiced. 3. Ellens family went through this process of allotment and enrolled on the Dawes roll, a kind of census for the Cherokee Nation and other tribes. Because they went through that 7-year long process, todays generations of Drews (my Cherokee familys name) are able to maintain our citizenship with the tribe.

Works Cited
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Chatterjee, A. Contestations: Constructing a Historical Narrative for Odissi. Rethinking Dance History. Ed. Alexandra Carter. London: Routledge, 2004. 14356. Print. Clifford, J. Indigenous Articulations. The Contemporary Pacic 13.2 (2001): 46890. Print. De Landa, M. A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum, 2006. Print. Derrida, J. Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. Trans. Gayatri Spivak, 1998. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967. Print. Foucault, M. Technologies of the Self. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Print. . The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, 2002. London: Routledge, 1969. Print. Giddens, A. The Social Constitution of Society. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Print. Hayles, K. My Mother was a Computer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Rodriguez, I. The Places of Tradition: Modernity/Backwardness, Regionalism/Centralism, Mass/Popular, Homogeneous/Heterogeneous. CR: The New Centennial Review. 1.1 (2001): 5574. Print. Scott, J. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print. Straw, W. Embedded Memories. Residual Media. Ed. Charles Acland. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 315. Print.
Ellen Cushman is an associate professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University and Cherokee Nation citizen. Her book The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the Peoples Perseverance (Oklahoma 2011), was based on a 6-year long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and identify. Her research has also recently appeared in Written Communication, Computers and Composition, Ethnohistory, and Wicazo Sa Review. Shreelina Ghosh is a professional classical Indian dancer, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University, and instructor at Arizona State University. Her publications include an article in Computers and Composition and a forthcoming chapter in Texts of Consequence: Composing Rhetorics of Social Activism for the Composition Classroom. Her research focuses on the digital mediation of cultural memory and works at the intersection of cultural and digital rhetorics.

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