ABSTRACT
One way to imagine the potency of 'nature' as a cultural construction is to imagine the appropriateness of the word 'aesthetic' in each place where Rappaport uses the word 'adaptive' in his essay on ecology and cognition. Here, ecological and aesthetic co-evolution means that the music of nature is heard as the nature of music. The ethnographic dimensions of this paper draw from field research among the Kaluli, one of four subgroups of two thousand Bosavi people who live in the tropical rain forest of the Great Papuan Plateau in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. In an attempt to explore patterns systematically among Kaluli people, the author research has explored three ecological nature-expressive culture linkage patterns across four general areas of musical and verbal arts. In the forest, sounds constantly shift figure and ground; examples of continually staggered alternations and overlaps, at times sounding completely interlocked and seamless, are abundant.
