Recollecting from the past : musical practice and spirit possession on the east coast of Madagascar
The first serious ethnomusicological study of Malagasy music, this book evokes the complex sound and performative aesthetic in Madagascar called maresaka. Maresaka pertains not only to musical expression but extends into ways of remembering the past, aesthetics of everyday life, and Malagasy concepts of self and community. The author focuses on tromba spirit possession ceremonies in which Malagasy use devotional practice as an occasion to expressively re-figure worlds often impeded by colonialism and postcolonial phenomena, extreme material poverty, and widespread illness. Malagasy not only preserve the past, but they interpret, revalue and transform it to their own ends. Music is crucial to these performances since powerful ancestral spirits will not enter into the present if not enticed by masterful musical performances, and so music itself provides a complex symbolic system with which Malagasy can recall and reconstruct the past. This groundbreaking study will be of interest to readers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, African studies, postcolonial and performance studies
Print Book, English, ©2002
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn., ©2002
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xvi, 241 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780819564993, 9780819565006, 0819564990, 0819565008
47922731
Some background on Tamatave
Spirit practices on the east coast
Maresaka
Material media of maresaka : the value in things
Recollecting
Power, resistance?, valses
Clinton, Bush, and Hussein in Tamatave
Style as iconicity of aesthetics
Discourse on illness, healing, and abnormality
Imagining Antandroy in Tamatave-ville
Retour