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Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, by Steven Friedson.
Steven Friedson has been keenly involved, in the past fifteen years, with research on indigenous healing and medicinal practices in selective areas in East and West Africa. Dancing Prophet is devoted to the Tumbuka people of Malawi, East Africa, and pays attention to the significance of music and dance and their mutual interaction with costume, symbolism, belief, and ritual performances. There are many research assumptions and theoretical constructs that shape the structure and content of this book; the following chapter headings of the text will give the reader an idea: "Ethnography as Possibility"; "To Dance and to Dream"; "God, Humans, and Spirits; Blood and Spirit: The Chilopa Sacrifice"; "The Musical Construction of Clinical Reality"; "In the Vimbuza Mode"; "An Ontology of Energy." These titles, however, begin to fade as we are confronted with more subtle and metaphorical allusions in subheadings: "phenomenology of blood"; "sacrificial axis"; "technology of trance"; "electric Nyanga"; "drum time"; and others. Before we discuss the theoretical importance and relevance of this work, this review will first lay out the basics for the reader.
The author, Steven Friedson, undertook fieldwork among the Tumbuka and related peoples in 1986 and in 1987, focusing on specific nchimi (i.e., healers and witch-catchers) and their nightly sessions in the Henga Valley. He worked closely with one particular nichimi, Chikanje, whose name recurs throughout the book. The Chikanje "text" is interspersed with mini case studies involving individual patients; Steven then devotes two chapters to musical details: "The Musical Construction of Clinical Reality" and "In the Vimbuza Mode." There are interview excerpts, song-text transcriptions, and some rhythmic notations. The preface to the book appropriately laments two obvious failings in the pertinent literature: lack of attention to music and dance in such healing contexts; and the often multidimensional and transcendent aspects of music and dance in African performance practices:
Music is usually treated as an epiphenomenon, something that accompanies other, more important ritual activities...it seems to be difficult for researchers to overcome this cultural bias and hear the significance of music in a clinical context. [...] It is impossible to separate the phenomenal reality of music, trance, and healing in Africa into neatly defined categories of Western epistemological thought such...