Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing (review)

Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, by Steven Friedson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 203 pp.; bibliog., index, append., photos.

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 as aesthetics, religion, and medicine. [. . .] Music, trance, and healing form a continuum that is often functionally irreducible into constituent parts. (xii-xiii).

Although the book lacks detailed musical transcriptions (especially songs), there are very important observations that would advance the learning, study, and explication of African music and dance. For example, researchers have consistently ignored the importance of timbre, privileging rhythm, instead, in their works. According to Friedson, "Timbre in African musics and, for that matter, in most musics is an ill-defined area of scholarship at best and needs much more attention" (197). The few Africanists who acknowledge the importance of timbre include Gerhard Kubik, David Locke, Mweki Nzewi, and Christopher Waterman. Waterman's emphasis is particularly relevant, reinforcing Friedson's:

A narrow concern with the delimitation of structural principles governing pitch and rhythm, not, coincidentally, those aspects of musical sound most handily dealt with by traditional western modes of analysis, means that we learn relatively little about timbre--a central criterion of aesthetic evaluation in many African cultures. (Waterman12; emphasis added)

Friedson's important discussion of not only the common practice of what is often referred to as "cross rhythm," but he also takes time to clarify the limited understanding that the term allows. He does this by first presenting the "hemiola" concept and then by challenging the common notion of "two against three": "In African musical practice, these beats, made up of differing numbers of pulses, are not against each other but occur simultaneously" (198, n. 8.). Unfortunately, many of these important statements are buried in endnotes. Other performance practices noted--and which...