Seeing with Music: The Lives of Three Blind Musicians (review)

Seeing with Music: The Lives of Three Blind Musicians, by Simon Ottenberg. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997. 230 pp. ISBN 0-295-97525-3.

This is a curious book unlikely to interest most readers or scholars. The author aims at offering an up-to-date anthropological study--with a self-conscious observer situating himself and his prejudices in the picture and indigenous voices who are individual agents and whose life stories are products of choice rather than being socially determined. To allow for dialogue between author and informants the book is structured to offer conclusions rather beginning with a theory to be proved. By now the reader will recognize the model. Its ways are the opposite of much recent literary criticism, but it shares a similar concern with deconstructing Western perspectives and narratives. In the hands of those who follow rather than are part of fashion, the results approach comedy. I am not interested in learning that Simon Ottenberg had an ordinary middle-class childhood and dislikes loud music, or that a song about a man with many lovers may refer to him.

Ottenberg is sincere and his emotional needs are understandable, but he appears a bloodless parody of the romantic white man in the tropics, uncertain about what he is seeing and hearing, and so relativisitic as to become absurd. When he comments that the musicians gain in prestige through being hired by him while he might be losing local prestige by associating with them, he reminds me of Swift's Gulliver solemnly assuring the reader that he was allowed to kiss the hoof of his master horse. This is not cultural relativism, it is a well-paid, secure, American anthropologist on a grant abroad being foolish. When Ottenberg wonders how his presence might influence the future of music in Sierra Leone, I am stunned at how Levy-Strausitis has become endemic to those anthropologists even studying the margins of the margins, as Ottenberg has written a book about the powerless and unimportant. For his presence to have influenced Sierra Leonean musical history we would need to revise Chaos Theory so that the observer of the butterfly becomes the cause of a long chain of events.

Ottenberg, a well-published, long experienced, American anthropologist, spent 1979-80 in the Wara Wara Bafodea chiefdom of the Limba people in northern Sierra Leone. He had previously studied communal aspects of the Nigerian Afikpo from a functional and structuralist perspective. Now feeling grief and loneliness because of the death of his spouse, and conscious that anthropological interest was shifting from power to aesthetics, he chose to study three blind musicians. The only European to have resided for a significant time in the Bafodea chiefdom, Ottenberg assumed that his own isolation and grief would give him a special relationship with the three men. It was a strange decision.

Ottenberg is not a musician, and even has hearing problems. What little musical analysis there is in his book is based on an unpublished MA thesis by one of his students who listened to Ottenberg's tapes for his own research. The musicians play the kututeng, a local version of the mbira, or thumb piano, an instrument about which there is already a considerable amount of literature elsewhere in Africa. The Sierra Leone version has a metal rather than wooden sounding box and is played in a reversed manner, with the metal keys held away from the body, and consequently the thumbs pluck from the distant instead of the near side. If the instrument is set upright, it is plucked near the top. These are inconsequential differences and their history and causes not known. Indeed little is known about how the kututeng got to Sierra Leone, its local history, or even why the Wara Wara Bafodea chiefdom itself has such an unusual territorial shape, with two very extended arms, the latter being possibly the result of past expansion into the...