For my ethnography project, I plan to study the music and culture of West Africa, more specifically of the Mande people, as it has been taught and performed in the United States today and in the past.
Currently I am taking a class called Mande Dance, Music and Culture which should provide a strong foundation for my research. The professor, Michelle, studies the social and popular dances of the Bambara peoples of Mali, and (according to internet sources) is currently working on a documentary and textbook on the subject. I would be interested to know what first drew her to Mande culture (affinity, heritage, etc.), and what made her want to teach it. I also just started going to a West African drumming class taught by one of the drummers from my dance class. It would be interesting to talk to him about why he came to America and how Mande culture still fits into his life.
I am also interested in looking at what draws so many non-West-African people to Mande music and dance. The Mande Dance class that I am in here at Brown is extremely popular—it is offered every spring and currently boasts a class size of 140 people. Are there people in the class who do have Mande roots? What do students, both with Mande roots and without, hope to get out of the class? On the other hand, what does Michelle (the professor) hope to pass on to her students? Appreciation? Understanding? Traditional knowledge? And what do the drummers see as their role in continuing to play Mande music in America?
An interesting organization that I found, called Rootsy Records, is dedicated to the “preservation and promotion of traditional djembe [a type of West-African drum] culture”. Its website, www.rootsyrecords.com, will be a good source for articles and raw footage of traditional West-African dancing and drumming, which can be compared to what I am being taught here at Brown.
Seeger (2002) also poses some interesting questions that I would like to try to answer in the context of Mande culture: what is the role of the individual in tradition, and of tradition in forming the individual? What is the relation of music to other societal processes/groups?
The first West Africans were brought to the U.S. as slaves, inspiring such dances as the Jon Don (representing bondage) and the Wolosodon (celebrating the breaking of their chains of bondage). Accordingly, I would also like to know more about how the slave trade affected Mande music in America, and how the musical traditions of West Africans who have lived in the U.S. for centuries compare to the musical traditions of recent immigrants.
2 comments:
That's a great bunch of ideas, Ariel. While a broad scope of background research into West African music and dance in the United States will be useful for this project, for the actual ethnographic portion you'll probably want to consider narrowing your scope down either to the non-African students of west african dance and music or the West African "culture bearers" themselves. Doing both might prove too overwhelming. If you choose to focus on the non-African students, you should consider how you'll frame that community as a diaspora.
In addition to the Mande dance and drumming class, there's also a Ghanian drumming class offered by the music department that you could look into as well.
This project looks wonderful, with lots of different possibilities for a central focus. I would suggest that you begin by talking with the Mande Dance, Music, and Culture professor about your ideas. She might be able to help you decide on what subtopic will be the most fruitful for a short-term project like this one -- and if you're planning on interviewing classmates about their experience, she should probably be aware of what you're doing. Do keep in mind that the question of who has the "right" to practice these kinds of traditions can be a sensitive one. Also, your own perceived racial/ethnic identity will certainly have an impact on what people will tell you about their feelings on this matter. (When I was teaching at a Canadian university I had a white male Canadian student and a female Kenyan student team up to do a similar project, and they heard very different ideas about what it meant for people of non-African descent to participate in these groups.)
Our upcoming African diaspora readings should be relevant for this project, and I'm sure your other professor will have plenty of suggestions as well. I would also recommend that you have a look at the Ted Solís book Performing Ethnomusicology, which is a collection of essays about "world music ensembles" of various kinds.
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