Traveling Spirit Masters

by Kapchan, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780819568526
• ISBN10: 081956852X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-26
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance--and indeed all sacred music--is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Author Biography

DEBORAH KAPCHAN is an associate professor of performance studies at New York University. She is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996).

Table of Contents

Figures

Transcription

Introduction: Initiation

The Culture of Possession

Emplacement

Intoxication

"A Gesture Narrowly Divides Us From Chaos": Gesture and Word in Trance Time

Working the Spirits: The Entranced Body, The Entranced Word

On the Threshold of a Dream

The Chellah Gardens

Possessing Culture

Money and the Spirit

In France with the Gnawa

Narratives of Epiphany

Possessing Gnawa Culture: Displaying Sound, Creating History in Dar Gnawa

Conclusion: The Alchemy of the Musical Imagination

Epilogue

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