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Signs of the Spirit

Signs of the Spirit

Name: Signs of the Spirit
Author: Tony Perman
ISBN: 9780252052132

Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

by Tony Perman

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Imprint: University of Illinois Press

280 Pages, 10 black & white photographs, 1 map, 9 charts, 15 music examples

Digital download
9780252052132
Published: June 2020

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise
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In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity.

Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community.

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Music, Experience, Meaning

Part I. Foundations

1. Introduction: Finding Madhlozi in Chipinge

2. Moving Signs: The Experience of Affective Semiosis

Part II. Ceremony at Horus Farm

3. Late Afternoon: Madzviti and the Foundation of Interpretation

4. Evening: Zvipunha, Signs, and Transformative Experience

5. Overnight: Mhongo and the Effects of Performance

6. Early Morning: Zvaayungu and the Shaping of Ndau Modernity

Epilogue

Appendix A: ChiNdau Glossary

Appendix B: Semiotic Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Back cover

Tony Perman is an assistant professor of music at Grinnell College.

"The real strength of the text lies in its reliance on the author's long-term fieldwork experiences and his nuanced and clearly communicated musical analysis to help elucidate the practices of a community whose experiences are worth recounting." --H-Net Reviews

"Perman's approach is an unambiguous recognition of the interpretive community's perspectives on an ethnography study's subject or text, which represents a clear adherence to a widely acknowledged good practice." --African Studies Quarterly

"Refreshing . . . Along with the theory and history, peppered throughout the text are the author's descriptions of people, places, and events; these are beautiful, person-centered and humanizing, in a way I wish all ethnographic writing would strive for." --Journal of Folklore Research

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