Kusamira Ritual Music and the Social Reproduction of Wellness in Uganda

• Other Authors: Hoesing, Peter (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: Music
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-7158

Ritual healing has fascinated ethnographers and historians for several decades. Over the last twenty-five years, ethnomusicologists have begun to examine the cognitive, performative, and phenomenological aspects of ritual and trance. Based on seventeen months of ethnographic field research over the last five years, this study examines ritual healing and spirit mediumship in two regions of southern Uganda, Buganda and Busoga. The groups living in these regions, the Baganda and Basoga, speak mutually intelligible languages respectively called Luganda and Lusoga. The performance of healing rituals involves kusamira, or what this study defines as flexible personhood, which has been termed elsewhere spirit possession or trance. Through the release of a usual sense of self to spirits in kusamira ritual, practitioners called basamize and baswezi create atmospheres for social interaction with ancestral and patron spirits. These interactions not only articulate categories of illness and wellness; they also become sites for manipulating and negotiating trajectories of mediumship and healing. Ritual adepts conceive of holistic wellness in these contexts, obulamu obulungi, as crucially dependent upon blessings from the spirits, emikisa, and the eradication of negative spiritual energy, ebibi. 'Carrying spirits,' okukongojja, facilitates the kind of social interaction between humans and spirits necessary to pursue these blessings in ritual and sacrifice. This dissertation offers the first ethnographic narrative on the music of kusamira. Through linguistic and musical research, performance with project participants, and other subjective ethnographic experience, it engages kusamira adherents at the level of verbal art and performative meaning. Specific methods include analysis of song texts, assessment of the place song in ritual contexts, examination of intercontextual references, and musical analysis. These approaches to kusamira ritual redress a major gap in the literature on ritual healing in Interlacustrine East Africa: although earlier studies have often mentioned the presence of music in this kind of ritual, they have failed to account for its significance or examine its meanings beyond a cursory level. Kusamira practitioners promote and control flexible personhood through musical performance as an essential technology of ritual interaction. Their social aesthetic is one of conviviality, which they cultivate among numerous frictions at the local, national, and regional levels. The tenacity of these practices reveals something beyond an aesthetic priority: although dismissed by colonizers, missionaries, and many modern Ugandans, they constitute a valuable form of expression, a widely used form of primary health care and maintenance, and an intersubjective'even intercorporeal'mode of being-in-the-world. For these reasons, kusamira involves indigenous knowledge on the level of an African gnosis. Professional basamize and baswezi healers and musicians keep and actively maintain this gnosis through the performance of kusamira ritual, which promotes the social production and reproduction of wellness. In contrast to strongly visualist representations of ritualists in contemporary Uganda, this project approaches kusamira according to its total sensory appeal. Among these I prioritize close listening to song texts, which reveals details about Kiganda and Kisoga spirit pantheons, ways of promoting convivial social relations with them, and the benefits of performing ritual for holistic wellness. By examining the ways in which basamize and baswezi use these texts in performance, this study finds such benefits to be dependent on creative capacities, the mutual dependence of humans and their patron spirits, and the agency of both entities in the ritual production of social wellness. === A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Spring Semester, 2011. === April 4, 2011. === Includes bibliographical references. === Frank Gunderson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Joseph Hellweg, University Representative; Michael B. Bakan, Committee Member; Peter Garretson, Committee Member.