RON EMOFF - Böcker

With contributions from leading researchers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore, this volume contains personal, imaginative accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that do not fit into a traditional scholarly context, yet are a vital part of research. Some pieces are engaging autobiographical accounts of ethnographers' experiences in the field, while others are fictional narratives. These tales take readers to a range of locales, offering richly detailed portraits of informants, local cultures, and life in the field.

With contributions from leading researchers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore, this volume contains personal, imaginative accounts of ethnographic fieldwork that do not fit into a traditional scholarly context, yet are a vital part of research. Some pieces are engaging autobiographical accounts of ethnographers' experiences in the field, while others are fictional narratives. These tales take readers to a range of locales, offering richly detailed portraits of informants, local cultures, and life in the field.

Marie-Galante is a small island situated in the Caribbean to the south of Guadeloupe. The majority of Marie-Galantais are descendants of the slave era, though a few French settlers also occupy the island. Along with its neighbours Guadeloupe and Martinique, Marie-Galante forms an official département of France. Marie-Galante historically has never been an independent polity. Marie-Galantais express sentiments of being 'deux fois colonisé', or twice colonized, concomitant with their sense of insularity from a global organization of place. Dr Ron Emoff translates this pervasive sense of displacement into the concept of the 'non-nation'. Musical practices on the island provide Marie-Galantais with a means of re-connecting with other significant distant places. Many Marie-Galantais display a 'split-subjectivity', embracing an African heritage, a French association and a Caribbean regionalism. This book is unique, in part, with regard to its treatment of a particular mode of self-consciousness, expressed musically, on a virtually forgotten Caribbean island. The book also combines literary, narrative, historical and musical sources to theorize a postcolonial subsurreal in the French Antilles. The focus of the book is upon kadril dance and gwo ka drumming, two prevalent musical practices on the island with which Marie-Galantais construct unique perceptions of self in relation, specifically, to Africa and France. Based on several extended periods of ethnographic research, the book evokes unique Marie-Galantais views on tradition, historicity, esclavage, nationalism (and its absence) and the local significance of occupying a globally out-of-the-way place. The book will be of interest not only to ethnomusicologists, but also to those interested in cultural and linguistic anthropology, postcolonial studies, performance studies, folklore and Caribbean studies.

The first serious ethnomusicological study of Malagasy music, Recollecting from the Past evokes the complex sound and performative aesthetic in Madagascar called maresaka. Maresaka pertains not only to musical expression but extends into ways of remembering the past, aesthetics of everyday life, and Malagasy concepts of self and community. Ron Emoff focuses on tromba spirit possession ceremonies in which Malagasy use devotional practice as an occasion to expressively re-figure worlds often impeded by colonialism and postcolonial phenomena, extreme material poverty, and widespread illness. Malagasy not only preserve the past, but they interpret, revalue and transform it to their own ends. Music is crucial to these performances since powerful ancestral spirits will not enter into the present if not enticed by masterful musical performances, and so music itself provides a complex symbolic system with which Malagasy can recall and reconstruct the past. This groundbreaking study will be of interest to readers in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, African studies, postcolonial and performance studies.