History, Ethics, and Emotion in Ndau Performance in Zimbabwe: Local Theoretical Knowledge and Ethnomusicological Perspectives

380 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.This dissertation is an ethnography of the dance/drumming practices of Ndau communities in Zimbabwe along the Mozambique border. I attend to the specific drumming practices of the spirit possession ceremonies central to local cosmological understanding, as well as the secular muchongoyo drumming that has become an important marker of Ndau identity and community. More than an examination of style and form, I want to understand why these practices thrive, how they affect people and the ways in which they contribute to the perpetuation of Ndau communities. Most importantly, I examine why drumming is important to and affective for the people I worked with. I address Ndau musical practices in relation to four major themes: possession and cosmology, history and history-making, "aesthetics" and the ethics of performance, and emotion and its relationship to performance. I explore how the ceremonial and historical contexts of performance in these communities shape people's ethical and emotional responses while simultaneously exploring how local emotional responses to performance situate locals' own spiritual and historical understanding of self and society.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD