Tony Perman. Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Illustrations. 280 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08517-8; $110.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04325-3.
Reviewed by Vicki L. Brennan (University of Vermont)
Published on H-Africa (May, 2021)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
Signs of the Spirit centers on a two-day spirit possession ceremony that took place on a rural farm in a Ndau community in Zimbabwe and analyzes it to understand the relationships between music, meaning, and experience. The events of those two days, which centered on performances of music and dance in order to enable spirit mediums to be possessed by a variety of spirits connected to the history of the Ndau community, are examined to detail pragmatically how affect and emotion become linked to musical events such that they are able to transform participants' understandings of themselves and their experiences. In his analysis, Tony Perman elaborates a semiotic framework that relies on the theoretical terminology developed by the philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Perman uses this framework to draw out the dynamic processes of performance and experience in such ceremonies. By specifying the physical, emotional, and cognitive interactions that enable human mediums to interact with and embody spiritual forces, Signs of the Spirit makes a contribution to a variety of scholarly literatures on the role of music in the making of religious experiences.
Perman demonstrates a solid understanding of the history of communities and warfare in southern Africa, from the precolonial period up to the present. He outlines how contemporary Ndau identity was shaped by precolonial movements of people in the region and situations of warfare between different kingdoms and other groups, as well as by experiences of European colonialism and subsequent postcolonial tensions in Zimbabwe. He describes the situations of poverty and struggle for political power that many Ndau people find themselves in in Zimbabwe's current moment.
This history is situated in relationship to the successive groups of spirits that appear over the course of the all-night ceremony, each of which represent different aspects of the Ndau past and the community's encounters with outside groups. As the night goes on, different spirits arrive, and Perman spends time explaining who the spirits are, how they are known and recognized by participants, what they do during the ceremony, and why they are desired by participants. Spirits possess mediums in succession as the ceremony proceeds throughout the night—from soldiers, to children, to mermaids, to foreigners. Spirit possession represents a way of working actively with history to make sense of the present and to lead toward a future.
The book is focused on the ideas and practices that enable spirit possession in the Ndau community under consideration. We learn about the spirits active in the ceremony, and we also learn that some members of the community have converted to Christianity and that others have an ambivalent relationship to the spirit possession practices emphasized in this ceremony. Perman provides less detail concerning the specifics of religious participation in the wider community, nor does he offer an explanation of the larger cosmology in which these spirits operate or the conceptions of person and community that they are shaped by and in turn shape. Surprisingly, there is very little about witchcraft in this context and the ways the spirit possession practices discussed here might be connected to such discourses in the community. We also learn that ceremonies such as those analyzed in the book are performed as part of healing processes, but we do not actually get a good understanding of the particular afflictions experienced by participants or the nature of healing in this context itself.
Instead, the analysis centers squarely on what makes spirit possession possible, and on the chains of meaning and experience that allow spirits to take hold of the bodies of their human mediums so they can dance and interact with the living community. How do spirits possess human mediums? How do they make themselves known in the bodies of the living? Perman locates this in the senses—hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting—as well as in the materiality of the body, food, beer, snuff, clothes, color, and most important, music and sound.
The book is neatly organized and tightly structured around the analysis of an elaborate community ceremony as it unfolds over time. The text is organized into two parts. The first part, "Foundations," lays out the background information needed to contextualize the ceremony and the theoretical framework that Perman uses to show how the ceremony works: how meaning, experience, and affect intertwine in sensuous performances of music. The second part, "Ceremony at Horus Farm," moves through each phase of the overnight ceremony, describing how participation shifts in relation to changes in musical instruments, rhythms, dances, and the availability of food and beer throughout the night, using each transformation to elaborate a different aspect of the analytic framework that Perman hopes to develop.
The first chapter introduces the key actors and events that are then analyzed in depth in the second part of the book: namely, the spirits and their mediums, as well as the ceremonial context in which they bring each other to life. This chapter also offers a historical overview of the community and briefly describes the place of spirit possession ceremonies in everyday life. In chapter 2, Perman outlines his theoretical modeling of the sequence of emotional experiences in ceremonies such as the one at the center of the book, drawing heavily on Peircian semiotic language and bringing it to bear on questions raised in a number of disciplines, including ethnomusicology (music and meaning), anthropology (the centrality of sound for social and cultural life), and affect theory (the quality and impact of emotion from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science). Perman suggests that Peirce's theories offer a way of bridging conceptual, practical, and experimental questions in these disciplines concerning the nature of human experience and the relationships between emotion and meaning. In particular, he wants to draw attention to how sound—specifically music in performance—enables these kinds of experiences, thus producing cultural ideas about self, value, and agency. This dense, theoretical chapter uses examples from Perman's ethnography of Ndau musicking to help bring these theories to life and ends with an abstract model of the sequence of emotional experience that underlies such practices as spirit possession.
The second part of the text analyzes each stage of a single ceremony, from its start in the late afternoon, to its winding down in the early morning of the following day. Each chapter of this section identifies the particular spirits associated with that segment of the ceremony and analyzes the precise musical details that facilitate the experience of participants. It is in this section of the book that Perman's analysis of the pragmatics of participation and possession is elaborated. The musical analysis is particularly clear as he effectively brings together observations, interviews, and the understanding that comes from a long period of engaging with a group of musicians to understand what they are doing when they perform and how they achieve their intended musical effects. In these chapters, Perman allows the reader to understand how specific rhythmic patterns, performance techniques, and textures of experience (from the timbre of the drum to the sweat and vibration felt in the performance space) come together in the moment of performance. The transcriptions of drum rhythms, tone, and timbre that also indicate the steps and movement of the dancers provided in chapter 3 are particularly impressive and help to elucidate the nature of participatory experience. In chapter 4, Perman presents the differences between the performance techniques of two drummers who perform during the ceremony to great effect, showing how small shifts in technique and also in ability affect the ability of ritual musicking to achieve the desired effects for participants. In all of this Perman shows how dynamic such performances are and how they create a sense of being in the moment, of immediacy, that leads to possession.
One of Perman’s central purposes in writing this book is to allow the reader to better understand what Ndau communities are doing when they perform music for the spirits and precisely to show how, through compelling and successful musical performances, they are able to bring spirits of the past into the present to facilitate healing. There is a lot of evidence and analysis here in support of such a purpose. Perman uses precise ethnographic details and elaborates on the unfolding of events to unpack how human emotion and cognition are embedded in and shaped by the complex contexts of history, tradition, and ritual. However, to get to this the reader has to wade through the complex semiotic terminology and the discussion of triads of interpretants, of rhemes and dicents, of haecceity, and of synechism and semiotic chains. Perman draws on this terminology to offer a theoretical model that pragmatically makes concrete the "ineffibility" of musical experience (some places in the text where Perman most clearly lays out these ideas are on pages 20-21, 73-79, and 215-18). Perman stresses frequently that all of this is for him a "tool," but it is not clear to what extent the reader actually needs to understand the tool to arrive at the point of the analysis.
Nor is it clear that the analysis allows for an expanded understanding of the applicability of Peirce’s model of semiosis to such experiences as music. What might be afforded by such an extension, and in particular an extension of this complicated theoretical framework, to an interpretation of religious musicking in contemporary rural African communities? There is some indication that the author is interested in questions of human subjectivity, agency, and experience addressed by anthropologists working on issues of ethics (such as Saba Mahmood and Michael Lambek) and ontology (such as Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveros de Castro, and Paul Kockleman). However, these arguments are not fully developed and Perman’s specific contribution to these conversations is not elaborated.
Signs of the Spirit asks questions relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines: ethnomusicology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, religious studies, history, and African studies. Perman brings together different disciplinary questions and frameworks to build a bridge between the humanities and the human sciences. In doing so, he draws on related studies central for the nexus of ethnomusicology and trancing experiences, including those by Judith Becker, Rich Jankowsky, and Steve Friedson. However, at times the ethnographic and musicological analysis is overshadowed by the use of Peirce’s dense theoretical language in making sense of music, meaning, and experience. 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.
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Citation:
Vicki L. Brennan. Review of Perman, Tony, Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56499
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