Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace

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Wesleyan University Press, Oct 26, 2007 - History - 325 pages

The sacred and musical phenomenon of trance

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local interest: the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance—and indeed all sacred music—is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

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Contents

Initiation I
1
THE CULTURE OF POSSESSION
3
Emplacement II
24
A Gesture Narrowly Divides Us From Chaos Gesture and Word in Trance Time
47
Working the Spirits The Entranced Body the Entranced Word
81
On the Threshold of a Dream
106
POSSESSING CULTURE
121
The Chellah Gardens
123
Narratives of Epiphany Indexing Global Links
176
Possessing Gnawa Culture Displaying Sound Creating History in Dar Gnawa
210
Conclusion The Alchemy of the Musical Imagination
232
Epilogue
240
Notes
243
Acknowledgments
279
Bibliography
281
Index
315

Money and the Spirit
129
In France with the Gnawa
151

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About the author (2007)

Deborah A. Kapchan is associate professor of performance studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition and Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace."She translated and edited a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry and is the editor of Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit and Theorizing Sound Writing.

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