Music, Movement and the Construction of Identity in Rural Southern Tanzania

Social anthropologists began to take a serious interest in cultural institutions involving spirit possession from the beginning of the 1960s. Where the so-called ‘cults of affliction’ were concerned, the dominant approach in many early studies of was to view them as ‘historically sensitive modes of cultural resistance’ (Body 1994: 419). Later work turned against the underlying ‘master narrative’ of resistance, to emphasize the central significance of personal healing and its symbolic or ritual repertoire of transformation, as well as the primary position of mediums, healers and leaders (e.g. Cohen 2007). In this presentation I will leave aside interpretations, which have analysed the widespread, dynamic, and highly flexible cultural trope of spirit possession rituals according to therapeutic models, or as symptomatic of power imbalances. Instead, drawing on fieldwork conducted in rural southern Tanzania in the 1990s, I will discuss the performative contexts of dance rituals in which spirit agencies are primarily experienced through music and dance. By comparing the crucial expressive role played by music between the popular cultural forms of masquerade and healing dances, I will attempt to draw some more general conclusions about the role of music in structuring movement, experience and identities