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

by Deborah Kapchan
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2007
362 pp., illus, 19 b/w. Trade, $75.00; paper, $27.95
ISBN: 0-8195-6851-1; ISBN: 0-8195-6852-X.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
Visiting Research Fellow
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

jonathanzilberg@gmail.com

Traveling Spirit Masters is a fascinating ethnomusicological study of music and possession above all because the way in which the author manages to convey the reality of the spirit world and for how she manages to so evocatively fuse the literature on possession, her personal experiential dimension, and the complex inter-twined global histories evident in this music. As such, not only is it a major contribution to the study of the body, emotion, memory, and historical experience, but it is a fascinating example of how to write poetically about embodied experience in a deftly effective manner, that is in a way which balances the theoretical muse with solid ethnography. For those interested in the study of trance, music, and ritual, and for taking pleasure in that which sets anthropology and ethnomusicology apart from all other fields, this would be an intoxicating possession to acquire.

As far as I know it is the first full scale ethnography of African ethnic music as it is received in the global marketplace. It is not merely a musicological analysis of how African music is produced for a global audience nor of the complex historical flows within African musics, but also of how audiences differently experience African music in Africa and in the West. Above all, it allows us to understand trance music in a deeply sensuous and historicized way. Moreover, while there have been significant studies of how globalized ethnic musics have been produced and received, most notably for instance, Louis Meintjis’ work on Zulu pop, this is the first major study which follows African musicians as they perform both in and out of Africa and of how American Jazz musicians have become part of local tradition. To be sure, there have been a number of fine studies of modernizing musical traditions, for instance Waterman’s, Erlman’s and Rumba River, but what this study does is to add enormous depth to the sensorial and affective spiritual dimension. As a consequence of the concern with possession, it connects this study into the anthropological literature in a very different way and with a very different phenomenological weight than if Kapchan had studied Afro-pop, Rumba or any of the other more well known African musical traditions which have become so popular in the west in recent decades.

One is seductively entranced by this study even from the first page, that is, from the table of contents which call forth the most intimate aspects of our anthropological desires and Orientalist fascinations: the emplacement and intoxication of the culture of possession, the role of gesture and word in trance time, the working of the spirits through the entranced body and word – the power and poetics of music and language and the dream threshold. After unveiling the gnawa culture of possession in this first part of the book, the second part explores “possessing culture” in Chellah Gardens, of the economy of the spirit world and the differences between experiencing gnawa music and trance in France and Morocco, of dreams and spirits and other sacred musics, most notably connecting Celtitude and Negritude. Following upon all this richness, Kapchan traces the global links in this transnational musical history and finally, she provides us with her epiphany - an alchemical musical imagination and in the epilogue her own crossing of the dream threshold. In all this, the spirit of the opening epigraph by al-Ghazzali in The Alchemy of Happiness permeates the entire text:

“This world is a stage or marketplace passed by pilgrims on their way to the next. It is here that they are to provide themselves with provisions for the way; or, to put it plainly, man acquires here, by the use of his bodily sense, some knowledge of the works of God, and, through them, of God himself.”

Finally, the epilogue is similarly powerful in how it stands as symbolic of the whole. There Kapchan confirms how anthropology can allow for deeply private quests which connect ethnographers to their subjects in ways which far exceed the academically distanced descriptions of possession we are more used to. Above all, this tactic, her perception of the reality of the spirit world in her own life, makes this text a classic instance of the productive post-modern turn in ethnography fortunately here unmarred by interpretive excess.

Chapter 5 is singularly memorable. In order to draw future reader’s attention to this essential chapter, it is worth re-quoting the passage from Carl Jung which Kapchan uses as an epigraph in order to justify the relevance of one’s dreams to one’s ethnographic project:

“[In] the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my dreams and visions . . . . They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized . . . . All other memories of travel, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings (1963:4-5).”

No doubt Jung’s revelation provides a potent rejoinder to ethnography. How few and far between are the anthropologists who would dare reveal their dreams before, during or after fieldwork!

All in all, this book is a wonderful addition to the expansive literature on spirit possession in Africa. Its particular contribution is that it familiarizes the phenomenon and assumes the reality of the spirit world through describing her personal experience, if not in terms of possession then at least through her dreams. This adds a subjective dimension to the more classical studies as for instance of the best known Zar cult or of Mayote trance in Madagascar, or of the pan-African Apostolic churches and the lesser known possession cults of Zimbabwe. It remains to be seen whether future anthropologists will follow in Kapchan’s unusual use of participant observation and thus how her study may or may not influence the study of African ritual. Regardless of the outcome, for myself as a symbolic anthropologist, the most important aspect of this study is that we finally have an ethnographic study of possession that focuses on music, something which to a great extent has been sorely lacking in the anthropological study of African religion, despite the move to study process of embodiment. This is of course not at all to say that ethnomusicologists have not paid attention to the role of music in religion, but that anthropologists have by and large been tone deaf. We have been so possessed by intellectual legacies pertaining to structure, symbol and process that we have been insufficiently aware of the power of musical experience as enabling transformative action in the social and political field. One can only hope perhaps that Kapchan’s study will inspire ethnographers to systematically record music during their fieldwork and consider it as central to their analysis as it is to the people whose rites and religions are being subject to analysis.

As a study of dreams and spirits, of jazz and the ancestors, of the past in the present, Traveling Spirit Masters will be savored as a complex multi-cultural form of Turkish delight. For those who are open to such sensation, it will draw you into the reality of the spirit world in a way few other anthropologists have been able to achieve. In doing so, at the risk of being overly enthusiastic, I believe, it may well become a foundational text for 21st century anthropology of music and religion concerned with issues of body, text and sound, a sensitive and yet robust example of how to cross the post-modern inter-disciplinary threshold and still make sense.