Remains of Ritual-Northern Gods in a Southern Land
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Winner of the Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology
Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson's second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson's careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.
Steven M. Friedson is Distinguished Research Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of North Texas and the author of Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing.
"In his Remains of Ritual, Steve Friedson has given us a pathbreaking work on the nature and dynamics of ritual practice. This sensuously contoured and theoretically nuanced tale of how the northern Gods came to possess Ewe mediums in Ghana's southern lands underscores powerfully how the fusion of sound, movement, and meaning evokes central themes of Ewe history and culture. In so doing, Friedson demonstrates how history and culture are reckoned and passed from present to future. This work is ethnography at its very best."
Paul Stoller, West Chester University
"Beautifully written, with a deft integration of history, theory, interpretation, and fine-grained ethnographic detail, Friedson's narrative-style analysis of Ghanaian Ewe shrine rituals and their music is compelling reading with breathtaking insights in every chapter. Integrating the phenomenological approaches of Heidegger with his sustained field research, Friedson presents the reader with more than just a fresh look at Ewe trancing, drumming, dancing, and singing—he teaches us how to conceptualize gold-standard fieldwork. Without didacticism, Friedson demonstrates the importance of long-term field research and how he negotiates his own role as a participant in the most intimate of Ewe shrine rituals without actually becoming a member. Efficacy is in the doing, not in the believing. He has appropriated and reinterpreted a philosopher from the European past to present a strangely beautiful and haunting tale of a contemporary West African musical/ religious practice."
Judith Becker, University of Michigan
"Friedson guides the reader through the complex realities of Ewe shrines, their gods, fetishes, and priests. The ontology underpinning the various kinds of engagement that Ewe have with their gods is revealed in the brilliant sensitivity of Friedson's exposition. He shows how the forces of the shrines and the powers of their priests must be grasped in the dynamics of participation. Here music is central, and Friedson reveals the exciting new terrains of understanding that become manifest in it. This is a masterly work that constitutes a major contribution to the anthropology of ritual performance and will have significance for knowledge well beyond the West African world that is the basis for Friedson's many, many insights."
Bruce Kapferer, University of Bergen
