Overview

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.

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9780226265049

Table of Contents

Reviews

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 Friedsons 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 Friedsons many, many insights.Bruce Kapferer, University of Bergen -- Bruce Kapferer

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<br>--Paul Stoller

Author Information

Steven M. Friedson is professor of music and anthropology at the University of North Texas and the author of Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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