Signs of the Spirit

An ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies among rural Ndau-speaking communities in Chipinge, Zimbabwe. The book examines how musicking during ceremonial life is meaningfully experienced in a single spirit possession ceremony, focusing on the immediacy of musical experience and how the ongoing present of performance becomes emotional and socially salient. It presents a model rooted in ethnography and semiotic analysis that illuminates the relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion, engaging with Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. The ceremonies described aim to transform possibility into actuality, with music uniquely suited to facilitate such experiential transformations.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This book is an ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies and accompanying musical practices in the rural Ndau-speaking communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Collectively called madhlozi, these spirits are the “outsider spirits” of distant social encounters that have shaped Ndau identity and history. The purpose of this book is to explain how musicking during ceremonial life in rural Ndau communities in Zimbabwe is meaningfully experienced during a single spirit possession ceremony. It investigates the immediacy of musical experience and the ways in which the ongoing present of ceremonial performance becomes emotional and socially salient. It provides a model rooted in ethnography and semiotic analysis that illuminates the tight relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion, engaging with three overlapping bodies of knowledge: Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. Each chapter in Part II focuses on a specific category of spirits and emphasizes an element of semiotic theory to build a model for exploring affect, emotional experience, and ceremonial efficacy: objects, signs, effects, and continuity. The purpose of the ceremonies I describe and analyze is to transform possibility into actuality, desires into reality. Music is uniquely suited to facilitate experiential transformations such as this. Situated within the historical, spiritual, musical, and political contexts of contemporary Ndau life in Zimbabwe, this book explains how important the experience of meaning is to ceremonial life.