Category Archives: Faculty

The Phonograph and the Research Process

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This post will be the final one on my research on Yoruba gospel music. It has also been the most difficult to write. In part, this is because I want (need?) to be more speculative and abstract in my discussion of the recordings of Yoruba Christian songs made by the Reverend J.J. Ransome-Kuti in London in 1927. My previous posts have been based on the historical and musicological sources that I have been able to find concerning Kuti’s life and music. In Part 2 I looked at how Kuti’s biographers positioned him as a Christian pioneer who mediated between old and new in colonial Nigeria. In Part 3, I discussed how Kuti’s musical compositions resolved a problem of musical translation for early Yoruba Christians; namely, the tone-tune issue where the tonal aspects of Yoruba language clashed with the musical melodies of translated European hymns. Today I want to return to some of the questions I raised in my first post and to ruminate on the issues and further questions raised by my investigation into these recordings.

As you may recall, I am especially interested in the recordings themselves and the issues concerning technology and materiality that they raise for our understanding of Yoruba Christianity. These questions speak to wider concerns in anthropology, African studies, and the study of Religion: the place and contributions of colonized Africans in the making of our modern world, the role of sound technologies in transforming religious and cultural practices,and  the transformations of the senses—in ways of hearing and soundings—by recording technologies which enabled a new way of transmitting and circulating sounds.

phonographWhile I can’t address all of these issues directly here, I want to reflect a bit on the phonograph, a technology central to the story I have been telling so far. There are numerous scholarly writings about the place of the phonograph in the shaping of modern experience and conceptions of music in particular and sound more generally. A key theme in these writings has to do with how recordings enable sounds to be dislocated and disembodied from their original sources, resulting in what R. Murray Schafer has termed “schizo-phonia,” a term with which he meant to indicate the troubled nature of such a relationship between sound and source. A similar strain may be found in the critical writings of Theodor Adorno, who in 1934 wrote of the phonograph record as designating a “two-dimensional model of a reality that can be multiplied without limit, displaced both spatially and temporally, and traded on the open market.” Thus, for Adorno music becomes less about technology serving human needs and desires, but rather about the subjection of humans to things, and the reduction of music to an object that can be bought and sold, thus transforming human history and experience.

More recent writings on the phonograph have complicated these arguments, seeking to uncover the assumptions about the nature of sound, music, and hearing that underlie them. For example, Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past outlines the history of the possibility of sound-reproduction in order to show how many of our now taken-for-granted ideas about sound and human experience emerge in relation to sound-reproduction technology itself; so that, for example, the universal primacy of face-to-face human interaction which is assumed in arguments such as Schafer’s is actually a historical and specific set of ideas that emerge out of an engagement with sound technologies. Other writers have considered the ability of sound technologies to repeat and circulate sounds outside of their original contexts in the formation of racial categories and subjectivities. For example, the role played by the phonograph in colonialism, particular in the kinds of racial imagination and desires enabled by the technology have been discussed by writers such as Michael Taussig and William Pietz.  Alexander Weheliye considers  the creative possibilities of sound-reproduction technologies as enabling of black cultural production and productive of a “sonic Afro-modernity” that entails new modes of and new possibilities for being.

Placing the technology of the phonograph recording at the center of the story I am telling here shifts priorities, questions, and possible conclusions. For example, why is it that Kuti’s biographers merely mention the fact of the recordings rather than emphasizing them as part of his mediation between old and new? Certain events, such as Kuti’s challenge to Yoruba traditional authority through the desacralizing of the umbrella, or his encouragement of the Christian ogboni as an Africanization of Christianity, receive detailed, chapter-long treatments in Delano’s biography. In contrast, the recordings are only briefly mentioned, in Chapter Nine of the book entitled “In Remembrance” which describes Kuti’s efforts at maintaining the church in the context of the loss of independence of the Egba nation to the colonial government. Delano writes of the recordings in a single sentence, which appears in a paragraph documenting Kuti’s travels outside of Nigeria. Here is the paragraph in its entirety:

In 1922, by the kind munificence of the late Mrs. J. B. Wood, one of the early European missionaries, he visited the Holy Land. By invitation of the CMS Authority he travelled through Europe, and attended the CMS Exhibition in London. He took this opportunity of making some gramophone recordings of his songs. This was his second visit to London; the first had been in 1905, when he preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral. On his return form his travels  he was made a Canon of the Cathedral Church of Christ, Lagos. [emphasis added to original.]

That’s it?! Really? This is the only mention of the recordings in a 64-page text about Kuti’s life. Of course, this passing mention might be understood in relation to Delano’s purpose in writing the book, which is to cast Kuti as a pioneer of Christianity among the Yoruba, and as an influential figure in the transformation of Egba society from old to new. Delano thus dwells mainly on Kuti’s activities in Egbaland, suggesting, perhaps, that the recordings had very little influence on Yoruba Christian life in Nigeria beyond the fact of their being made.

Extending this line of argument to the tone-tune issue discussed by musicologists, Kuti’s recordings then are also a document of his resolution of this issue in his compositions. Furthermore, as Akin Euba notes, it is one that has little impact on Yoruba Christian practice; as Euba writes, “ironically…the sings which today appeal most popularly to the grassroots of the Christian community…are songs in which the intonation of the words is often distorted, as if they were European hymns translated into Yoruba and sung to European tunes.” So much for Kuti’s impact on future Yoruba Christian musical production, whether through the printed hymn book or the recordings.

Further support for the lack of importance or impact of the recordings in Nigeria is provided by the journalistic website Sahara Reporters, in an article about “The Singing Minister: The unsung story of Fela’s grandpa.”  Here Kuti is depicted in reference to his grandson, Fela Kuti, the contemporary Afro-beat superstar whose life and music has been the subjects of numerous books, films, and even a Broadway play. The article about the “unsung story” of J.J. Ransome-Kuti provides the (apocryphal?) tale of Kuti’s grandson, Dr. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, learning of the existence of the recordings from a librarian at the British Library. Olikoye is reported to have been “shocked to listen to his grandfather’s voice, not in Abeokuta, his ancestral home, but right in far away British Museum.” Certainly a displacement of object from source, a voice calling out across the generations. Could it be that Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti’s recordings really had so little impact in Nigeria that they were lost even to his family members?

From the blog Postcards: Then and Now (http://postcardsthenandnow.blogspot.com/2012/05/hayes-middlesex-station-c1914.html)

EMI Factory; Hayes, London; c.1914. From the blog Postcards: Then and Now

 

Coming at this issue from another direction, there is the possibility that the recordings were made for European audiences and that it was there where their impact lay.  Recall that Paul Vernon suggested that these records were “aimed at a European audience and regarded as novelties.” I dismissed this possibility in my first post, but now I want to reconsider it. Indeed, a number of novelty recordings of Africans and other colonial subjects were made for sale in European markets, though the majority of them were of folkloric songs or performances. Some recordings featured speakers of African languages demonstrating the diversity of human linguistic output. Other recordings were distinctly ethnological, intended to preserve aspects of local cultures that were seen as disappearing in the face of European colonialism.

Thinking about the recordings in this way opens up a number of new analytic questions: What does it mean to think of Kuti’s recordings as a novelty for European listeners? What did that even mean; in other words, in what way were they a novelty? Why might European listeners want to hear a Yoruba man sing his Christian songs in a language that they could not understand? How did these recordings impact British understandings of the colonial project and of the place of Africans in British conceptions of Christianity?

While I do not have the answers to these questions, they present fruitful avenues for further research into this topic. My intention in this series of posts has been to describe my current research and to provide insight into the research process. My posts make clear that the research process is often messy and incomplete, requiring one to move forwards and then back again as the researcher’s categories are refined and her questions reformulated. While I hope that you have enjoyed learning more about the recordings made by J.J. Ransome-Kuti, I also hope that you have learned a bit more about the nature of research in the humanities (and the humanistic social sciences). This is the reason why my series of posts on this topic ends with more questions than answers. As the sociologist Andrew Abbott writes:

In the humanities and social sciences we do not ask questions to to which final answers already exist, answers which can be found somewhere. We seek to adjust the questions we can ask and the answers we can find into harmonious writings that explore again and again the subtleties that constitute human existence. It is our pleasure to do this in a rigorous and disciplined way. That is what makes our research academic. But our research is not scientific, for the things we wish to discuss do not have fixed answers. We discover things, to be sure, but their discover merely opens further possibilities to complexify them.

Faculty featured in UVM Humanities Publication

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Recently, the UVM Humanities Center produced an aptly titled publication, Humanities, which focused on humanities and the creative arts at UVM, and captured the depth, range, and relScreen Shot 2015-03-06 at 11.00.09 AMevance of work by UVM faculty, students, and alumni. It featured a number of Religion Department faculty!

Prof. Thomas Borchert‘s recent research on Buddhist monks in Thailand–a regular element of this blog!–was highlighted in a piece titled “Crisis in the Temple” by Basil Waugh (pp. 50-51). Prof. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s use of social media and digital technologies in the classroom was featured in a piece titled “Follow that Professor,” authored by Amanda Waits (pp. 74-75). And Thomas Weaver wrote an article titled “Humanities at Home,” (pp.  78-79) which foregrounds Prof. Richard Sugarman talking about the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP), one of the College’s Teacher-Advisor Programs for first-year students, of which he serves as Director.

Download the whole Humanities magazine here (in PDF format).

 

The Genius of Yoruba Music

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This is Part Three of a series posts about Professor Brennan’s new research on Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti and the history of Yoruba gospel music. Here are links to the earlier posts: Part One and Part Two.

I want to build on my previous post about how Reverend J. J. Ransome-Kuti negotiated old and new ways of life for Yoruba communities in colonial Nigeria by talking about how Ransome-Kuti’s music was a part of that dynamic.  Despite the overwhelming attention to issues of language and translation by missionaries who attempted to present Christianity in terms that local Yoruba communities could understand, music was also seen as key to attracting converts as well as for their properly adopting Christian practices. Hymn singing was central to Christian evangelism, and harmoniums and hymnals were part of the cargo sent to West Africa along with Bibles and other religious tracts. Missionaries ideally sought to use the words and tunes of the hymns in order to arouse the emotions of a religiously awakened congregation.

Early musical practices in Yoruba mission churches involved translating English hymns directly into the Yoruba language and then fitting those lyrics to the appropriate melodies and harmonies hen they were performed. This practice resulted in what the musicologist Akin Euba has called “an unhappy cultural marriage.” The mismatch between Yoruba lyrics and English hymn tunes was due to the fact that the tonal nature of the Yoruba language was often distorted by the melodic contour of a given song. The Yoruba language relies on three tones—high, medium, and low—in order to distinguish semantic meaning. Translating English hymns into Yoruba, and then applying those Yoruba words to the already existing melody that was written without regard to the tonal requirements of the language potentially rendered the lyrics meaningless or at best altered their meaning unintentionally.

Akin Euba explains the tone-tune discrepancy in translating English songs directly into Yoruba. From Euba, A. 1989, "Yoruba Music in the Church"

Akin Euba explains the tone-tune discrepancy in translating English songs directly into Yoruba. From Euba, A. 1989, “Yoruba Music in the Church”

It was for this reason that early converts—and indeed the missionaries themselves, many of whom came from Yoruba communities and spoke Yoruba fluently—endeavored to compose original tunes to Yoruba hymns. One of the earliest records we have of such compositions may be found in the letters of James White, a Yoruba pastor assigned to the Church Missionary Society mission at Ota, outside of Lagos. White encouraged the production of local hymns and Christian songs, noting that Yoruba communities were skilled at using music and poetry to praise religious figures. His letters from 1857 included the following observation: “Our converts, when heathens, certainly had hymns and songs of praise in honor of their gods—might they not also, now that they are Christians compose songs and hymns in honor of the God of gods?” White’s letters also included a pamphlet entitled “Orin, Ati Iyin si Olorun” (“Hymns and Praises for God”) which contained printed lyrics and translations of hymns composed by church members.

While the efforts of White’s congregation represented an early move towards the development of a corpus of indigenous hymns among the Yoruba, shifts in the nature of evangelism and the understanding of the role of Christianity in the new social and political order of the colony at the turn of the twentieth century further encouraged such practices. In response to a shift in mission policy away from “native governance” of mission affairs, many Yoruba clergymen reacted to European assertions of African inferiority through a revaluing of Yoruba culture. Yoruba pastors and scholars developed an increased interest in Yoruba history, religion, and politics which resulted in the first books written in English by Yoruba authors concerning Yoruba history and culture. These included Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas (manuscript completed in 1897, published in 1921) and James Johnson’s Yoruba Heathenism (1899).

Proponents of this perspective articulated a form of cultural nationalism that claimed that conversion to Christianity did not necessarily require a wholesale adoption of European or English ways of life. Mojola Agbebi, a leader of this movement, argued in an influential speech given in 1902 that certain practices were not essential to being a Christian but instead interfered with what he saw as the African achievement of a Christian identity identity:

Prayer-books and hymn-books, harmonium dedications, pew constructions, surpliced choir, the white man’s style, the white man’s name, the white man’s dress, are so many non-essentials, so many props and crutches affecting the religious manhood of the Christian African.

In this speech Agbebi suggested that the style or form in which Christianity was practiced was not important.  Agbebi began a process in which Christianity became unlinked from “whiteness” and cultural aspects which were seen as being European not African. In this way Christian practice became open to the inclusion of African modes of expression.

Mojola Agbebi

Mojola Agbebi

In a sermon later that year Agbebi expanded further on the ways in which Christian musical practices could be “Africanized”:

It was recorded of the early disciples that after the Celebration of the Last Supper ‘they sang a hymn,’ yet it should be remembered that neither the harmonium, nor the organ, nor the piano was known to them. Our dundun and Batakoto, our Gese and Kerikeri, our Fajakis and Sambas would serve admirable purposes of joy and praise if properly directed and wisely brought into play. (…) In the carrying out of the function of singing, therefore, let us always remember that we are Africans, and that we ought to sing African songs, and that in African style and fashion.

In this sermon Agbebi articulated a particular conception of Christianity connected to a newly developed sense of historical time and global space as he attempted to account for the location of Africans—particularly Yorubas—within a wider Christian historical framework. His call to “sing African songs” in an “African style and fashion” suggests that singing itself was an important aspect of Christian practice, not the nature of the song itself, which should be suited to the linguistic and emotional preferences of the person singing the song. Agbebi’s comments here also spoke to the way in which musical practice could become compelling for Yoruba Christians through the integration of African musical practices for the purpose of joy and praise.

Ransome-Kuti’s corpus of sacred songs was part of this movement towards the Africanization of church music. In addition to composing new hymns that began with Yoruba lyrics and adapted melodies to suit them, he also took the bold step of adapting indigenous tunes to newly composed Christian words. A selection of his hymns, entitled Awon Orin Mimo Ni Ede Ati Ohun Wa (Sacred Songs in Our Language and Intonation), was published by the CMS bookshop in Lagos in 1925. In addition, 57 of his songs were published as an appendix to the standard Yoruba hymnbook (1923), and editors noted his contribution in the Preface by writing:

No tune, however, can possibly express the meaning of words in a “tonic” language such as Yoruba, so well as one written specifically for the words. Great thanks are therefore due to the Rev. J. J. Ransome Kuti for his contribution of original airs, which express the genius of Yoruba music, and will, for that reason, be greatly appreciated.

Unfortunately, no such note of acknowledgement exists to account for the Ransome-Kuti’s recording of his songs in 1922, though we might make a reasonable assumption that they were also part of this movement for greater autonomy for Yoruba clergy and indigenization of Christianity in Yoruba communities. I hope through future research to substantiate this assumption.

Ransome-Kuti: Between Old and New

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In my last post about Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti and the origins of Yoruba gospel music I indicated that there were a number of things that I do not know about his recordings; namely why they were made, how they were distributed and marketed, and who constituted their audiences at the time. I am still continuing to research those questions. However, there is much that is known about Ransome-Kuti and the period of Yoruba church history in which he made his recordings. In today’s post I will write about how we can understand the Ransome-Kuti recordings in relation to both his life history as well to historical developments in Yoruba Christianity.

Isaac Delano, Ransome-Kuti's biographer.

Isaac Delano, Ransome-Kuti’s biographer.

There are a number of published biographies of Ransome-Kuti, though they are mainly available to readers in Nigeria. Of particular interest are two books written by Isaac O. Delano, a Yoruba intellectual from a prominent Christian family in Abeokuta, who wrote a number of books about Yoruba language and culture. Delano’s first book about Ransome-Kuti, The Singing minister of Nigeria, was published in 1942 by the United Society for Christian Literature. The intention of the book, as noted in the Publishers’ Note, was to “stimulate Africans to take an interest in the reading of the great tribes and personalities of their continent.” The second book, Josaiah Ransome-Kuti: The drummer boy who became a canon, is an abridged version of the first, and was published by Oxford University Press in Ibadan, as part of their “Makers of Nigeria” series.

In Delano’s account, Ransome-Kuti is depicted as champion of local Yoruba leadership within mission Christianity. One of the ways Delano does this is through stressing Ransome-Kuti’s devotion both to the Yoruba communities in which he worked as well as to the goals of Christian evangelism and conversion in those communities. Delano describes Ransome-Kuti as “the link between the old and the new civilizations, as well as between the black and white” (51).  Thus, even though Ransome-Kuti was a tireless warrior against traditional religion, he recognized the values of Yoruba language, music, and forms of social organization in his ministry. Even though he was a representative of the British colonial administration (according to Delano he was given a mandate by the Egba Government to act on its behalf), he was also a keen voice in support of “native” leadership in the church and at local levels.

Two examples from his biography make these aspects of Ransome-Kuti’s orientation towards Yoruba Christianity clear. The first concerns his campaign in the town of Ilaro to allow Christians to use umbrellas. The umbrella served as symbol of royal power and for this reason was restricted to the use of the ọba (king) of the town.

Egba Kings with Umbrellas

Egba Kings with Umbrellas, a symbol of royal power under dispute in Ilaro.

Ransome-Kuti’s petition was granted by the palace; however his actions were viewed as threatening to local authority by some members of the community. Ransome-Kuti was attacked with machetes in the night by members of this faction. These actions led to a larger stand-off between the Christians in the community who wanted to take their revenge, the parties connected to the King’s palace who were seen as responsible for the attack, and the British government representatives who sent a battalion of soldiers to the area in anticipation of violence. Ransome-Kuti worked to stave off a large-scale conflict in the community by negotiating between the three sides. The resolution of this event involved the trial of those involved in the attack on Ransome-Kuti in the British court and an easing of tensions between Christians and non-Christians in Ilaro. Ransome-Kuti is identified by Delano as responsible for this; as he writes, “Christianity at Ilaro was built on the blood of Kuti” (35).

At the other end of the spectrum, Ransome-Kuti was also not afraid to challenge the mission leadership and colonial administration in support of the Yoruba communities in which he worked. For example, he challenged the church constitution by baptizing the children of of those whose parents weren’t married in the church and was found guilty by the Episcopal Court for this offense. When his followers in Abeokuta wanted to split from the Diocese over this, he implored them to work to change the church policy from within. Ransome-Kuti’s other clash with church leadership was over whether or not a group of Christian elders who called themselves the “Christian Ogboni” could hold their Thanksgiving service in the church. The Ogboni were a secret society that before colonialism had played an important role in politics and who acted in a judicial capacity in Yoruba communities. The Christian elders at the Ake church in Abeokuta had formed  themselves into a similar society, taken titles, and went about settling matters between Christians. For allowing the Christian Ogboni to hold their Thanksgiving service, Ransome-Kuti was charged with “introducing heathenism into the church” (46). Due to the overwhelming support of the local congregation for Ransome-Kuti’s actions, he was let off from this charge with a warning.

It is actions such as these that lead Delano to celebrate Ransome-Kuti for being “a man who stood firmly between the old and the new Egba people at a time when they were passing through difficult and revolutionary changes” ( 63-64). Here, Ransome-Kuti stands as a metaphor for Yoruba modernization.

Such qualities also characterize Delano’s description of Ransome-Kuti’s musical abilities. While Delano writes little about Ransome-Kuti’s musical recordings other than noting that they were made, he does tell us about Ransome-Kuti’s musical endeavors, portraying them as similarly straddling old and new, black and white. Delano writes,

He was first and foremost a craftsman, labouring to build up native music with the same conscience with which a first-class carpenter would build a table. He picked some of the best native airs, polished them up and set them to music. They were more easily followed and understood by the hundreds of converts whom he was to bring into the fold of Christ. [12]

In this way Ransome-Kuti is portrayed as both Christianizing and modernizing (by “polishing up”) Yoruba music at the same time as he translated Christian musical practices to Yoruba communities. Delano also notes the importance of music for galvanizing Yoruba and Christian devotion. Towards the end of the book he describes an enthusiastic crowd listening to Ransome-Kuti preaching in the town market:

Mounted on a petrol box, Kuti would be singing with hand raised, his earnest face illumined but the peace in his soul; his bushy hair waving in the breeze. The people around him would sing lustily. They sang as they felt; they felt as they sang. The same cure, the same key was offered for the unlocking of the mysteries of their hearts. [58-59]

It is in such descriptions that we can better understand why Ransome-Kuti’s songs may have been singled out to be recorded. More importantly, we can see the centrality of musical practice for Yoruba Christian experience—the feelingful aspects of singing that drew converts to the church and made them feel connected to and at ease with the changes that were happening around them at the time.

In my next post I will address some of the musical characteristics of Ransome-Kuti’s songs, in order to better understand how this negotiation between old and new was accomplished musically.

Rev. J. J. Ransome-Kuti and the History of Yoruba Gospel Music

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Last September I announced on the REL@UVM blog that I would post periodic updates about what I was up to while on sabbatical. I then disappeared…into my field notes, stacks of library books, and pages of notes on my new book project. Well, I am back! I am still in the thick of it—ordering books from Interlibrary Loan, searching through indexes to find out which archives might hold relevant sources, and scribbling and typing notes on what I know and what I need to find out. This month I plan to share some of these notes in a series of posts describing my current research and providing some insights into the research process.

A selection of labels from releases by J. J. Ransome-Kuti, from Black Europe endpapers.

A selection of labels from releases by J. J. Ransome-Kuti, from Black Europe endpapers.

The main project I have been working on since September has been a study of commercially recorded and distributed Yoruba gospel music. This topic emerged naturally out of my research on music in Cherubim and Seraphim churches in Lagos, as the church where I based much of that earlier research had a choir that released a number of successful recordings (see my article about these recordings here). My interest in the gospel music industry in southwest Nigeria led me to investigate the history of this genre. When were the first recordings of Yoruba Christian music made? How? Who made up the audience? Do the recordings circulate today?

These questions led me to focus on what I believe are among the earliest—if not the earliest—sound recordings of Yoruba gospel music. In 1922 the Reverend Josaiah Jesse Ransome-Kuti traveled from his home near Abeokuta, Nigeria to London, England to attend the Church Missionary Society Exhibition. While there, he recorded a total of 43 songs which were released on double-sided Zonophone discs by the Gramophone Company.

Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti

Reverend J. J. Ransome Kuti

According to most sources, Ransome-Kuti wrote and arranged all of the songs he recorded. The recordings feature Ransome-Kuti singing to piano accompaniment. The majority of the songs are described on record labels as Yoruba “hymns” or “sacred songs.” In addition to these Christian songs he also recorded a funeral lament, and a track described on the label as “Abeokuta National Anthem,” a folk song about the strength of the Egba Yoruba community in which Ransome-Kuti lived.

I first heard these recordings when I visited the British Library in 2010. However, they have since been released by Bear Family Productions on a monumental boxed set called Black Europe that documents the sounds and images of black people in Europe prior to 1927. The set includes 45 discs of music and data, along with two coffee-table books that provide documentation and background information about the recordings. While only 500 copies of the Black Europe set were released, when I asked Lori Holiff, the librarian at UVM’s Bailey-Howe Library, to purchase a copy she readily agreed. In the past three months I have been poring over the recordings and combing through the extensive documentation to help me understand the significance of these recordings for both the history of Yoruba Christian music as well as for the development of the music industry in Nigeria.

I have a lot of questions to ask of these recordings. It is unclear exactly why they were made and how they were used. In a paper concerning the history of the recording industry in West Africa, Paul Vernon suggests that the Ransome-Kuti recordings were likely novelty records made for British audiences. I have a difficult time imagining non-Yoruba speaking listeners to these recordings, nor does this explanation account for the number of songs that Ransome-Kuti recorded. A more promising explanation is found on a promotional sheet reproduced in the Black Europe book, which notes that the recordings were made by Ransome-Kuti “so that the Sacred Songs of his own composition…may be available to all Yoruba speaking people” (Vol. 2, p. 194) This statement opens up the possibility that they were recorded for and distributed to the growing number of elite, educated, and Christian Yoruba families in Lagos and Abeokuta, Nigeria in the 1920s. This group constituted an early market for Western commodities, which may very well have included gramophones. I am looking for additional evidence that supports this interpretation. I still have to follow the strands through the archives and history books to determine to what extent the playback technology was available for consumers in Nigeria in the 1920s and 1930s and whether or not recordings such as those made by Ransome-Kuti were marketed to listeners in Nigeria.

I am also interested in how these recordings were used, and what people thought about them at the time. Did they help to circulate the growing corpus of Christian songs composed by Yoruba musicians to the expanding number of churches in the Yoruba-speaking region of the colony? If so, this represented a transformation in the way Christian practices were circulated between churches. Were the recordings intended to help congregations learn these songs so that they could sing them during church worship? Did they supplement the numerous printed hymnals and other song books in which the songs appear?

I do not have the answer to these questions though I have some ideas about what I will find, as well as some ideas about the implications my findings will have for understanding the development and significance of Yoruba Christian music. In the coming weeks I will tell you more about what I have found out about J.J. Ransome-Kuti and these recordings, how my research questions have developed over time, and what new directions this project will take me towards in the future.

Read Part 2 of this series of posts, “Ransome-Kuti: Between Old and New.”

Babies, Babar, and Yoga

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BKHALDBabarsYogaLarge300I have an almost-two year old daughter, and she has a legion of Nanas, Pop-Pops, Grandmas, Grandpas, Aunties, Uncles, and general well-wishers who love buying things for her. (This is lovely and appreciated, even if often roundly met with frustration: Please bring less stuff into my house. Please.) In the midst of a now-typical “But, seriously, what does she need?!” conversation, Babar’s Yoga for Elephants, a book in the (revamped, English) Babar series, was suggested as a perfect gift. After all, it’s Babar! And he’s doing yoga! 

Cue a surprise academic moment. This is Babar, an elephant king who shares his name with Babur, the first Mughal ruler. This is Babar, whom I read about avidly as a child–only to get to college and realize my love of Babar meant I had participated in the orientalist assumptions with which it was written. This is Babar, keeping up with the times and staying fit with yoga. This is Babar, practicing bendy, stretchy, mindful-but-not-religious yoga, at the feet of a stereotypically dressed yogi, fashioned as a dark-skinned, eyes-closed, bearded, bare-chested man in a white turban and wrapped, white bottoms (a dhoti?). B7zLqS6CEAADINa.jpg-large

At once, the obvious problems with depicting a generalized South Asian–the man in the image above–are as banal as they are startling. This image is readily critiqued, easily identified, and almost boring in its cliche; yet seeing these problems replicated not in an early-20th century text (when French and English colonialism were in full swing) but rather in a recent book, intended for children, is disconcerting, if not altogether shocking.

Before one even gets to the book, we encounter its dust jacket–which itself serves as fodder for analysis. It reads:

“Well before yoga became fashionable via Sting and Madonna, our friend Babar and all the residents of Celesteville were finding peace and tranquillity through yoga. And now elephants everywhere can join them! … Written by Babar himself, the book explains how yoga was introduced to Celesteville and how he and Celeste keep fit doing yoga on their many travels.” (Replicated here.)

There are multiple truth-claims within this short passage which, in turn, represents the universe in which Babar exists. The first is that Babar is an original practitioner of yoga; his instructional book is thus both authentic and accurate. It ought not to be confused with new iterations of yoga, or newcomers to the practice (like Sting and Madonna), which represent a passing fad and even a disingenuous interest. But while Babar and the residents of Celesteville originally found “peace and tranquility through yoga,” now, in his own words, Babar tells his audience how to “keep fit doing yoga.” What began as a way to find calm, well before it was popular among those living beyond Celesteville, is now a way to keep fit.

A yogi in a cross-legged position doing Machendra asana, British Library: Add.24099, f.14.

This, in some ways, reflects the adoption, adaption, and appropriation of yoga in contemporary, often Euro-American, contexts. What started as a set of disciplines–what yoga literally translates to–in some South Asian religions, for specific participants (usually male, high-caste, and ascetic, as argued by many, for example Sarah Strauss) is now a multi-billion dollar exercise (and perhaps self-help) business. While it’s easy and appropriate to point to the contemporary uses and alterations to yoga, it’s not the whole picture: there is ample evidence that many non-casted, non-Hindu or Buddhist actors have adopted, adapted and appropriated yoga in other historical periods. For example, Muslim Sufis utilized yogic techniques like breathing and meditation, with some even advocating for its adoption into appropriate Islamic praxis (see Ernst here and Kugle there). Yoga, as most other religious ideologies and forms of practice, has been adapted for and by different communities for centuries.

But that doesn’t mean we ought to label Babar practicing yoga as evidence of how normal and normative yoga has become, and move on. There are some for whom this appropriation of yoga is normal, but inappropriate. As schools debate incorporating yoga, mindfulness, and/or meditation into curricula, some Hindus have argued that this misuses their religion, of which yoga is a part; some Christians and atheists, likewise, have argued that allowing these practices in school promotes (a specific) religion, and is inappropriate. All the while, the American Yoga Association claims yoga is not a religion. Debates about what religion is, how it ought to count, and how what counts (or doesn’t) is used are all central to these ongoing conversations, in and outside the public sphere. They also all apply to how we read and see Babar’s Yoga for Elephants. Is Babar practicing religion? Is it spirituality that Babar practices? Is he just participating in a fun, hip exercise program? Or is it a mindful, meditative way to calm down?

If what yoga was, is, and might become is both historically delineated and constantly shifting, how do we read Babar and his instructive yogic text?

Part of my answer to this question lies in thinking about the historical implications and legacies alongside contemporary assumptions and conceptualizations. Babar isn’t just a fun children’s character. He’s an elephant king, developed at the height of colonialism, and, as others have argued, “a tool of colonialist oppression.” In this Babar book, he practices an ancient-but-living Indic form of religiosity (which is, as above, depicted as led by a stereotypically drawn man) for the purpose of “keeping fit.” Beyond contemporary popularity, scientific evidence of its efficacy as a medical treatment for certain issues and people, and the widespread availability of “yoga pants”–in other words, beyond the normative expression of yoga–is a familiar problematic in which someone else’s history, praxis, culture(s), languages, and religions are adopted, adapted, and appropriated, all for our contemporary uses.

My daughter (and I) do participate in yoga. There’s a lovely, local place that offers classes for kids, and my wild, busy toddler loves the space for wiggling, running, and when she slows down long enough, doing an occasional down-dog. Yoga, and our contemporary uses thereof, isn’t inherently a problem. But, with all the complex and overlapping colonialist and orientalist images in Babar’s Yoga for Elephants, she will not get a copy as a gift. Since it seems better suited for my research, I picked up a copy for myself.

Primary Sources: Reading President Carter’s talk at the AAR

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Every year, over the weekend before Thanksgiving, scholars of religion gather for the annual American Academy of Religion (and concurrent Society of Biblical Literature) meetings. It is usually a zoo: networking, papers, panels, interviews, plenary sessions, reunions, and more for nearly 10,000 scholars, whose expertise varies from Biblical hermeneutics to critical theories to Islam to post-secular ritual and more. Despite a long history, and many important moments in scholarly production, this year marked a true first: a former president of the United States addressed the conference attendees. As a historian who deals, in bulk, with archives and documents, President Jimmy Carter’s talk turned out to be a fascinating, rich, and valuable primary source.

President Carter has a new book out–A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power–and ostensibly, found the AAR/SBL annual meetings a good place to talk about (and sell the results of) his findings. He presented a talk entitled “The Role of Religion in Mediating Conflicts and Imagining Futures: The Cases of Climate Change and Equality for Women.”

As a scholar of Islam, I was suspicious of this talk, to be honest; I wanted to see a former president speak, but I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come of it. After all, a Sunday school teacher, an active and evangelical Christian, and, yes, former POTUS talking about religion and violence against women (with an addendum of climate change) reeked of a certain paternalism, perhaps even a lurking Orientalist set of assumptions–we Americans know about the appropriate treatment of women; those (Muslim?) foreign folks, in far-flung lands, do not.

photo 1

POTUS Carter, as seen on screen from the crowd.

My suspicions weren’t entirely grounded, it turned out. Carter did espouse a particular set of paternalist and patriarchal assumptions–i.e., he called for the protection of women by men, and called for men to step up to this specific challenge, without citing women or girls who already do this work or whose movements we might look to for models.  And, yes, he opened his talk by discussing violence against women “over there,” by an assumed Muslim population: genital mutilation, the Taliban’s ban on girls attending school, child marriage. But then, bluntly, he addressed this crowd of scholars by saying: “If you think these aren’t our problems, you’re wrong.”

With that and what immediately followed, he proved that I was wrong to have assumed a monolithic dismissal of non-American or non-Western cultural practices or an abundantly rosy view of America or the West. He listed statistics about sexual assaults on university campuses and in the military. He cited women’s unequal pay for equal work. He blasted Atlanta, where his own center is located, as the nation’s largest hub for human trafficking. He lingered on human trafficking, though Carter refused to call it by its “euphemistic label,” and instead called it slavery. And then, President Carter claimed that there are more slaves–more trafficked humans–in today’s America than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. With oratory aplomb, he let that sit; and then, he continued on to link what he called the degradation of women and girls to issues of race and racism, briefly mentioning the then-unfolding decision in Ferguson.

While Carter did not address climate change or the environment at length in his prepared (though, for the record, extemporaneously delivered) remarks, the Q&A that followed focused on his (religious) sense of environmentalism, highlighting policies he created in office and asking him to reflect on the relationships between violence against women and nature. He suggested that women and girls would be hardest hit by climate change, as they tend to be in most natural or man-made crises.

Women, girls and the environment. But, what about religion, you ask? That’s the most fascinating part of all. President Carter asked for action not on the basis of American superiority, though that was part of it. He asked, in this talk anyway, for action on the basis of reading scripture correctly. His talk was a primary source document: it demonstrated world problems, to be sure, but then asked the audience to solve those problems using appropriately read and meaningfully interpreted theology. It was a lived exercise in progressive evangelism and liberal theology. To use the language of pedagogy, President Carter described problems but prescribed (generally) a solution: rereading scripture and correcting misinterpretation.

To his eye, misinterpretation of holy scriptures–Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, here–was at fault for systems that support violence against women, girls and the environment. Carter was asked if religion might be an obstacle to achieving his stated goals; couldn’t religion and religious texts be used to prop up the systems he critiques? And in reply, he offered classic theological interpretation, saying, “They [opponents] can find some verse in the Bible to support their misinterpretation.”

Of course, he doesn’t see his own interpretations–that women and girls are equal, that the environment is entrusted to humanity by God–as misinterpretation. He sees them as accurate, based upon deep reading, deep commitment, and, as he put it, his sense that he “serves the Prince of peace.”

His talk begs countless questions. What Christianity or textual interpretation does he envision as especially correct–is it just his, is it his community’s, or something else altogether? Does he envision limitations in non-male, non-white, non-Christian settings to an approach that values (Christian) liberal theology? If climate, gender, sex, race, class, and religion are so imbricated–as he suggested at various points–how might his solution(s) address these both various and intersecting sets of issues? How might his suggestion of “reading better” work against his calls for peace, environmentalism, equality, and justice?

It was a scholarly treasure trove, as primary source texts often are, which is why his talk was exciting: as a scholar of religion, I had the opportunity to listen to the former leader of the United States actively offer biblical exegesis in light of current issues, and do so in such a way that critiqued various (American) political administrations, (largely Christian) textual interpretations, and ethical and moral commitments (of political and religious institutions and persons). And reading his talk as a primary source is crucial. By doing so, analyzing what he says in its contexts leaves room to critique issues in his comments like paternalism, heavy-handed prescriptive Christian religion, and privilege of various stripes, while also preserving his talk as an example of a set of discourses.

The Zombie as Ethical Guardian: An Aperitif Before Consumption?

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by Todne Thomas Chipumuro

It’s Halloween season. The crisp fall air pairs with the final scenes of colorful foliage. Children are giddy with the prospects of receiving candy in exchange for their cute or frightening frocks. College students appear to be just as excited as they whisper about weekend plans and costume choices with their classmates. Amongst the bevy of options they contemplate and discuss are the supernatural cast of characters that include vampires, witches, fairies, werewolves, and zombies.

Within a contemporary U.S. socio-cultural milieu, zombies often appear in films as a destructive horde singularly focused on cannibalizing humans who are often left to survive amidst the ruins of shattered societies. From the ravenous, rotting corpses that terrorize remnant communities on The Walking Dead and World War Z, to the virally-infected hosts that horrify humans in I Am Legend, Resident Evil, and 28 Days Later, to the disenchanted but awkwardly well-meaning zombies of Warm Bodies, zombies have become more than fixtures of the silver screen. Zombies and the forms of apocalypse they foretell have become their own genre of U.S. popular culture that illustrate the disasters that can be wrought by an over-zealous bio-industrial military complex, capitalist overconsumption, and, I would argue, the dystopia of economic recession. Not just a cinematic fixture, the zombie emerges as a symbol of danger, lifelessness, ugliness, and contagion that has been mobilized to describe economics, modernity, Jesus, and even pumpkins. More broadly, the zombie emerges as a figure that exists beyond the boundaries of life and humanity. Animated but not alive, consumptive but never satiated, the zombie symbolizes liminality in perpetuity—the social condition of being caught betwixt and between states of existence, the alienations of capitalism, and the limbo of postmodernity.

Far from a contemporary creation, the zombie of the U.S. popular culture landscape descends from two predecessors: the zombie produced through a U.S. imperial and racial imaginary during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the zonbi of Vodou religious culture. The U.S. popular cultural zombie emerged as a bricolage of foreign travelogues, folklore accounts, and U.S. military accounts of Vodou religious practice shaped by unexamined imperialist beliefs in Haitian racial and religious primitivism. If Vodou (a syncretic religion generated by enslaved Africans’ creative combinations of traditional African religious practices and Catholic ritual ways and iconography) became mobilized as evidence of Haitian social degeneracy and incapacities for self-governance, the zombie became a symbolic lynchpin in the argument for U.S. military and economic intervention.

Translated from the pages of foreign accounts into the emerging horror genre of Hollywood with the film White Zombie (1932), the zombie emerged as a “postcolonial sub-subaltern monster” that terrorized white western audiences with the prospects of being “dominated, subjugated, and effectively ‘colonized’ by a native pagan” (Bishop 2008: 141-142). The zombie, then, first entered U.S. popular culture as a symbol of racial and imperial anxieties about Western dominance and postcolonial retribution. The zombie imagery popularized by Romero’s famous film Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in a different decade but reflects related socio-political constructs about racial otherness and societal decay.

The zonbi of Vodou religious culture provocatively speaks to another set of historical and ethical concerns. For Vodou practitioners, the zonbi symbolizes the ways in which the stakeholders of the French plantation regime attempted to reduce enslaved persons to the value of the labor produced by their bodies. If, as aptly worded by Martinican intellectual Aime Cesaire in Discourse on Colonialism, “colonization = thingification,” the zonbi (a laboring body devoid of agency whose sole purpose is to minister to the desires and whims of the bokor/sorcerer who resurrected him/her) becomes a powerful illustration of the dehumanization and commoditization of slavery.

In the postcolonial society made possible by a successful Haitian revolution against the French, the zonbi continued to reflect exploitative social dynamics through its association with the torture and silencing of dissidents and everyday individuals during a Duvalier regime that was imagined as an ensorcelling dictatorship. Aside from the zonbi’s reflection of the exploitative evacuation of human agency by colonial and postcolonial stakeholders, a number of theories abound about the socio-cultural and ethno-botanical constructions of the zonbi. One such reading outlines the zonbi as an embodied form of punishment against individuals who grossly violate community ethics. As described by anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister:

One extreme and rare form of punishment these societies can hand down to a criminal is to be made into a zonbi zo kadav, whereby his spirit is extracted from his body and his body is sold into modern-day slavery to cut cane on a sugar plantation….The body is then left as a religious and social corpse” (2012: 469-470).

The zonbi created as a community response to malignant individualism is just as stringent as it is allegedly final. While such a process of zonbification raises important questions about vigilantism, power, representation, and agency, I would also contend that the zonbi of Vodou religious culture can be understood as a symbolic guardian of an ethics of reciprocity. The zonbi’s plight across a variety of Haitian contexts and imaginations thus speaks not only to an indemnification of overconsumption but of communities interested in making interventions to prevent social cataclysm. Thus, the zonbi emerges as an individual objectified figure constituted by a broader narrative of community agency. As argued by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton in their cross-cultural study of zombie appropriation, “In many respects it looks as though the Haitian zombie is a thing of the past, permanently eclipsed by the success of Romero’s cannibals” (2011: 5). But what if we take a moment to place the zonbi in its proper context? To do so would be to partake of an aperitif—to study our understandings of community, the ethics of social relationship, and the legacy and contemporary dimensions of U.S. socio-political engagements rather than robotically consuming an appropriated icon.

 

Works Cited

Bishop, Kyle

2008      The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Voodoo Zombie. Journal of American Culture 31(2): 141-152

Cesaire, Aime

2000[1972] Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Moreman, Christopher and Rushton, Cory, eds.

2011       Race, Oppression, and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition

McAlister, Elizabeth

2012        Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies. Anthropological Quarterly 85(2): 457-486.

Bad Gifts

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pindabaat.thailand 2009.compressed

            Every day, around Bangkok, among other places in the Theravāda world, lay people give gifts to monks. During the spring semester, when taking my son to his school in western Bangkok, I would see groups of monks from the wat just down the road. These monks walk barefoot (!) around the neighborhood, stopping to receive an offering when people proffered them. Monks would often stop by the bus stop, which was a de facto market where people would buy breakfast, and perhaps make merit. (One established market I biked by every day in Chiang Mai advertised itself in the following way: “Make Merit! Fill a monk’s bowl! Buy things! Fresh and Safe!”). Others seemed to have set rounds of houses. There was one monk who I would see standing outside of a house waiting. Normally, the lay people are supposed to wait for the monk, but the occupant of the house was an older woman who could not move quickly. So the monk waited for her, knowing that she liked to make merit most mornings. Normally, lay people give monks (and novices) food at these times, and indeed most of what is given to monks are among the “requisites” that they need for their well-being: food, daily use articles like shavers, pens and paper or books for education, medicine. Less frequently, monks are given new robes, or a begging bowl. Occasionally, though they are given less appropriate things; they are given “bad gifts.”

 

This week, I am going to give a paper on “bad gifts” at a conference called “The Ethics of Religious Giving: Historical and Ethnographic Explorations,” at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. “Bad gifts” are things given to monks that are seen as inappropriate. My research for this paper comes from watching and talking with monks and novices in Thailand and Sipsongpannā, a Theravāda Buddhist minority region in southwest China over the last twenty years. While I can’t discuss everything I say in the paper, there are a few points that I found interesting and worth highlighting here.

 

What is a bad gift? At first, I thought this would be a straightforward issue to address. A bad gift is something that Theravāda monastics should not have. Obvious choices for this would be alcohol which the most basic precepts in Buddhism forbid or a gun, which as one monk I spoke with noted “can only be used to kill.” However, there is a surprising amount of difference in what would count as a “bad gift,” depending on who you talk to, the area and how the question is framed. For example, in Thailand monks and novices are forbidden from driving cars and motorcycles and bicycles, but in Sipsongpanna in China, they do drive and ride and at least until recently, a bicycle would be offered by relatives or neighbors when a boy ordains as a novice. In other words, a bicycle is a bad gift in Thailand, but not in China. And of course bicycles are not in the vinaya.

 

What does inappropriate mean? Another question emerges from the way I framed the problem above. If bad gifts are things that are seen as “inappropriate,” what does this mean? Obviously, these would be things that someone says monks shouldn’t have, and presumably this would be because the vinaya says they shouldn’t. Monks can’t drink alcohol according to the vinaya and so beer is not good (though it’s worth noting, I have seen people give alcohol to temples, and monks accept them and have to figure out what to do with this gift). My phrasing comes not from the vinaya but from what Thai monks in particular have said to me when I asked them about bad gifts. They tended to say one of two things: that a given gift or thing is “not appropriate” (mai somkhuan) or “unattractive” (mai suay). The second is particularly striking, because it highlights how monks are often seen/understood as figures who are models for the lay folk. If one were to give cigarettes to a monk, which is not quite forbidden in Thailand, but not encouraged, this would encourage monks to do something that is “unattractive.” Again, this is different in Sipsongpannā, which has been shaped by the cultures of China (where smoking is more common) as well as the Theravāda cultures spread through mainland Southeast Asia. In Sipsongpannā giving cigarettes is not seen as inappropriate.

 

Who decides? For me, this is perhaps the most interesting point. When talking about Buddhist morality, scholars of Buddhism, monks, and lay folk have collectively tended to emphasize the importance of the vinaya, the disciplinary codes of Buddhism. The vinaya is held up as the authority, even when people are not really paying attention to the vinaya. In fact, part of what seems to be taking place is that at least at the margins, what counts as bad gifts are things that lay people decide are inappropriate or unattractive. As monks will tell you, often with a laugh, bicycles, smart phones and cigarettes are not in the vinaya (though as they also say betel is). As a result, people need to think analogically about what works and what doesn’t. I argue in the paper that despite being “below” monks in the religious hierarchy, it is lay people, in conversation with monks, and the vinaya and government authorities, that decide what counts as a good or a bad gift.