Artistic Dynamos: An Ethnography on Music in Central African Kingdoms

Brian Schrag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000331486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Artistic Dynamos: An Ethnography on Music in Central African Kingdoms uses stories and research from Ngiemb??n communities of Central and West Cameroon as touchstones for proposing new approaches to arts scholarship and community development. Building on the results of ethnographic research, artistic action is viewed through the lens of communication. This view brings a picture of increased cultural energy in the enactment of artistic genres—those with melodic, rhythmic, poetic, dramatic, visual, and performative features. Schrag's treatise will change how scholars across disciplines understand and engage with the arts. This volume offers methods for improved scholarship, resulting in communities living better lives. The author's website contains the video and audio recordings discussed in the book, plus full color versions of many photos and diagrams.

www.ArtisticDynamos.com

1Setting the Stage

From Humble Learning to Artistic Communication

Just before midnight on a Friday in January 2004, I boarded a 30-passenger bus with 32 members of a dance association called DAKASTUM (Danse Kanoon du Secteur Ntumplefet) (see Figure 1.1). We were in Yaoundé, Cameroon, headed to the kingdom of Batcham where the group would help commemorate a man who had died six years earlier, the father of member Samuel Fotio. Except for a stop in a small town to buy hats and drink beer, and a period from about 3:30 to 4:30 a.m. when all but one person slept, they sang and played instruments until our arrival near Batcham at 6 a.m. Later in the day, DAKASTUM danced and sang as one of 16 groups at an event called, in the Ngiembɔɔn language, nkem legwé.

Figure 1.1On the road to Batcham with DAKASTUM.

I first met the members of DAKASTUM during research for my PhD dissertation in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Several times a year, as I describe in this brief vignette—and in more depth in Chapter 4—men and women in DAKASTUM travel a mostly paved road from their homes in the Cameroonian capital to their birth region in the West Province. There, they artistically invoke the names of Sonkwa (the king of their natal village Batcham at the time), Tataŋ (Batcham’s previous king), Bamoun (a reference to the centuries’-dead leader of a neighboring kingdom), and scores of other personalities mentioned in lyrics of songs in the kànɔ̀ɔn genre. Throughout the rest of the year, they rehearse and perform from a continually evolving repertoire, naming many of the same people, but from sites primarily in Yaoundé.

Members belong to the Ngiembɔɔn kingdom, a subgroup of the Bamiléké, whom Cameroonians essentialize as highly disciplined, successful in commercial ventures, and exceptionally devoted to their traditions, qualities captured popularly in the phrase “le dynamisme bamiléké.” They are known for both material success and thriving traditions in a period of unprecedented global and local change, changes that have left many other communities’ languages and arts in view of extinction.

My interactions with people from and knowledgeable about other Bamiléké language communities reveal wide-ranging commonalities, including networks of regularly meeting groups like DAKASTUM. I had direct confirmation of this for Ngomba, Yemba, and Medumba. Though this book’s focus is on Ngiembɔɔn, then, I am convinced that it represents Bamiléké dynamics as a whole, and will sometimes use the names interchangeably.

When DAKASTUM sings a song or takes to the road—or does both simultaneously—they are not alone. Hundreds of Bamiléké dance associations throughout Cameroon regularly and frequently engage in parallel activities, journeying through well-worn communication pathways: the roads to and from the West and Northwest Provinces; the words, rhythms, and movements of artistic genres; and the social protocols they follow when interacting with their compatriots, to name a few.

Figure 1.2Map of Bamiléké and Ngiembɔɔn Regions in Cameroon.

In Artistic Dynamos, I explore the physical, artistic, and social infrastructures undergirding DAKASTUM’s communication and a detailed description of occasional and regular artistic performance contexts in the Ngiembɔɔn kingdom of Balessing (see Figure 1.2). I show how artistic enactment invigorates Bamiléké cultures, not only in affective arenas, but also economically and materially. In particular, I argue that arts powerfully mediate and energize reciprocal communication with givers, enforcers, and protectors of traditional Ngiembɔɔn values and social structures, both living and dead. I further submit that this artistically invigorated communication creates physical and symbolic feedback resonance, thereby helping to perpetuate, strengthen, and extend le dynamisme bamiléké. Finally, and happily, I demonstrate how other communities can increase their own thriving by drawing on the processes resulting in Bamiléké vitality.

The Grand, Multi-Sited Conversation

Lessons I learned as a headhunter helped prepare me for the complexities of research. In 1988, with a newly minted Master’s degree in ethnomusicology and a wife four months pregnant, my motivation to gain employment was high and prospects low. The situation circuitously resulted in my working for a headhunting firm in Chicago, a job for which I was profoundly ill-suited. Nevertheless, one of the firm’s owners taught me a lesson about sales that has proved useful in performing fieldwork. Our task was to find people who were qualified and willing to take positions with the companies we represented. He noted that if you wanted to sell an object, you had only to convince someone to buy that object and make the transaction; the object itself could not refuse. However, in our work as recruiters, we had to initiate and follow through on a process in which both the potential employee and employer could reject the transaction at any point. Even worse, as mediators, we could also cause the communication to fail. Thus, at least three participants have the ability to derail the process (not to mention the colleagues, family members, and others working behind the scenes). In more volatile and far-reaching contexts, such as negotiations to halt violence, the precarious nature of multiple conversations becomes even more evident and serious.

In a similar vein, I approach the task of fieldwork as a grand conversation between multiple actors, at numerous sites, each of whom is beholden to untold communities and free to terminate or confuse the discussion at any point. As primary negotiator, I am perhaps the actor most prone to cause the enterprise to fail. To guard against this weakness, I apply rigorous processes to the data, calling into service multiple methodologies and approaches, all with the aim of allowing me to converse more fluently with other participants. Ultimately, my goal is valid, truthful, theoretically cogent representation of realities that exist. I also want others to engage with and build on this work, and so must enable external verification by exposing my presuppositions and methods to scrutiny.

Research Personality

I planned my research with five broad issues in mind: flexible methodologies; complex relationships; multiple beneficiaries; reliability of results; and multiple locations. My approaches reflect in large part those of interpretive and action anthropology, whose relevance I also address in Chapter 6.

Methods Evolve

I performed primary explorations for this book between June 2002 and June 2006 while living with my family in Cameroon’s capital city, Yaoundé. The majority of my activities comprised situationally modified application of arts ethnographers’ long-tested research tools: audio and video recording of artistic enactments; recorded and impromptu interviews; observation; and participation. I also integrated dialogic techniques whenever possible by, for example, watching and discussing video footage of a dance I had recorded with DAKASTUM leaders (inspired by Rees 2000, 2001). Though infrequent, people recorded portions of events in which they were participating, redolent of the use of cultural probes, “a set of simple items given to participants to help them document their experiences” (Gooby and Kassan 2020: 1). Ngiembɔɔn friends and colleagues Prosper Djiafeua, Moïse Yonta, and Ferdinand Doumtsop also read and commented on drafts of papers and chapters, providing important corrections and adding ideas. Finally, desire to gain a perspective on the vast network of dance associations in Ngiembɔɔn kingdoms prompted me to tap into the strengths of questionnaires, whose surprising results appear in Chapter 3.

I communicated almost exclusively in French, with a smattering of English and Ngiembɔɔn where socially appropriate. I overcame the limits imposed by my rudimentary ability in the Ngiembɔɔn language primarily by working closely with highly educated Ngiembɔɔn people with strong experience and interest in their traditional culture and language.

In parallel activities, I traveled to several Ngiembɔɔn towns, audio- and video-recording artistic enactments in both mundane and ceremonial contexts, and reading Cameroonian scholars’ reflections on aspects of Bamiléké and other cultures. The more deeply I investigated Ngiembɔɔn artistic life, the more closely I relied on Ferdinand Doumtsop and Prosper Djiafeua. Our research activities were truly collaborative, a feature increasingly important, especially when applied to prosocial community engagement (see, for example, Collins and Watson 2017).

Everyone Holds a Complex Position Vis-à-vis Everyone Else

DAKASTUM meetings normally include a segment where members share events that affect their lives, especially illnesses and deaths in their families. It so happened that my grandfather, Waldo Menno Schrag, passed away while I was in Cameroon. When I shared this news during a meeting, the group expressed sympathy and someone asked how old he was: 94 years. They laughed in relief, since such an advanced age fits the Ngiembɔɔn category of a good death. In that moment, something changed in my relationship with DAKASTUM members, a camaraderie resulting from personal transparency. They immediately began planning a visite de condoléance ceremony to comfort me in my loss (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3Jean-Pierre, Brian, Étienne, and Photo of Waldo and Elma Schrag.

Marcia Herndon has called binary descriptions of researcher/researched as outsider/insider simplistic and distorting (1993). Our positions vary on continua of insiderness, or—better yet—“multi-dimensional congeries, or even multi-dimensional dynamic models” (79). Kubik (2000) reflects in some detail on human relationships in the research context:

No human being can ever be a 100% insider in any conceivable context, nor a permanent outsider for that matter. The insider/outsider dichotomy functioned as a nativistic and ethnicist statement, as a model to trap individuals on the basis of physical appearance, language, nationality, or birth-place with the claim that such factors would predictably condition individual success or failure …

While intellectual preference for sharp contrasts and bipolar models has tended to dominate socio-cultural theory in the late 20th century, the real world—and that includes our developing virtual circuits and communities—is a terrain of fuzzy logic, of shades and transitions.

(12–13)

Throughout the research process, I attempted to maintain integrity and transparency while flowing between my various roles as researcher, SIL member, husband, father, and Christ-follower. Points of connection with some Ngiembɔɔn contacts in Cameroon include having already lived two years in an African village, speaking French, being able to play a Congolese harp (the kundi), and sharing Christian beliefs. Frequent parameters of disconnect include my light skin, US upbringing, a desire to maintain some aspects of American culture with my family, and the necessity to perform research for personal, academic, and professional goals. Of course, any of these could be turned on its head and work in the opposite direction. My goal h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Video and Audio Clips
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Setting the Stage: From Humble Learning to Artistic Communication
• 2 First Meetings: Bamiléké Communities in Ethnographic and Artistic Context
• 3 Discovery at Home: The Stable|Malleable Divide
• 4 Confirmation from a Distance: The Inner Life of an Urban Dance Association
• 5 Necessary Rigor: Multi-Artistic Description of One Enactment of One Communication Genre
• 6 Better Futures: Stable|Malleable Dynamos in Community Thriving
• References
• Appendix A: Dance Associations in the Kingdom of Balessing
• Appendix B: Histories of Three Ngiembɔɔn Genres
• Appendix C: Ngiembɔɔn Instruments in Balessing
• Appendix D: Village Association Questionnaire
• Appendix E: Corpus of 16 DAKASTUM Songs
• Appendix F: A Narrative Approach to Arts Research and Ethnography
• Glossary, Abbreviations, and Coding Systems
• Index