Dan Ge Performance

Masks and Music in Contemporary Côte d'Ivoire

Daniel B. Reed

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780253028303
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Etnomusicología

"An excellent study of both the visible and invisible elements that constitute the Ge performance of the Dan People of western Côte d'Ivoire." — The World of Music Ge, formerly translated as "mask" or "masquerade, " appears among the Dan people of Côte d'Ivoire as a dancing and musical embodiment of their social ideals and religious beliefs. In Dan Ge Performance, Daniel B. Reed sets out to discover what resides at the core of Ge. He finds that Ge is defined as part of a religious system, a form of entertainment, an industry, a political tool, an instrument of justice, and a form of resistance—and it can take on multiple roles simultaneously. He sees genu (pl.) dancing the latest dance steps, co-opting popular music, and acting in concert with Ivorian authorities to combat sorcery. Not only are the bounds of traditional performance stretched, but Ge performance becomes a strategy for helping the Dan to establish individual and community identity in a world that is becoming more religiously and ethnically diverse. Readers interested in all aspects of expressive culture in West Africa will find fascinating material in this rich and penetrating book.

FOUR

What Is Ge?

Hours and hours of many days in 1997, I, often with Jacques and sometimes with Nicole, sat with Monsieur Gueu Gbe Gonga Alphonse, discussing Ge.

Monsieur Gueu Gbe’s house, where we held all our interviews, was a 20-minute walk from the house that Jacques, Nicole, and I shared on the edge of Man. We followed dirt roads through the mostly residential Quartier Domoraud, passing women farming the spaces between cement homes, small street-food stands where women sold fried fish and alloco (deep-fried plantain), and children playing soccer in the streets using small stones to mark the goals. Approaching the center of town, we would pass a mosque and a rather large Islamic school just next to the bridge crossing the river Ko, which divided Domoraud from Julabugu—the neighborhood that was populated mostly by Muslim immigrants from the savanna. Gueu Gbe’s house rested a stone’s throw from the river in a small part of Domoraud sometimes called Quartier Résidential. Within his walled compound of multiple buildings, flowering bushes, and shade trees, the world seemed a tranquil place. Songs of tropical birds provided a constant background to our conversation, which was punctuated five times daily by the call to prayer emanating from the Islamic school around the corner.

Since Gueu Gbe had assisted ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp with some of his research in the 1960s, I felt fortunate to have the opportunity to meet him and ask him how things had changed in the thirty years that had passed since that time. Because of his knowledge about and passion for Ge and his enthusiasm for discussing the topic, Gueu Gbe quickly became one of my primary consultants. There was from the beginning a kind of affection between Gueu Gbe and me. Because of his previous experiences with Zemp and as a politician concerned with cultural matters, Gueu Gbe understood my role as an ethnographer and enthusiastically invited us to his house immediately upon learning we were in town.

Gueu Gbe from the outset saw me and my research as a means to reach the outside world with the message that there was something wonderful, something powerful about Dan culture. He unabashedly said that he wanted me to go back and write about the Dan in such a way that would stir interest and inspire others to come to experience the riches of Dan culture. His was a very pragmatic idealism; he believed that the way to keep Dan culture alive was to publicize it, to write about it, to film it, in order to bring tourists and researchers to the region. A tireless promoter of Dan culture, and especially Ge, he argued that the way to keep “the tradition” alive was to make it relevant in the contemporary Ivorian and global economy, to make it profitable, which would keep people practicing it and keep the values that underpin Ge performance alive and functioning. It was from this point of view that Gueu Gbe sought us out. He was excited that there was a foreigner in Man to study Ge, and he viewed my presence as an opportunity to promote his culture to the outside world.

Although I had read previous literature about Dan genu and had conducted preliminary research in the Man region during the summer of 1994, it was only through my initial conversations with Gueu Gbe early in 1997 that my understanding of Ge began to deepen. Of course, Monsieur Gueu Gbe’s thoughts about Ge represent just one person’s take on the topic, and I argue that there are multiple interpretations of this phenomenon. Yet I begin with his thoughts here because they capture the essence of a notion of Ge shared by many of my primary consultants who practiced “the tradition.”¹ Furthermore, I had a sustained, deep series of conversations on the subject with Gueu Gbe. As it was Gueu Gbe who initiated my understanding of the depth of Ge, I will begin my in-depth discussion of Ge here by focusing on his thoughts about this rich and fascinating concept.

During our many discussions on the topic, Monsieur Gueu Gbe artfully articulated the polyvalent nature of Ge. Gueu Gbe often spoke in poetic phrases, weaving together different aspects of Ge into a single multilayered metaphor² that demonstrated the subtle integration of religious belief, moral theory, and behavior— in everyday life and in special framed performance—that characterizes this word. Gueu Gbe emphasized to me time and again that “masque“ is simply an insufficient French translation of the phenomenon I had come to study:

Ge in Dan country, it’s a history. It’s a system. It’s a philosophy. It has nothing to do with the act of taking an object to cover the face.... It’s a school. A system of commandments. A philosophy of comportment. We must no longer accept the name “mask.” There are words that you cannot translate in another language. “Ge” is “Ge.” So it is my wish that you write in such a way that the name “Ge” be from now on the name retained for this phenomenon, of this system, upon which our society rests. (Gueu Gbe 1997g)

Monsieur Gueu Gbe stressed repeatedly the importance of distinguishing between the idea of a masked person and Ge. In other words, the image that immediately comes to mind when we hear the word “mask”—a piece of art that conceals the face—is but one small part of just one aspect of Ge—its physical manifestation among humans. This physical manifestation itself is just one aspect of the whole philosophy or system called Ge. Understandably, Monsieur Gueu Gbe and others argue that the translation of “Ge” as “mask” reduces a complex sacred phenomenon to something a person might wear to a masquerade ball.³

So, that said, what is Ge? Like any mystical phenomenon, Ge has no simple definition. Mystics around the world have often turned to poetic language to describe their spiritual thoughts and experiences. Gueu Gbe is no exception:

Ge is the beginning. Ge is the middle. Ge is the end.

Ge is a living entity!

It is polyvalent. It is omnipotent. It is a polytechnician. (Gueu Gbe 1997a)

Ge, it is unknowable. It is nonmaterial. (Gueu Gbe 1997d)

For Gueu Gbe, words can only approach Ge; the notion cannot be fixed in language, in definitive terms.⁴ During one discussion we compared several divergent definitions and descriptions of Ge, some of which came from my consultants and others that I had read in previous literature. My goal was to clarify whether or not Ge is a manifestation of an ancestral spirit or a forest spirit that has direct access to spirits of ancestors. At one point, a somewhat exasperated Gueu Gbe said:

All these terms turn around the power of Ge—ghost, ancestor, bεman [“ancestor” in Dan], yinan [“spirit” in Dan], all that. These are words we designate, that we choose, to approach the definition of Ge. But one can never succeed in finding a total single definition. (Gueu Gbe 1997g)

The absence of a clear, precise definition did not prevent Monsieur Gueu Gbe from describing Ge, which he did at length during many of our conversations. Drawing upon these conversations and many others I had with other primary and secondary consultants, I was able to slowly piece together common points that helped me to understand Ge and its role in Dan religious thought and practice. I approached this issue differently with different people in different situations. Never did I simply begin a conversation with the question, “What is Ge?” Occasionally, with secondary consultants with whom I had less time, I would ask that question toward the end of an interview to clarify the ways they had been using the term and thinking about the concept during the course of the interview. The material that comes from my primary consultants on this matter is much richer because we had many occasions to sit and talk around the topic, which is where my understanding of it really began to flourish. Occasionally, I would use previous literature or another consultant’s opinions as a springboard to compare/ contrast different peoples’ opinions. I went back to primary consultants⁵ time and again with my interpretations of their thoughts about Ge to be sure I was understanding them properly (Lawless 1993; Stone and Stone 1981). It was through this process that I developed the following general understanding.

GE AS FOREST SPIRIT

Ge is simultaneously spirit and matter. Ge can materialize in peoples’ daily actions and in corporeal form in Ge performance. But genu are always extant and present in geɓɔ—the mystical plane—in spirit form. This aspect of Ge can be better understood by placing it in the context of the Dan religious system.⁶

Describing how Ge fits into the Dan religious system is not a task I take lightly. The notion of a religious “system” seems on the surface to suggest something monolithic, devoid of human agency, that people simply plug into. “Traditional religious system” is a phrase that has too often been used in just such a way, stripping individuals of active thought and choice. Many African ethnographies feature representations of ethnic groups as homogeneous blocks of people, at the center of which is their “traditional religious system” which is assumed to be uniformly shared, believed, and practiced. Postmodernism and its close cousin deconstructionism have exploded just this kind of essentializing, a necessary process in the growth of academic discourse. Yet, taken to an extreme, deconstructionism could render scholars unable to utter anything resembling a generalization for fear of being accused of essentializing and representing humans as will-less, homogeneous beings. Taken to an extreme, deconstruction could banish ethnographers to representations of individuals who share nothing, who are alone in the world. Such a representation would bear no resemblance to the life experience of my Dan consultants.⁷

The Dan religious system does in fact exist in certain of my consultants’ experience. Many of my consultants identify as practitioners of this system. There is enough shared between and among their views, in fact, to permit me to make some generalizations. This is precisely because these people have community, which means they communicate, that they share ideas. Theirs is not a world where they are all faceless followers of some predetermined religious law, but neither do they think about and practice religion in radically individualized manners so different from one another that there is nothing shared, nothing to generalize about. Some of my consultants understand themselves to be, and experience themselves to be, actively engaged in a system of religious thought and practice. They want to create community through their religion, and they do so, by enacting their beliefs together. As van Beck and Blakely write, “The religious action that is the core of African religion is group oriented“ (1994, 18; italics mine). The words “religious system” suggest a certain degree of commonality and generalization, but this phrase does not inherently remove agency. When my consultants refer to their religious system, they do so in individually unique ways, yet they are also intentionally referring to something shared. This is the nature of the intersubjective process of the creation of community. Like many religious traditions around the world, Ge serves as a resource for community-building. Through Ge, certain of my consultants accomplish the goal of creating community and solidarity.

Though they envision themselves to be participants in a religious system, my consultants do not share opinions about every aspect of this system. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is the nature of Dan religion. Dan religion, like many indigenous religions in Africa, is nondogmatic, is an oral tradition, and varies somewhat from family to family. Religious pluralism, then, did not arrive with the introduction of Islam and Christianity. At its core, Dan religion itself is pluralistic, in part because it is problem-oriented and action-oriented (van Beek and Blakely 1994, 16). The Dan system involves a somewhat cohesive set of separate systems of problem solving. One could view this system, in fact, not as one system, but as “an agglomerate of systems,” a set of strategic means to ends. Still, as van Beek and Blakely assert, “the relevant sacrifices, words, dances, and associated beliefs” often end up being conceived of as a system (17). My consultants talk about “the tradition” in this way, even though the ideas they express demonstrate that this system is, like many in Africa, characterized by variability and flexibility.

Other interpretations may account for the discrepancies I encountered in my consultants’ accounts of their religious beliefs and practices. Variation might well have emerged because of the sacred and, to some extent, secretive nature of the topic. It is possible, of course, that people were not always telling me the “truth” or what they really think. Yet postmodern anthropology has rightly questioned the very idea of searching for and constructing some kind of “truth” in ethnographic situations (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Rather, ethnographers interpret ethnographic encounters, encumbered as they are with all manners of politics, historical legacies, and interpersonal communications. And the translations of these encounters into something to be read by people in different social-historical situations further problematizes any notion of the representation of a “truth.” I agree with van Beek and Blakely that “cultural expressions can be understood, but never fully, and can be communicated transculturally, but not without the loss of meaning and the creation of new meaning” (1994, 3).

To some extent, I am playing the role of “the native theologian” (van Beek and Blakely 1994, 16), assembling a coherent whole cloth from the various pieces collected from different consultants. Yet not all Dan theorize about their religious system. My ground base is constructed of ideas expressed by Gueu Gbe Alphonse—someone who thinks a great deal about these things—and is supplemented by ideas of others who are active experts in Ge affairs and performance and still others who frankly do not think about these things as much but share nonetheless in the intersubjective construction of ideas about Dan religion. It is possible these l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Notes on Language
• Cast of Characters
• Introduction: Talking about Ge
• One On the Road to Man
• Two Coexistence, Cooperation, and Conflict in the City of Eighteen Mountains
• Three “When a rooster goes for a walk, he does not forget his house”: “The Tradition” and Identity in a Diversifying Context
• Four What Is Ge?
• Five Manifesting Ge in Song
• Six Drums as Instruments of Social and Religious Action
• Seven Gedro at Gueheva
• Eight Gegbadë at Yokoboué
• Nine Pathways of Communication and Transformation
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index