Overview
- Presents a new perspective on the well-studied Mande region of West Africa
- Engages in a reflexive, embodied, and sensorial ethnography
- Provides a case study on apprenticeship and embodiment as a growing fieldwork technique
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book describes the remarkable culture of jeliya, a musical and verbal art from the Manding region of West Africa. Using an embodied practice as her methodology, the author reveals how she and her music teachers live “in between” local and global cultures. Her journey spans 20 years of fieldwork presented through personal and intimate stories, first as a student of the balafon instrument, then as a patron of the music. Tensions build in both the music and in social relations that require resolutions, underscoring the differences between two world views. Through balafon lessons, the author embodies values such as patience, courage, and generosity, resulting in a transformative practice that leads her to better understand her position vis-à-vis that of her jeli teachers. Meanwhile, jeliya itself, despite having been transmitted from teacher to student for 800 years, is currently in peril. Jelis cite modern globalized culture and people like the author herself as both a source of the problem as well as the potential solution.
Reviews
In this absorbing, readable ethnography/memoir spanning the Gambia, Guinea, Paris, New York City, and beyond, Feder gives us a 21st century perspective on an alluring subject: West African Mande music culture. Candidly exploring issues of diaspora, gender, apprenticeship and patronage, morality and character, privilege and status, Feder enhances the literature of West African music. Required reading for anyone wishing to learn Mande griot (jeli) music.
—Banning Eyre, Senior Producer for Afropop Worldwide
“Ethnographic accounts of first contact and subsequent participant-observation typically focus on cultural institutions such as language, marriage, and kinship of the Other; Lisa Feder offers a refreshing auto-ethnography of her lengthy experiential learning about Mande people and culture through their music in Guinea, The Gambia, New York City, and Paris.”
—Barbara Hoffman, Professor and Director of Anthropology, Cleveland State University, USA
"Lisa Feder’s decades-long study of Manding jelis plying their musical art and wisdom traces their struggle to navigate between cultures. This is an example of how ethnography ought to be—a narrative of how becoming deeply entwined changes everyone involved. Feder fearlessly examines her own in-betweenness, grappling with vestigial traces of anthropology’s unwitting colonialist past. This engagingly written book overflows with mutual love and respect. A potent read."
—Steven F. Pond, author of Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Lisa Feder is an American anthropologist with fieldwork experience in Brazil, France, New York, and West Africa. She has been a lecturer at the Academy of Art University, USA for over a decade. She currently resides in France and is the founder of Manding Grooves, a company that supports jeli music and culture worldwide.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Jeliya at the Crossroads
Book Subtitle: Learning African Wisdom through an Embodied Practice
Authors: Lisa Feder
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-83058-8Published: 01 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-83061-8Published: 02 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-83059-5Published: 30 September 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 252
Number of Illustrations: 12 b/w illustrations
Topics: Anthropology, Music, Ethnography