Musicking Tradition in Place: Participation, Values, and Banks in Bamileke Territory.

Abstract

This dissertation is a linguistic and musical ethnography of Bamiléké people in Bangangté, a town in Cameroon where many musical groups are also rotating credit associations. These “musical banks” met each week to address financial matters and rehearse their chosen genre. I argue that the musicking of musical banks is a key site for creating and reproducing solidarity and moral values about kinship, place, “tradition,” and death. I bridge a theoretical gap between poetics, performance, and ideology in linguistic anthropology and the participation approach in musical anthropology.

My focus throughout is on the musical bankers’ major concerns, what people do with musical banks, and how these practices address the major concerns – all with special emphasis on music and language as forms of social action. I analyze song recorded at rehearsals, and discuss public appearances at funerals. I also use metadiscursive data drawn from a wide range of informal events.

“Traditional/modern” discourse shapes a lot of what musical bankers do and I discuss these terms as power-laden tropes, not analytic concepts. Positioning themselves in the semiotics of these tropes required considerable uncertainty and subtlety in choosing and negotiating particular signs which may index both “tradition” and “the modern” in contradictory ways.

Most of what musical banks do concerns funerals, which means that confronting the reality of death undergirds the musicking and solidarity of members. Musicking helps the bankers manage and accept the intensity of death and of their solidarity within the banks.

Musical bankers’ song relies heavily on inherited personal names, which index matrilines and villages. They provide a crucial resource for the formal structuring of song, and constitute a major piece of the puzzle of what makes this musicking emotionally rich. Understanding why the musical bankers felt strongly about what they did requires appreciating the importance of place. The positive values many musical bankers associated with “tradition” were, in fact, rooted in the power and beauty of villages. It is specifically the land which my Bamiléké consultants understood to be essential for the continuation of their moral values.