African Musical Symbolism In Contemporary Perspective - Saoas.org

THEMATIC CHAPTER NINE: THE PARTICIPATORY
MODE
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The traditional African performing arts involves everyone
directly around, whether young or old, master or novice,
musician or dancer, cantor or chorus. Furthermore, they all meet
face-to-face within an open dance space, a circle, a “theatre in
the round” surrounded by a swaying, clapping and fully
participating audience. As noted in Chapter Two this emphasis
on direct participation is also found in the religious, sociopolitical
and economic areas of traditional African societies that
are communalistic “gemeinschaft” ones based on kinship
solidarity, personal ties and informal “primary relations”. At a
more metaphysical level human society, nature, the ancestors
and spiritual forces are all considered to be part of the same
sacred community.
This is in contrast to Western societies that are typified in the
performing arts by passive spectators and a stage that separates
the audience from artists. On the broader scale there is social
division-of-labour, an emphasis on impersonal bureaucratic
“secondary” relationships, and industries that dominate and
destroy nature. This non-participatory mode is also a cornerstone
of the Western scientific approach that separates the
experimenter from the experiment, splits the mind from the
material and traps a subjective ghost in a deterministic machine.
Nevertheless and as will be discussed first in this chapter,
many areas of the social and behavioural sciences are
rediscovering the participating subject. Some social scientists
have moved away from just discovering generalised social laws
and are looking at how people actively construct established
social norms: indeed “participant observation” has become one
of its key research methods. On the other hand some branches
of psychology have moved away from intense introspective
therapies to those that involve the broader social context, or as
social-psychology look at how behaviour is related to the overall
cultural milieu.