Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace

by Deborah Kapchan

The sacred and musical phenomenon of trance

A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is hardly of only local the Gnawa have long participated in the world music market through collaborations with African-American jazz musicians and French recording artists. In this first book in English on Gnawa music and its global reach, author Deborah Kapchan explores how these collaborations transfigure racial and musical identities on both sides of the Atlantic. She also addresses how aesthetic styles associated with the sacred come to inhabit non-sacred contexts, and what new amalgams they produce. Her narrative details the fascinating intrinsic properties of trance, including details of enactment, the role of gesture and the body, and the use of the senses, and how they both construct authentic Gnawa identity and reconstruct historically determined relations of power. Traveling Spirit Masters is a captivating and elucidating demonstration of how and why trance―and indeed all sacred music―is fast becoming a transnational sensation.

Genres: Music

362 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2007

Reviews

[Wes Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, canny memoir/academic dealy about the Gnawa of urban Morocco and how they're fairing with cultural tourism $. Had to give author a wide berth on book, as it's the only one in English that's about the Gnawa, so if you ain't going to buy the ticket for this ride, you gonna be waiting a long time before the next bus comes around, and there's no telling what Gnawa culture's gonna look like by then. It's surprising there's not more around, because the Gnawa, groups of sub-Saharan Africans brought north over several centuries and sold into slavery, look like a quick read on paper. An African diaspora within Africa, The Gnawa raise interesting questions about ethnicity, cultural migration and syncretism, etc. etc. In the migration, they took their music and local possession religions with them; these syncretized with Sufi Islam to form a mystical Sufi offshoot wherein participants become possessed by African spirits and Sufi saints in nocturnal rituals. Originally a form of cultural remembrance and mental therapy in the days of slavery, the Gnawa ritual (called a lila) is synaesthetic, using specific songs, colors, gestures, incense, food to announce the arrival of different spirits -- post-slavery the Gnawa do this as therapy (even as an alternative or holistic supplement to psychological treatment) for non-Gnawa as well in exchange for cash. This situation, as one might imagine, is tailor-made for folks with disposable income and a love of psychedelic drugs.

Book is really about defining "trancing." When a Gnawi talks about trancing, he/she's talking about getting out to a lila and letting a spirit (which the Gnawa can summon and then control) inhabit your body for awhile. When the record-and-concert-ticket-purchasing public talks about trancing, they are talking about getting out to a club and honing in on a primal state for a bit. There's just enough overlap in terminology here for the Gnawa to sell mad CDs of their syncretic African music (which is -- irony acknowledged and not sweated -- totally worth your yankee dollar, btw) to the trancing public-at-large. This is not lost on the Gnawa, who regularly alter their previously proscribed rituals to play them in Parisian amphitheaters for hard Euros so consumers can trance -- playing down the Islamic elements and punching up the African ones, shortening the songs, whatever makes them appear more accessibly exotic. Author posits that this might be a good trade: The global commercial class has money but no primal reality, the Gnawa deal in primal reality and need some bucks. If the lila is really about healing, then maybe it can heal better and more effectively if it changes to meet the needs of the folks willing to pay for healing. In the end, the real question becomes who is playing who, and there's no definitive answer. Author has obviously thought all this through and probably does know the answer but finds it so depressing that book's two-page epilogue is just about her divorce.

Missing a macro view of Gnawa culture, but rich in detail; short on history (the specific origins of the Gnawa may, in any case, be lost to the sands of time), but long on insight, book is really something. It ain't a fun read, but it's an illuminating (maybe a brilliant) one. First part of the book was hard-going for me, mostly about the psychological and performative aspects of possession. The second part gets down to what fetishistic folks like me were looking for from page the first, which is partly why book is so effective. If you pick it up, hang with it.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Filled with pretentious postmodern jargonizing.