“15. How Can Music Ameliorate Displacement, Disconnection, and Dehumanization?” in “Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees”
Chapter 15 How Can Music Ameliorate Displacement, Disconnection, and Dehumanization?
Michael Frishkopf
How can music ameliorate refugee crises of displacement, disconnection, and dehumanization? What can ethnomusicology—the study of music in its socio-cultural context—contribute toward formulating effective musical interventions? Certainly, neither music nor ethnomusicology springs to mind as a first response to such crises. Essential needs for security, shelter, nutrition, and sanitation demand precedence, whether refugees are in transit, in refugee camps, or in more stable host societies. But neither is music a pure luxury, to be deferred to some distant future moment when physiological needs have been met, or to be enjoyed only by those who have clambered to the summit of Maslow’s famous pyramid (1943).
Rather, evidence from refugee experiences suggests that once essential needs have been even partially satisfied, music and related performance arts (dance, theatre, storytelling, oral poetry1) spontaneously emerge as a powerful social technology for rehumanization, solidarity, and meaningful intersubjective connection (Frishkopf 2018; Frishkopf, Morgan, and Knight 2010; La Rue 1993; Reyes 1999; Schmidt et al. 2018; A. R. Schramm 1986, 1989, 1990; K. Schramm 2000; Arts Research Network, n.d.; Gonzales 2017).
As Dwight Conquergood writes in an article about Hmong refugees in Thailand’s Ban Vinai refugee camp,
Camp Ban Vinai may lack many things—water, housing, sewage disposal system—but not performance. The Camp is an embarrassment of riches in terms of cultural performance. No matter where you go in the camp, at almost any hour of the day or night, you can simultaneously hear two or three performances, from simple storytelling and folksinging to the elaborate collective ritual performances for the dead that orchestrate multiple media, including drumming, stylized lamentation, ritual chanting. [. . .] Performance permeates the fabric of everyday life in Ban Vinai. (1988, 176)
He goes on to remark,
A high level of cultural performance is characteristic of refugee camps in general. Since my work in Ban Vinai I have visited or lived for short periods of time in 11 refugee camps in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, not counting a shantytown for displaced people in Nigeria. In every one of them I was struck by the richness and frequency of performative expression. One explanation for this is that refugees have a lot of time on their hands to cultivate expressive traditions. But I think there are deeper psychological and cultural reasons for the high incidence of performance in the camps. Refugee camps are liminal zones where people displaced by trauma and crisis—usually war or famine—must try to regroup and salvage what is left of their lives. (1988, 176, 180)
Regrouping is key and a primary function for arts-based socialization; refugee communities typically comprise a heterogeneous mix of social classes and ethnic groups who would not ordinarily interact. Music and performing arts indeed have the capacity to link refugees not only to one another but also to their host societies and to their homelands, respectively empowering the refugee community, catalyzing social integration with a host community, and maintaining personal identity, spinning intersubjective threads to weave a new social fabric, comprising resonant, resilient, affective connections across these cultural boundaries (Frishkopf 2022, 79).
By enhancing empathetic, affective communication, music provides a development function toward well-being, not simply for refugees, but for everyone: music for global human development, toward the development of the global human (Frishkopf 2022, 84). As Paulo Freire emphasizes, everyone is dehumanized by oppression, oppressor and oppressed alike—though he believes it is up to the oppressed to “wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity” (2000, 47, 56). Through transcultural music—deliberately crossing and thereby critiquing and undermining artificial cultural divisions (putatively symbolic but actually ideological)2—refugees and hosts alike develop their humanity, individually and dialectically, across the artificial system-induced boundaries masking our humanity from one another.
Music naturally supports regrouping, emerging bottom-up to heal disconnections, though not necessarily quickly or even for the better, since enhancing empathy in one group can trigger (or even depend on) dehumanizing another. Carefully planned musical interventions help avoid such social pathologies. Here, ethnomusicology—the study of music in its socio-cultural context—provides valuable guidance, particularly in its applied, activist forms (Rice 2014; Pettan and Titon 2016; Harrison, Mackinlay, and Pettan 2010; Diamond and Castelo-Branco 2021).
In a method I call “Music for Global Human Development” (M4GHD), applied ethnomusicology can purposefully guide this “aesthetic technology” toward effective, sustainable, rehumanizing interventions (Frishkopf 2021, 2022).
Humanization, Rehumanization, and Social Transitions
Humanization is the process of recognizing the other as a human being in an intersubjective space, a “transcultural” endeavour of recognizing the self in the other, a subject like oneself, constructing a collective “we,” transcending putative boundaries (whether of race, ethnicity, religion, nation-state, or other markers) underpinning the pernicious tribalism mutilating humanity’s underlying unity. Within a suitable environment, given sufficient cognitive and emotional communication, we quite naturally come to recognize one another as humans like ourselves and act accordingly, treating one another as subjects, not objects, ends rather than means, in a principle both philosophy (Kant’s categorical imperative) and theology (the Golden Rule) have theorized as the basis for all ethical behaviour.
Crucial to this communicative process is a phenomenon I term resonance, requiring flexible communication proceeding in both directions, thereby enabling mutual adaptation, by which communicating individuals—whether in dyads or larger groups—converge in a connected emotional, affective space, becoming aware of their collective participation and the commonalities generated or revealed by such communicative processes. While cognitive communication is not unimportant, it is the more ineffable process of affective communication, toward what I call “common feeling” (Frishkopf 2010, 22; 2022, 78), that is of overriding significance in the generation of resonance. Such collective performance presents a form of “plural reflexivity, the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray, understand, and then act on itself” (Turner 1979, 465).
What impedes this process, particularly in the case of forced migration, is attenuated affective communication, an absence that may be exacerbated by linguistic difference, socio-cultural difference, visible difference, or sheer distance. For refugee populations cohabiting with a host population, physical distance may evaporate, but other differences persist. Here is where the resonant “common feeling” of shared musical experience can make its mark.
But let us begin by considering (re)humanization in the context of more “ordinary” life processes in a cultural steady state. Humanization unfolds first of all, and most unremarkably, following the birth of a human being into a stable social context. The unborn is not yet an independent human being—and in many cultures, neither is the newborn—until humanity is formally recognized, often conferred through a naming ceremony (Alford 1988). The infant then enters a coherent, stable web of connections (relationships with family, friends, community), linking to others who recognize her or him as a subject, increasingly so as the baby grows and communicates, affectively and with the acquisition of language.
This infantile process of humanization repeats as what might be called “rehumanization” during life cycle transitions from one social category to another, when old connections are broken and new ones created, via formal “rites de passage” (Gennep 1960), rituals entailing a process of separation, liminal transition, and reincorporation. Each such ritual (e.g., marriage) precipitates a shift into a new, culturally recognized social status accompanied by social and often spatial movement (e.g., the bride’s transfer to the husband’s home in cases of patrilocality). Such movements may transform or sever old relationships, and call for new ones, in a process of rehumanization, through the spinning of new threads: resonant connections.
Sometimes, multiple relations are jeopardized all at once: the crisis of the “social drama” and its four phases of separation (breach, crisis) and resolution (redress and integration or schism), as theorized by Victor Turner (1980, 149). Both ritual transition and social drama can be viewed as forms of movement in physical, social, or cultural space, straining human connections, sometimes to the breaking point, and spinning new ones, ensuring that the individual remains safely ensconced in a humanizing web of intersubjective relationships. What is the place of music in fostering such (re)humanization? While most cultural anthropologists attending to the intensive interactions of ritual and social drama do not dwell on music, music nearly always appears in their ethnographic accounts. Ethnomusicologists fill this gap, focusing on music’s many roles in expressing or catalyzing socio-cultural transformations.
But beyond these theatrical moments of transformation, at the individual or social level, rehumanization is also required in more prosaic processes of resocialization following the migrations that increasingly characterize the modern world, whether intranational economic displacements from a rural to an urban environment, or overseas to another country. Music takes its functional place in such instances as well, solidifying the new collectivities that form in order to effect smooth transitions, performed in church, school, or community groups (Avorgbedor 1992; Manuel 1995). Music is performed by funeral associations in Greater Accra, serving to bind and integrate a diverse group of rural immigrants (Frishkopf 1989), and by nation-based but heterogeneous community associations in Edmonton during their annual celebration of Canadian multiculturalism in a secular rite called the Edmonton Heritage Festival (Heritagefest, n.d.).
In each case, social connections are strained, even broken, as a result of movement in physical and social space—but, subsequently, new ones form, catalyzed by the mass-emotional power of participatory performing arts, centered on music and dance, which also help maintain cultural connections to the homeland (and thus to one’s past and social identity), as well as weaving interstitial connections to the host society. The social bonds of intersubjectivity are constantly being reformulated alongside such transformations, whether individual or collective, and while each case is unique, music always provides the same generalized functions: to bind the displaced together, to integrate them with their new environments, and to tether them to their individual pasts.
Music: Transcultural Meaningfulness, Connection, and Resonance
From the Romantic period came an oft-heard refrain: “Music is the true universal language,” as Schopenhauer announced in 1851, and many others preceded or followed him in a claim that has echoed to the present day (Longfellow 1861, 357; Clarke 1855, 322; Schopenhauer 1851, 162; Gottlieb 2019; Mehr et al. 2019). According to this view, while no language is universally understood, everyone understands music, the language of feeling.
Even before the field was formalized in the 1950s, ethnomusicology was quick to negate such a broad claim based on ethnographic studies of music cultures around the world (Seeger 1941), as anticipated by a few earlier writers (Jacques 1888); more recently, such a view has been reinforced by big data analysis (Daley 2018; Panteli, Benetos, and Dixon 2017). “Musical sound and meaning are cultural,” declares a primary ethnomusicological postulate, and as culture is diverse, so are sound and meaning. Following anthropological colleagues in conceiving “culture” as a countable noun, a separable world of meaning, and a discrete, well-bounded “object” that can be classified (Human Relations Area Files, n.d.; Lomax, Erickson, and American Association for the Advancement of Science 1968), musical meaning is, likewise, held to be highly variable. Further, only ethnographic fieldwork can reveal music’s particular meaning for its users in each “world of music” (Titon 2009). Universalism was out; relativism in.
Yet there is a sense in which the Romantics were right. Music is a universal language, even if its sounds are diverse and its meaning is highly variable. Music is a language—but one that does not “communicate meaning,” at least in the ordinary sense of “communicate” as error-free transmission and “meaning” as reference (Cherry 1966). Meanwhile, “culture” was never a countable noun, compartmentalized into closed, mutually incomprehensible worlds—and certainly not in the contemporary reality of globalized flows (Appadurai 1996). Increasingly, culture is borderless, an uncountable noun like water—a global landscape rather than a discrete set of closed worlds. Unlike language, “culture,” considered broadly to include all systems of non-referential signs, presents no impassable boundaries of comprehensibility, only gradients of change, steeper or shallower, but never absolute—though to affirm borderlessness is not to unreservedly affirm universality either.
Rather, what is universal about an utterance in a non-referential “language” like music (and the same would hold of other non-referential systems such as clothing, food, or kinship relations) is not meaning but meaningfulness; what is expressed, transmitted, and ultimately communicated is not a fixed meaning as reference but a fluid semantic potential, imprinted as a mental state, along with an awareness of meaningful communicative intent, and a feeling (short of provable certainty) that one is sensing what the “sender” intended, even if that is not the case.
For sound, such meaningfulness is particularly intimate, since music—according to composer and sound theorist Murray Schafer—constitutes a form of “remote touching,” passing from the tactile to the acoustic at around 20 hertz (Schafer 1994, 11). Music also represents an acoustic and auditory extrusion of the self, the projection of a personal voice carried far beyond the body’s physical boundaries. While each voice remains deeply anchored in a human performer, multiple voices interpenetrate and fuse in a resultant soundscape.
Such collective communication of meaningfulness is not the mere perception of possible meaning (as when we hear someone speaking in a language we do not understand, knowing meaning must be present but not receiving it) but actual meaning, formulated first in the sender and subsequently in the hearer. The problem with the linguistic analogy is that such meaning is not necessarily the same on both sides; this is not a communicative process in the ordinary technical sense. Indeed, with music, what we receive is always other than what was sent, even when sender and receiver (assuming boundaries could be drawn) belong to the “same culture.” Yet a bond is nevertheless established in the process, via individual meaning coupled with an affective awareness of mutual meaningfulness, the analogue to Michael Chwe’s “common knowledge” (2001) that I call “common feeling.”
Indeed, this individualization of musical meaning, while retaining a sense of connection, is an important source of music’s social power. Music needn’t mean the same thing to all participants in its processes; it is connective because it is universally meaningful.
Musical behaviour, in its generalized sense, includes sound, movement, gesture, facial expression, and poetic verbalization, whether produced by “musician,” “singer,” “dancer,” or “listener” (and the distinction is not always clear). Defined in this way, the space of musical participation is broad. Thus construed, music is naturally a mass medium, from the perspectives of both sender and receiver, “broadcast” (whether live or through synchronous or asynchronous media channels—radio, CDs) from and to the many in an act of collective participation (unlike speech, which, with the exception of ritual chant—which is actually closer to music—flows from one to one or one to many).
From the standpoint of the group, musical connection fosters resilience because it tends to link all participants, everyone to everyone—what the social network analyst calls a “clique” (Wasserman and Faust 1994, 254)—at least in principle. The resulting network is “robust”: its overall connectedness is maintained, even if a few links do not form or are lost. From the standpoint of the individual, affective links are resilient because they cannot be weakened or even contradicted by the introduction of new information—they are pliable, unlike the brittle connections resting upon cognitive consensus (political or religious views, say), which are vulnerable to disagreement. By contrast, music is not subject to argumentation; as Maurice Bloch quips, “You cannot argue with a song” (1974, 71). Music thus weaves an extensive resilient web of participation, flexibly linking the participating group, yet without requiring semantic unanimity, unlike ordinary speech (but analogous to poetry, which thus stands as metaphor of, as well as being embedded in, music per se).
Such music-induced bonds drawing people together through meaningfulness intensify when music circulates among a group of active participants, creating feedback loops shaped by but also shaping participants’ internal mental states, moving them (though not in the same way) and moving them together.
If the patterns of such generalized musical communication are furthermore flexible enough to adapt to such exchanges, intensifying its effects through continuous and dynamic adjustments on the part of each participant, a state I call “resonance”—by analogy to the resonant frequencies of acoustical cavities—may emerge, capable of catalyzing new social bonds or reinvigorating extant ones. Such a process, and its resulting state, is approximately equivalent to what Durkheim calls “collective effervescence,” as in his famous description of a “corroboree” performed by Australian “Aborigines”:
The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each one echoing the others. The initial impulse is thereby amplified each time it is echoed, like an avalanche that grows as it goes along. (1976, 217–18)
To what extent is non-referential meaning actually shared? It varies. In traditional settings, such as this Indigenous one, perhaps to a greater degree, carried perhaps most overtly through lyrics and contextual references, as well as sedimentation of indexical meaning (Turino 1999) accruing from past performances, though even here the idiosyncrasies of music as a non-referential art form enable a great deal of individual interpretation, particularly due to sedimented memories. Thus, a young participant can hardly experience the same emotions as an aged one, who has attended the corroboree many times in the past, associating it with long-gone eras and people.
But the same process works when music is performed transculturally: meaning is projected from the performer, even as it changes in transit, arriving in a new form. Everyone wrings meaning from music, though each in their own way; all understand that some musical meaning has been sent and received, alongside a rational awareness that these may not be the same and an affective sense that they are. Again, there is no universal meaning but rather universal meaningfulness and an understanding of that shared meaningfulness resulting in a sense of empathetic connection enabling a diverse and far-flung connective tissue to form. When music is distributed through a network (whether in a public performance or via the media), this network extends through a potentially heterogeneous assortment of participants, who are thereby linked together in intersubjective relationships of common feeling.
This power of music to induce “common feeling” even across putative linguistic and cultural boundaries is amplified by basic properties of sonic (unlike visual) performance: rapid mass diffusion of sound waves outward in three dimensions, audio diffraction (passing around obstacles), masking (blocking competing dyadic communications), and carrying of paralinguistic information conveying expressive affect.
To summarize: I propose that music (re)humanizes by establishing and maintaining intersubjective connections among participants in a process of musical semiosis generating common feeling; this process is intensified through fuller participation, the formation of feedback loops, and flexibility in the musical system itself, conditions leading to a state of socio-affective “resonance,” the ephemeral dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, and an intensive shared feeling underlying the construction of a collective “we.”
When these intersubjective connections can be sustained also by durable social bonds lying beyond the boundaries of musical performance (resulting, for instance, from shared membership in a church or community group), the sense of a humanized collectivity can likewise endure, recharged by each subsequent performance, when existing bonds are reinfused with sustaining affective energies, and new ones are created. Resonance may occur to varying degrees and with variable impact, but the process is the same: moving participants (individually) and moving them together (socially).
Transcultural Music for Global Human Development: (Re)humanization After Displacement
In all societies, music’s resonant power to catalyze and maintain human connections emerges naturally, requiring neither plan nor planner, adapting to social, cultural, and natural environments. Such music functions alongside the more prosaic, universal communicative form of language throughout human societies, becoming more essential during moments of individual or collective transition, when intersubjective connections require protection, maintenance, or reformulation, whether in life cycle rituals, social dramas, or other social movements, as outlined earlier in this chapter. Music and musical resonance play prominent roles in restoring equilibrium, maintaining homeostasis by mending and spinning social threads. At times of transition, music appears to revitalize solidarity or reweave the social fabric.
These musical roles transpire within the lifeworld of lived experience and meaning, traditionally in balance with the abstract structures of the system, lying beyond direct experience, but instantiated in a set of political and economic positions, connections, and institutions that help coordinate the lifeworld and provide continuity from one generation to the next. In such a mutualistic relation, the system serves the lifeworld, opening the possibility for larger collectivities, typified by an interdependent division of labour and what Durkheim calls “organic” solidarity.
But in keeping with Durkheim’s structural functionalism, it could be argued that in modern times, social pathologies have begun to proliferate, signals that the lifeworld and system are wildly out of balance, indeed tending toward a parasitic relationship, whereby the system “colonizes” the lifeworld, as Habermas describes it, increasingly coming to mediate all human relationships in an inexorable quest to accumulate money and power, ultimately destroying the lifeworld (and hence itself) as the outcome of this unsustainable process (Habermas 1984, 2:325).
The system’s positions are intrinsically dehumanized and therefore impose dehumanization on the subjects inhabiting them, as well as dehumanizing induced connections mediated by the system. Within the system context, they become merely interconnected objects, communicating to support the system’s maximization of its steering values: money and power. In conditions of system-lifeworld balance, such dehumanized relationships exist in parallel with richer intersubjective ones, placing a moderating brake on system tendencies. But when the system comes to thoroughly colonize the lifeworld, it induces a pervasive dehumanization there as well, leading to the negation of basic human rights, socio-economic injustice, and massive inequality, all completely incompatible with humanized intersubjective relationships.
What I call “big problems” are those resulting from these large-scale social pathologies, triggered by an increasingly rapacious, violent global system, dehumanizing all and everything in its path toward the accumulation of money and power. Such problems are today occurring on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented frequency, requiring explicitly targeted and carefully calibrated interventions.
For instance, so long as relations between rich and poor countries are mediated by the current system of politics unmitigated by any intersubjective fabric, the majority of citizens of the former will feel little compassion for those of the latter, who—in the absence of other humanizing factors—remain as faceless objects, dehumanized citizens of a foreign nation-state. The same considerations apply to the corporate elite’s exploitation of the working classes, their illegal dumping of toxic waste on poorer nations’ shores, or their pursuit of corporate profit even at the cost of irreversible, catastrophic environmental damage. Political oppression (surveillance, incarceration, even torture and executions), economic exploitation (even slavery), environmental plunder, war, famine, economic collapse, xenophobia and racism, and even genocide are the tragic results. All these eventualities induce forced migration, displacing people who become refugees, travelling, even at great risk, in search of safety and a better life elsewhere.
Indeed, “big problems” are doubly intertwined with refugees: first, as triggers of forced migrations, and, second, as consequences of social and cultural dislocations that trigger personal, economic, and food insecurities alongside xenophobia—often outright racism—as well as a denial of life’s essentials as a consequence of dehumanization, rather than actual scarcity.
The rapid displacements triggered by such social upheavals leave little time for emergent music making of the sort that might mend rifts in the social fabric under more ordinary conditions. Thus, in such cases, a more deliberate, intentional musical intervention is required—the type that can be prepared by a suitably trained, experienced applied ethnomusicologist, who helps guide, focus, and accelerate an inclusive and sustainable process of music-induced healing by introducing and nurturing socio-musical resonance toward rehumanization.
For this purpose, the ideal methodology is participatory action research (PAR; Fals-Borda 2005; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005), promoting full participation by members of the displaced group, who are best positioned to design and guide a successful, sustainable intervention. Such participation renders musical action both more effective and more ethical. In PAR, the intervention process is itself humanized, since the relationships comprising the intervention are themselves instances of the kinds of intersubjectivities such an approach aims to foster. Successful PAR projects spiral upward, from planning to acting, observing, and reflecting, then back to planning, each new round a refinement of the previous, informed by past results, which are the subject of research.
I call such PAR-powered musical interventions “Music for Global Human Development” (Frishkopf 2015, 2021, 2022), defined as a form of participatory applied ethnomusicology in which a diverse, global project team, well-knit through humanized relationships, deploys transcultural music, capable of interconnecting across vast cultural and social divides, both to promote a humanized response to “big problems” of development and to foster the development of the “global human.”
Once again, the threat of dehumanization may appear in three contexts of forced migration: among refugees (often diverse in ethnicity and class; sometimes in conflict due to civil war or scarce resources), between refugees and host societies along the migration path, and between refugees and their homelands, receding into the distance (particularly for those born in diaspora) and jeopardizing an existential prerequisite—continuity of the self.
In each context, performing arts–based modalities can serve to effectively weave or repair the social fabric.3 In particular, musical interventions—fostering resonant connections—operate in each context, assuming three essentially different directions and modalities, fostering three forms of transcultural rehumanization. First, resonance connects refugees to one another, creating social solidarity—whether in an ephemeral camp, in transit, or in a safe haven host society—despite cultural differences, and generating the empowerment required for collective action necessary to (re)gain human rights in new social contexts. Second, resonance connects refugees to the host society, weaving a new transcultural social fabric, toward a social integration avoiding the extremes of both assimilation and balkanized “multiculturalism.” Rather, this fabric undergirds intersubjective understanding, across putative “cultural boundaries,” a humanized recognition of the “other” as “self” and “self” as “other,” toward a fuller humanity for both the newcomer and the host, as per Freire. Third, resonance within the self, between its own present and perceived past, helps maintain a felt connection to the culture of the homeland, extending a lifeline of belonging to a place of origin (Walker 2003), thus maintaining identity and self-worth—and the existentially critical continuity of the self (M. Freire 1989, 57).
At the same time, it must be stressed that the arts are not a panacea or even an unmitigated good when it comes to countering social differentiation and dehumanization. Tracing the boundaries of conflict, resonance can exacerbate division and even promote dehumanization. For instance, in 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin organized a musical concert featuring the Russian band Lyube performing patriotic songs, as the nucleus for a massive pro-war rally, mustering support for war crimes in Ukraine (Pavlova, John, and Graham-Yooll 2022). While reports suggest that many participants were coerced into attendance, here musical resonance is arguably responsible—albeit indirectly—for the forced migration of millions of Ukrainian refugees. Nationalistic music has often been deployed in this way to promote violence, aggression, and hate.
Resonance is thus revealed as a neutral force. Left to its “natural” emergent forms in times of social drama, musical humanization may serve to bolster in-group solidarity at the cost of dehumanizing outsiders. However, carefully formulated as an ethical ethnomusicological intervention, the musical arts can help restore humanity and reweave the social fabric across boundaries.
Finally, I illustrate the above arguments with three relevant examples of humanizing ethnomusicological interventions in the M4GHD mould. I conclude this chapter with a brief description of “Giving Voice to Hope,” a PAR collaboration between the University of Alberta and Liberian refugees, then living in the Buduburam camp, near Accra, Ghana. The following chapter centers on the role of music for an African artist in exile the legendary Zimbabwean musician and political activist Dr. Thomas Mapfumo. A third chapter introduces a concert featuring refugee musicians from Iraq and Syria, who performed with professors from the University of Alberta’s Department of Music, in the public event—also featuring Dr. Mapfumo—inaugurating the conference that led to this book, thus closing the circle.
Liberian Refugees in Ghana
The Buduburam Liberian refugee camp, designed to accommodate eight thousand refugees from Liberia’s civil conflict, was packed with some forty thousand people when I first visited in 2007. I was in Ghana on an inaugural study abroad program of my own design, centered on the ethnomusicology of West Africa (Frishkopf 2012). One of my students, Eilis Pourbaix, had previously volunteered at a camp NGO (the Center for Youth Empowerment, CYE) and linked me to its director, Slabe Sennay, himself a refugee. Together, we began thinking about ways we could formulate a PAR ethnomusicological intervention involving musicians and students to help support refugees. Slabe introduced us to the camp’s extraordinarily vibrant musical life.
Despite a minimal standard of living—overcrowded, insect-infested dwellings, frequent electrical outages, and lack of basic sanitation—music scenes miraculously flourished, both live (especially in church) and mediated. A few popular musicians even produced music in their own camp studios. Many songs expressed war’s horrific impact and hopes for peace while critiquing power and corruption. The camp’s musical life appeared to help generate solidarity, bringing residents together, uplifting the refugees, and ameliorating despair.
Once we discovered the popular music scene and met a few musicians, a path forward appeared. Musicians and CYE, along with University of Alberta students, staff, and faculty, joined together in a PAR network to produce an album, Giving Voice to Hope, featuring sixteen musical groups in the camp. We added extensive liner notes, telescoping from historical context to camp life and including biographies of the musicians based on interviews (GVTH 2009). Together, we aimed to support musicians both symbolically—by raising their international profiles—and financially, generating needed royalty income just around the time they were beginning to return to Liberia. The project also helped “musicify” and hence humanize camp life, generating hope for refugees and awareness of their predicament in North America, where so many Liberians ultimately settled. Following the PAR methodology, the project subsequently spiralled forward into several subsequent initiatives in Ghana and Liberia that have continued, in different ways, to the present (Morgan and Frishkopf 2011; Frishkopf and Morgan 2013b, 2013a; Frishkopf 2017; 2022, 88).
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1 Taxonomies (even in science) are always cultural constructions, and the performing arts are no exception. The definition of “music” as an independent “art of sound” is not present in many cultures; for instance, in most West African ethnolinguistic groups, music, poetry, and dance are traditionally inseparable (“music” per se being a colonial imposition). Therefore, in this chapter, I interpret “music” broadly to include all allied expressive arts and “musical participation” to include all roles, from playing or singing to toe tapping, akin to Christopher Small’s generalized idea of “musicking” (Small 1998).
2 The concept of “transcultural music” is inspired by the ideas of Fernando Ortiz, which underlie my conclusion that cultural “boundaries” (and the very idea of “culture” as a countable noun) are contemporary constructions, invariably artificial, perspectival, situational, and ultimately ideological in nature. They are liable to freighting with differential values—generating competition and conflict, which is often dehumanizing—and always distort humanity’s underlying unity (Cuccioletta 2001; Ortiz 1947).
3 Alternatives to performing arts exist in the literature—for example, Camia and Zafar’s (2021) research on autobiographical life narratives. See Barzanji in this volume.
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