Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine (Volume 28)

Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care

by Marina Roseman

Music and dance play a central role in the "healing arts" of the Senoi Temiar, a group of hunters and horticulturalists dwelling in the rainforest of peninsular Malaysia. As musicologist and anthropologist, Marina Roseman recorded and transcribed Temiar rituals, while as a member of the community she became a participant and even a patient during the course of her two-year stay. She shows how the sounds and gestures of music and dance acquire a potency that can transform thoughts, emotions, and bodies.

Genres: Anthropology

278 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 1991

Reviews

[Aileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book to understand how the sounds, gestures of Music, dance acquire a potency that Can transform thoughts, emotions and bodies from an antropologist point of view. I began to understand the articulation between musical and medical domains. In this book..Temiar tribe in Malaysia sing when they cure. A major technique of healing involves singing/trance dancing ceremonies in which mediums sing tunes and texts given to them during dream by spirits. The Temiar concepts of illness etiology and their strategies of diagnosis and treatment,is about using their indigenous ideas about musical composition, speech, performance and affect, on the other. The trance dancing ceremonies, some of which were held for curative purposes. Others were held to Mark the agricultural cycle, to herald the advent of fruit season, to end period of mourning, to strengthen or publicly celebrate connections with spiritguides, to entertain guests or inaugurate travels.
I, personally had watched several ceremonial performances, attendes bio acoustic courses, this book translate the aggregation of multivocal metaphors in both of pyschology of music, psychoacoustics (acoustic science) and also olfactory modes and value structures. These symbolic codes meaning on terms of the value of believing community.