Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land

by Steven M. Friedson

Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written book and, as advertised, pays great attention to the musical dimension of West African religion. While there are points where my lack of musical education made the book tough-going, it was well worth the effort. Friedson's discussion of how polyrhythms are constituted and developed over the course of a ritual is hands-down one of the most thorough I have read. He gives the drums pride of place, but he doesn't ignore any musical elements, be they singing, a bell, or the clapping of participants.

I will surely be revisiting his discussion of the 'African hemiola' in the future. I hope other scholars pay attention to it and capitalize on it--it seems like there is a fair amount of good work that could be done by further developing Friedson's ideas.

Friedson does a good job foregrounding his place within the world he describes. He doesn't try to disappear from the ethnographic encounter nor does he let his presence dominate the encounter. He is honest about his moments of discomfort and about his moments of comfort. The book isn't an abstract discourse about how Ewe, but a story of Friedson's time with an extended Ewe community. He talks about this or that person more often than he talks about Ewe in general.

Despite having a strong narrative dimension, the book does not romanticize Friedson or his Ewe informants. It is humane and humanizing in the most meaningful sense of the term.

His use of Heidegger is a bit hit or miss and parallels Judy Rosenthal's use of Lacan to discuss the Ewe. I appreciate the way both use European thinkers without privileging them. They never quite seems to find the groove with these thinkers, though, so that it often feels like Friedson's discussion of Heidegger (like Rosenthal's discussions of Lacan) is off-beat, too late or too early to actually respond to the Ewe world. Not always, just often.