Ecologies of Well-being: Hearing Uganda Through Ritual Repertories

Abstract:

Part of the first comprehensive study of music among Ugandan traditional healers, this paper examines how traditional healers in southern Uganda work at the intersection of music, plant medicine, and relationships with patron spirits to wield influence within ecologies of well-being. Ugandan repertories of ritual action, including song, help define such ecologies more expansively than naturalists or wildlife ecologists might. Ecologies of well-being include not only physical domains human bodies, flora and fauna, but also their underlying and closely linked spiritual features. Here, at the nexus of the human, the more-than-human, the plant, the animal, and the complex spiritual world, healers called basamize and baswezi articulate the analogy between individual and society in the social domain and between organisms and their environment in underlying, homologous physical and spiritual domains. Kiganda and Kisoga repertories of well-being called Kusamira render boundaries between these domains porous, linking people with other people, with powerful plant medicines and animal familiars, with the places where these powers dwell, and with the spirits who dwell therein. Repertories of well-being actively invite the influence of these powers, attempting to shape their incorporation into bodily and spiritual substance. These musical repertories contribute to the interdependence of such domains through indexical functions deployed through dramatic rituals involving spirit mediums, references to the royal enclosure, sophisticated notions of twinship, and a human-spiritual-animal morphological continuum. Doing spiritual work in this context involves singing and drumming, the creation of power objects, and exchanges of hospitality for blessings. All embed music in a tightly integrated cultural logic that integrates humans, animals, crops, and plant medicines into ecologies of well-being.

Bio:

Peter J. Hoesing (Pete) is an ethnomusicologist and research administrator who serves as Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Dakota State University. A faculty affiliate of DSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, Hoesing also serves the Ethics and Humanities Faculty Section at University of South Dakota’s Sanford School of Medicine as Director of Medical Humanities. He previously taught at Grinnell College, Claflin University, and Florida State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 2011. Hoesing’s book with University of Illinois Press (2021) and his award-winning documentary short examine the music of Ugandan traditional healers. His other research and teaching interests span Africa and its global diaspora, especially East African expatriate communities and popular music in the Americas. His research has garnered generous funding from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Krebs Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, UNCF Programs, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and the South Dakota Humanities Council.