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University of California Press

Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest

Temiar Music and Medicine
by Marina Roseman (Author)
Paperback
Price: $31.95 / £27.00
Publication Date: Mar 1993
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 278
ISBN: 9780520082816
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Series:
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About the Book

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.

About the Author

Marina Roseman is Assistant Professor of Music and of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and has been recognized for her work in ethnomusicology and traditional Asian medicine.

Table of Contents

Contents
Figures and Tables
Plates
Acknowledgments
Orthography

1. Introduction 1
Jungle Paths and Spirit Songs
The Articulation Between Musical and Medical Domains
Theoretical Considerations
The Orang Asli
Translating Worlds

2. Concepts of Being
Head Souls
Heart Souls
Odor
Shadow
Spirits, Sounds, Goods, and Selves

3· Becoming a Healer
Dreaming
Singers of the Landscape
Halaa' Adeptness: A Potential
Halaa' and Leadership: A Role
The Nonadept: Alternative Strategies for
Wives and Women
Land, Person, and Song

4· The Dream Performed
Spiritguide Genres
The Social Structuring of Sound
Male Mediums and Female Chorus
Symbolic Classifications and Metaphors for Sound
Symbolic Inversion: Everyday Life and Ritual Performance
5· Setting the Cosmos in Motion: Sources of Illness
and Methods of Treatment
Sources of Illness
Setting the Cosmos in Motion
Singing as Transformation

6. Remembering to Forget: The Aesthetics of Longing
Remembering to Forget
The Aesthetics of Longing
Longing in the Late Afternoon: Instrumental Music
The Aesthetics of Sway: Dance and Movement
Soul Loss
Musical Form, Emotion, and Meaning

7· Songs of a Spirited World
The Body as Nexus
Ensouling the World

Appendix A. Temiar Transliterations
Appendix B. Discography
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography

Reviews

"One of the best pieces of ethnomusicological research of the last ten years. Roseman shows just how central musical ideas and practices are to a way of knowing and imagining the world, to a way of transforming ordinary experiences, and to penetrating belief systems more broadly."—Steven Feld, University of Texas, Austin

"An exciting contribution to interpretive medical anthropology. Moving analytically between Temiar cultural constrictions of illness and health, and the humanely organized sounds of healing ceremonies, Roseman explicates the culural logic whereby aesthetic configurations participate in a comprehensive, therapeutically effective pattern of reality. This author has brocaded medical anthropology with ethnomusicology, producing a shimmering postmodern ethnographic tapestry of great subtlety and strength."—Barbara Tedlock, SUNY, Buffalo