The Presence of the Past - Madagascar, Music, and Devotion

People throughout Madagascar maintain a strong reverential connection to their ancestors, whose spirits may be called upon to enter into the present to resolve problems and to heal illness. Music performance provides a vital means of communicating with these ancestral spirits, thus of evoking the past and the power emergent in it. This project results from intensive ethnographic research that Ron Emoff performed on the east coast of Madagascar from 1993 through 1995. Dr. Emoff's fieldwork focused upon connections between musical performance, spirit possession, ways of recollecting the past, constructions of power, and perceptions of the colonial era in Madagascar.