Music making, musicking in its expanded sense of players, singers, dancers, and all the participants in an interactive ceremonial gathering, offers powerful experiences, access to the divine and a broad realm of spirits, healing, communal unification, and focused purpose, to generate powerful emotional and spiritual meanings in ways quite different from what language can accomplish. How it does this is what Tony Perman wants to explore. He says his explanations emerge from his experiences with Ndau musicking, but they are grounded in the phenomenology and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. He aims to formulate a semiotic ethnomusicology that illuminates how “meaning is experienced during Ndau spirit possession ceremonies and shapes emotional life” (5). This study emerges from his participation in a particular ceremony in the Chipinge district of southeastern Zimbabwe, augmented of course by the broader panoply of everything he experienced and learned while doing research there.

In a nutshell, Perman states that the book is about music, experience, and meaning, all three being multi-dimensional concepts subject to many varied interpretations. So he devotes some time in his prologue to each, explaining how he will use them. Then, in Part I, he presents the geographic, social, spiritual, economic, and political landscape into which the book nestles, along with a detailed account of his theoretical approach. In Part II he examines the lengthy ceremony, presenting it in the order in which specific categories of spirits emerged, beginning in an afternoon and ending the next morning. And here we learn a great deal more about these spirits, the history they are a part of, the performing that brings them into embodiment so they can dance, their pronounced usefulness in people’s lives, and the theory of semiosis that Perman is shaping.

Studies of music in Zimbabwe have been prominent in scholarship since at least Paul Berliner’s tremendous book, The Soul of Mbira, published in 1978, and the documentary films of Gei Zantzinger, released around the same time. But most publications focus on people who were prominent players in Zimbabwe’s liberation (and subsequent repression). Perman’s text focuses on people who have not received as much attention in the literature, and so is most welcome.

Spirits are at the heart of this volume, and the description of the Ndau experience of spirits is complex and not overly easy to understand. That is refreshing. It reflects actual human patterns of belief, value, and complex contemplation. Western scholarship trails behind it too long a history of trying to render the complexities of human behavior comprehensible by over-simplifying them. Understanding is better served by not doing that, even though it leaves us with tumultuous assemblages of interacting information, with all the rough edges and contradictions of reality. From within a larger conglomerate of spirit types that include ancestor spirits and vengeful spirits, the four spirits central to this book are collectively called Madhlozi, “‘outsider spirits’ of distant social encounters that have come to define Ndau identity and history” (17). The mediums who bring these spirits in, and the ceremonies in which they appear, help shape people’s “collective approach to the future” (19). The reality of these spirits (and all the others) is omnipresent and vitally dynamic. They are agents of action just like people. Perman’s perspective on this resembles that of many contemporary ethnographers, who accept the possibility that the world encompasses “multiple natures, multiple realities.” For me this brings to mind the marvelous ethnographic groundwork, laid decades before in the radical empiricism of Michael Jackson, that focuses on what really counts in other people’s beliefs, practices, and experiences. Jackson once said that doing accurate and genuinely useful ethnography was nigh on to impossible, because of complexity in people, situations, and experiences, then noting that we still had to try. Perman’s solution to this problem is to present elaborate, carefully considered descriptions that feature the ideas and perspectives of a great many people involved in Ndau possession ceremonies. There is so much variation, such a wealth of interpretations, that we are reminded repeatedly how delightfully complex people are and how they bring that into their performance activities. I like it! Perman’s description of the Ndau spirit world, with all its variation and convolutedness, is engaging and quite exciting, reminding us how creative people can be in the manufacture and interpretation of experience. It is also illuminating to read about the local and greater Zimbabwe histories that engendered those “outsider spirits” so important in Ndau life.

If the heart of this book is the Ndau spirit realm, its invocation and utilization, the book’s soul is a very dedicated effort by Perman to show that Pierce’s phenomenology and semiotic theory of signs constitute a broadly applicable theory ethnomusicologists can use to understand meaning and affect that lie outside the boundaries of language. He offers a primer for this on page 20 of the introduction (chapter 1) and then starts to deal with it in earnest in chapter 2. He begins by showing how astoundingly complicated and chaotic elaborate ceremonies can be, made more so for researchers by the multitude of specific perspectives contributed by every participant. Then, beginning with Pierce’s sense of “signs,” he proceeds to align Pierce’s complicated theoretical universe with the complicated universe of Ndau ceremonial performance.

This book isn’t an easy read. If you are not a semiotics enthusiast, if you find it difficult to work through all of Pierce’s nooks and crannies, or if you question how any intellectual theory can be justifiably applied across a myriad of cultures, you may struggle. Chapter 2 presents Perman’s use of theory in great detail, and then every chapter thereafter continues the process. I cannot see undergraduate college students breezing through this work. Work is what you have to do as you read. But Perman has absorbed and contemplated an enormous volume of theoretical and ethnographic literature, and he does not present this adaptation to ethnomusicology lightly. So even if you finish the book and do not agree that Pierce’s semiosis of affect is the way to go, you still have gained a great deal from considering the ideas Perman has presented. In addition, Perman’s ongoing integration of local and regional histories into the Ndau spirit experience is another of the book’s great strengths, and a welcome demonstration of how events and circumstances offer resources people shape into lives and the ever-changing components of society and culture. Also most noteworthy, along with the theory and history, peppered throughout the text are the author’s descriptions of people, places, and events; these are beautiful, person-centered and humanizing, in a way I wish all ethnographic writing would strive for. And finally, you will not forget that Perman is an ethnomusicologist. His discussions of how musicians play and the effects they achieve are illuminating and most valuable. Just skip ahead to “The Semiotics of Groove” section starting on page 141 if you want a good example of that.

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[Review length: 1145 words • Review posted on April 1, 2021]