In Traveling Spirit Masters, Deborah Kapchan is concerned with cultural performances of trance, its global circulation, and its relation to cultural and historical memory. Kapchan draws together ethnographic material from two primary locations: a close phenomenological and semiotic study of trance in Morocco (Part I) is juxtaposed with an analysis of the international performance and consumption of trance, particularly in France and the United States (Part II). The book is based on the author’s considerable ethnographic experience in Morocco, where she has conducted research for more than two decades, and on her more recent travels with the Gnawa to international performance venues.
In Part I, “The Culture of Possession,” Kapchan takes up questions of spirit possession in Morocco, with specific focus on the ritual life centered around a group of Gnawa master musicians. Kapchan weaves vivid ethnography into a persuasive semiotic analysis of the multiple layers of trance (as experienced in particular within the lila or “night” ceremony) as an historically and culturally elaborated phenomenon. In chapter 2, Kapchan approaches trance as a sensory and somatic experience that entails a restructuring of sensory hierarchies involving touch, smell, taste, sound, and movement. The reconfiguration of the sensorium is part of what makes trance intoxicating and pleasurable for practitioners. While indebted to Marcel Mauss’s work on techniques of the body, Kapchan also suggests that particular constellations of sensory experience in trance may work to configure a kind of historical memory--in particular, of slavery in Morocco--that is not otherwise articulated. Chapter 3 studies the transitions into and out of trance, focusing on the gestural realm in which trance has been embodied. The suspension of ordinary self-awareness in trance enables the experience of another temporality, facilitated by music, movement, odor, and narrative. Chapter 4 focuses on poetics and deictics, showing how language itself is made commensurate with the rhythm and temporality of trance. Chapter 5 enters into the cultural space of dreams and visions as another site where spirit-centered and quotidian realms of experience are knitted together in culturally specific ways. In all, Part I offers a convincing, textured, and evocative analysis of what makes trance so compelling for its practitioners. Kapchan’s accessible account of the phenomenology of trance will be a welcome addition to the undergraduate classroom, while advanced students will benefit from her eloquent semiotic analysis.
In Part II, “Possessing Culture,” Kapchan turns to questions surrounding the cultural circulation of Gnawa trance performance within and beyond Morocco. Here, the focus shifts to two linked issues: how the material and aesthetic forms associated with Gnawa rituals are transformed as they are recontextualized in new cultural and commercial environments, and how, in turn, the global appropriation of Gnawa music affects those Gnawa who continue to make their living by facilitating possession trance ceremonies in Morocco. In chapter 7, Kapchan considers the ways new evaluative criteria of “authenticity” are elaborated as Gnawa music circulates in a global market where trance itself is being commodified. In chapters 8 and 9, she follows the Gnawa as they move from Morocco to Paris, Brittany (France), and New York. These chapters beautifully highlight the competing interests at play in the circulation and commodification of the Gnawa phenomenon. Despite the considerable cultural and historical differences informing these various agendas, they nevertheless share, Kapchan argues, a common quest for an experience of epiphany that is now being marketed globally. Whereas the Celtic Breton musicians have self-consciously fashioned an agenda of intercultural exchange (which they describe as an encounter between “Celtitude” and “Négritude”), the African-American blues pianist Randy Weston draws on his long experience with Gnawa music (including his own experience of trance) to position the diaspora in new relation to the African homeland. The Gnawa themselves are hardly outside these agendas--for instance, in Paris, they helped arrange the club where they were performing to resemble a North African marketplace complete with spice stand, mint tea, and Moroccan sweets, thus participating in their own commodification even as they continue to trance to the spirits of the lila on a Parisian stage. The book fittingly concludes with a visit to a Gnawa cultural center in Morocco, where the Gnawa tradition is being transformed into a self-conscious display of heritage. Of particular interest is the cultural center director’s attempt to codify in writing the unfolding of the lila ceremony into a master chart of songs, spirits, colors, and places of origin. Here, the culture of possession has become the possession of culture, as knowledge is being formulated and transmitted in an entirely novel form.
In its focus on the dialogic encounters generated as the Gnawa travel to Europe and North America and back to Morocco, the book also generates new dialogues of its own. Kapchan artfully brings questions of the phenomenology and semiotics of trance into relation with discourses of heritage, hybridity, and cultural appropriation. As she travels with the Gnawa across three continents, her vivid and lively prose draws the reader into her ethnographic experience and makes her interlocutors come alive. Her rich and multifaceted ethnographic data are not subordinated to a single theoretical lens; instead, she productively juxtaposes theoretical perspectives drawn from philosophy and aesthetics as well as social theory, literary analysis, and linguistic anthropology. In all, Traveling Spirit Masters enriches our understanding of the phenomenon of trance and carves out new terrain at the intersection of aesthetics, poetics, performance, and global circulation.
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[Review length: 892 words • Review posted on July 23, 2008]