Abstract
This paper challenges the “intervention-as-solution” approach to health and well-being as commonly practised in the international development sector, and draws on the disciplinary intersections between Community Music Therapy and ethnomusicology in seeking a more negotiated and situationally apposite framework for health engagement. Drawing inspiration from music-based health applications in conflict or post-conflict environments in particular, and focusing on case studies from Lebanon and South Sudan respectively, the paper argues for a re-imagined international development health and well-being framework based on the concept of deep listening. Defined by composer Pauline Oliveros as listening which “digs below the surface of what is heard … unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning, and memory down to the cellular level of human experience” (Oliveros, 2005), the paper explores the methodological applications of such a dialogic, discursive approach with reference to a range of related listening stances – cultural, social and therapeutic. In so doing, it explores opportunities for multi-levelled and culturally inclusive health and well-being practices relevant to different localities in the world and aimed at the re-integration of self, place and community.
Highlights
Whose Health? Whose Art? Whose Development?International development was established as a professional sector in the USA shortly after the Second World War as an attempt to redress growing poverty in the colonised or former colonial dependencies in the world (Escobar, 2001, Allen & Thomas, 2000)
It extends the notion that international development health policies remain reluctant to take on board cultural understandings of health and healing, which are often embedded in a broad ecology of social, spiritual and physical maladies and managed in a context of ritualised expressive action
We explore the concept of deep listening in relation to two contrasting case studies, each focusing on a country that would fall under the UK Department of International Development’s designation of a “fragile and conflict affected state.”
Summary
Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 February 25. Published in final edited form as: Arts Health. Deep listening: towards an imaginative reframing of health and well-being practices in international development. Mercédès Pavlicevica,* and Angela Impeyb aNordoff Robbins Music Therapy, London, UK bSchool of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, UK
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