Musical Understanding: The Ethnoaesthetics of Migrant Workers' Poetic Song in Lesotho

Abstract

ne of consequences of expanding presence of non-Western scholars in humanities is vitalizing criticism, on both epistemological and political grounds, of our ways and means of depicting colonized traditional peoples. In pursuing accurate representation of their participation in events, we must seek every available means of hearing and comprehending the voice of people. Ethnographically, people's voice consists in expression of what Clifford Geertz (1983) has called knowledge: a people's conceptions and perceptions of themselves and of their situation in society and history, formulated in terms and occasions of their culture. Such knowledge clearly plays a key role in ways people respond to, and seek to control, shifting pressures and conditions of their communal and individual lives. Cultural performances involving music, dance, verbal art, and other aesthetic media serve both to formulate local knowledge and to communicate its shared understandings in total context of social institutions, relationships, and realities. As James Fernandez (1986:105) argues for deepsong of Asturian countrymen, Songs and verses may not be final causes of interpersonal relations, but they are surely efficient causes for way cattle keepers and miners represent their situation to themselves. Even before Klaus Wachsmann's pioneering collection, Essays on Music and History in Africa (1971), musical traditions, genres, instruments, tech-