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Title

Devotional music and healing in Badakhshan, Tajikistan: preventive and curative practices

Author

Koen, Benjamin David

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Music, 2003.

Advisor

Margarita Mazo

Pages

xxii, 298 p.: ill

Abstract

The dissertation examines current practices of music and prayer in healing among the Pamiri people of Badakhshan, Tajikistan. Over the last decade, the field of ethnomusicology has become increasingly concerned with the role of music in healing. Simultaneously, clinical research into music and healing, as well as prayer and healing has dramatically increased. Yet, the link between music and prayer in healing has not been critically examined, either in ethnomusicology or health science. To approach the topic holistically, an interdisciplinary team of researchers was assembled in Badakhshan. Through an integrated methodology of traditional ethnomusicological techniques and physiological experiments, the dissertation investigates the phenomenon of music and prayer in healing in Tajik Badakhshan. By working with master musicians, traditional healers, local religious leaders and physicians, ethnographic and physiological data were collected that form the basis of the dissertation. In the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, the preeminent vocal and instrumental genre of devotional music is known as maddah. It serves several cultural functions and provides an example of how music and prayer function as a unified whole in the context of traditional healing. Maddah has been little researched in ethnomusicology, and its role in healing has not been explored in the literature. My research shows that the ritual performance of maddah is used as a preventive practice for health maintenance, as an adjunctive medical treatment, and as a curative ceremony. The dissertation introduces music-prayer dynamics as a model to conceptualize the use of music and prayer to effect healing in special contexts and in daily human experience. Evidence from my research suggests that the integration of music and prayer is potentially the most efficacious parameter of the music-prayer dynamics model. The study also proposes medical ethnomusicology as a specialized area of inquiry, which emphasizes integrative research to explore holistically music and healing in any context. Musical and poetic analysis draws on local, power-laden cultural symbols and metaphors, as well as concepts of embodiment and emplacement to explore how bodily response, belief and cognitive flexibility work together for cure and prevention.

Subject Headings

Music

Keywords

medical ethnomusicology; music and prayer dynamics; music and healing; devotional music; Badakhshan; Tajikistan

Document number: osu1059673277. Bookmark this page as
<http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1059673277>.

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