Angela M Impey | SOAS University of London (original) (raw)
Papers by Angela M Impey
Arts & Health, Aug 13, 2013
This paper challenges the "intervention-as-solution" approach to health and well-being as commonl... more 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 reintegration of self, place and community.
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2001
University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2018
Yearbook for Traditional Music
Yearbook for Traditional Music
The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights
Transitional justice in process, 2022
This chapter invites critical scrutiny of the role of performance ethnography in development prax... more This chapter invites critical scrutiny of the role of performance ethnography in development praxis, focusing specifically on the place of ethnomusicology in current discourses about alternative frameworks for transitional justice in post-conflict and fragile states. The paper responds to the increasing appeal in transitional justice literature for legal pluralism and reflects on the challenges and opportunities that traditional justice strategies pose for many of the fundamental assumptions that currently underlie post-conflict rule-of-law work. Taking direction from Brown et al. (2011) and Mignolo (2013), who call for imaginative “delinking” from current epistemic hegemonies in seeking solutions to pressing societal problems, the chapter argues for greater consideration of culture in responding to the multidimensional legacies of protracted conflict (Rush & Simić 2014). Drawing on research on Dinka ox-songs in South Sudan—a country that emerged from half a century of civil war with Sudan, but remains profoundly destabilized by internecine violence—the paper argues that in their capacity as public hearings, ox-songs offer locally embedded judicial instruments or “justice rituals” (Rossner 2013) of narration, listening, and understanding, opening discursive spaces for the expression of multiple public positions and forms of agency. While songs recount individual, clan, or community memories within the context of culturally legitimate expressive spaces, they equally reveal potentially incompatible rejoinders to social justice, forgiveness, and inclusivity, thus supporting new pathways for hybrid or plural frameworks for truth-telling, justice, and reparative outcomes.
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
Future Pasts is a cross-disciplinary project researching critical and cultural conjunctions betwe... more Future Pasts is a cross-disciplinary project researching critical and cultural conjunctions between 'sustainability' and 'environmental change'. Funded primarily through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) 'Care for the Future' research theme, and developed in conjunction with our Namibian partner organisations (the National Museum of Namibia, Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, Save the Rhino Trust, and Mamokobo Film and Research), Future Pasts explores understandings and practices of 'sustainability' and 'environmental change' in west Namibia, where three of our UK academics have long-term field experience. Through combining methods and theoretical perspectives from social anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, environmental ethics and ethnomusicology, we intend enquiry that is cross-and transdisciplinary, drawing on a hybrid range of disciplinary and situated perspectives. This inaugural working paper in the Future Pasts Working Papers series introduces our research aims and orients our project in the historically globalised and diverse cultural landscapes of west Namibia. We note that concerns about 'environmental crises' also constitute opportunities for engagement. We thereby highlight emergent 'green economy' responses through which the creation of markets for products arising from the production of sustainability is considered to 'perform green'. We engage these market-based green performativities in juxtapositions with varied cultural histories, discourses, values and practices regarding socioecological phenomena, observing that the latter may be both delegitimised and/or capitalised through entanglements with modern technical and economic interventions. We acknowledge the range of cultural registers through which socio-environmental knowledges may also be transferred and mediated, emphasising combinations of songs, dances, poetic stories and memories. We note some ways in which these enactments and embodied knowledges may 'haunt' the present, even as they are masked by currently hegemonic trajectories of economic development amidst contexts of environmental crisis. To further engage with narratives of environmental change in west Namibian contexts we present a comparative assessment of repeat images of west Namibian landscapes, as well as bringing varied sources of datafrom samples of indicator species to audio recordings of places and landscapesto bear in reconstructing historical ecologies of the Namib. We draw the threads of our research together into a theoretical approach that asks questions of the ethical outcomes effected by different cultural understandings of sustainability and environmental change, and thus of assumptions regarding best practice in transferring socioecological value(s) forwards to the future. Our title 'Future Pasts' acknowledges that understandings of the past guide present recommendations for the future, while querying whose version of past values may become privileged in present productions of sustainability.
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
This chapter examines the role of performance ethnography in development practice, focusing in pa... more This chapter examines the role of performance ethnography in development practice, focusing in particular on the contributions of ethnomusicological research to current discourses on transitional justice in post-conflict states. Inspired by the appeal by Brown et.al. (2011) for ‘imaginative transdisciplinarity’ in seeking solutions to critical social problems, it argues for greater consideration of situated cultural mechanisms of truth, justice and reconciliation in the critical interrogation of prevailing Northern legalistic justice and accountability paradigms. The chapter draws on the example of South Sudan—a country that has recently emerged from half a century of civil war with (the previously north) Sudan, but remains profoundly destabilized by internecine violence—and reflects on the role of songs in Dinka culture as judicial instruments of truth-telling, offering a locally apposite discursive space for the expression of multiple public positions and forms of agency. Correspo...
Arts & Health, Aug 13, 2013
This paper challenges the "intervention-as-solution" approach to health and well-being as commonl... more 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 reintegration of self, place and community.
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2001
University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2018
Yearbook for Traditional Music
Yearbook for Traditional Music
The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights
Transitional justice in process, 2022
This chapter invites critical scrutiny of the role of performance ethnography in development prax... more This chapter invites critical scrutiny of the role of performance ethnography in development praxis, focusing specifically on the place of ethnomusicology in current discourses about alternative frameworks for transitional justice in post-conflict and fragile states. The paper responds to the increasing appeal in transitional justice literature for legal pluralism and reflects on the challenges and opportunities that traditional justice strategies pose for many of the fundamental assumptions that currently underlie post-conflict rule-of-law work. Taking direction from Brown et al. (2011) and Mignolo (2013), who call for imaginative “delinking” from current epistemic hegemonies in seeking solutions to pressing societal problems, the chapter argues for greater consideration of culture in responding to the multidimensional legacies of protracted conflict (Rush & Simić 2014). Drawing on research on Dinka ox-songs in South Sudan—a country that emerged from half a century of civil war with Sudan, but remains profoundly destabilized by internecine violence—the paper argues that in their capacity as public hearings, ox-songs offer locally embedded judicial instruments or “justice rituals” (Rossner 2013) of narration, listening, and understanding, opening discursive spaces for the expression of multiple public positions and forms of agency. While songs recount individual, clan, or community memories within the context of culturally legitimate expressive spaces, they equally reveal potentially incompatible rejoinders to social justice, forgiveness, and inclusivity, thus supporting new pathways for hybrid or plural frameworks for truth-telling, justice, and reparative outcomes.
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
Future Pasts is a cross-disciplinary project researching critical and cultural conjunctions betwe... more Future Pasts is a cross-disciplinary project researching critical and cultural conjunctions between 'sustainability' and 'environmental change'. Funded primarily through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) 'Care for the Future' research theme, and developed in conjunction with our Namibian partner organisations (the National Museum of Namibia, Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, Save the Rhino Trust, and Mamokobo Film and Research), Future Pasts explores understandings and practices of 'sustainability' and 'environmental change' in west Namibia, where three of our UK academics have long-term field experience. Through combining methods and theoretical perspectives from social anthropology, cultural geography, environmental history, environmental ethics and ethnomusicology, we intend enquiry that is cross-and transdisciplinary, drawing on a hybrid range of disciplinary and situated perspectives. This inaugural working paper in the Future Pasts Working Papers series introduces our research aims and orients our project in the historically globalised and diverse cultural landscapes of west Namibia. We note that concerns about 'environmental crises' also constitute opportunities for engagement. We thereby highlight emergent 'green economy' responses through which the creation of markets for products arising from the production of sustainability is considered to 'perform green'. We engage these market-based green performativities in juxtapositions with varied cultural histories, discourses, values and practices regarding socioecological phenomena, observing that the latter may be both delegitimised and/or capitalised through entanglements with modern technical and economic interventions. We acknowledge the range of cultural registers through which socio-environmental knowledges may also be transferred and mediated, emphasising combinations of songs, dances, poetic stories and memories. We note some ways in which these enactments and embodied knowledges may 'haunt' the present, even as they are masked by currently hegemonic trajectories of economic development amidst contexts of environmental crisis. To further engage with narratives of environmental change in west Namibian contexts we present a comparative assessment of repeat images of west Namibian landscapes, as well as bringing varied sources of datafrom samples of indicator species to audio recordings of places and landscapesto bear in reconstructing historical ecologies of the Namib. We draw the threads of our research together into a theoretical approach that asks questions of the ethical outcomes effected by different cultural understandings of sustainability and environmental change, and thus of assumptions regarding best practice in transferring socioecological value(s) forwards to the future. Our title 'Future Pasts' acknowledges that understandings of the past guide present recommendations for the future, while querying whose version of past values may become privileged in present productions of sustainability.
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Me... more The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project 'Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song', a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their 'Beyond Text' programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file...
This chapter examines the role of performance ethnography in development practice, focusing in pa... more This chapter examines the role of performance ethnography in development practice, focusing in particular on the contributions of ethnomusicological research to current discourses on transitional justice in post-conflict states. Inspired by the appeal by Brown et.al. (2011) for ‘imaginative transdisciplinarity’ in seeking solutions to critical social problems, it argues for greater consideration of situated cultural mechanisms of truth, justice and reconciliation in the critical interrogation of prevailing Northern legalistic justice and accountability paradigms. The chapter draws on the example of South Sudan—a country that has recently emerged from half a century of civil war with (the previously north) Sudan, but remains profoundly destabilized by internecine violence—and reflects on the role of songs in Dinka culture as judicial instruments of truth-telling, offering a locally apposite discursive space for the expression of multiple public positions and forms of agency. Correspo...