Office of the Vice Provost for International Relations
Columbia and the World

 

My dissertation project analyzes vocal performances––both musical and non-musical––for insights (or perhaps auscultations) into social identification and the meanings of community and citizenship among the "Swahili" population of the Kenyan coast.  It is an ethnographic project based on data from nearly two years of research in Kenya, supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program, the Social Science Research Council IDRF program, and a summer travel grant from Columbia University.

The Study in Brief

The term Swahili in Kenya refers to a collection of city and town-dwelling communities who share certain key cultural elements, including Islam, the Swahili language (in its many variations), coastal lifeways, and a complex history of cultural exchange and synthesis with groups from the African interior and across the Indian Ocean. It has always been a complex and contingent ethnonym in Kenya, made no less so by the fact that it describes a kind of non-tribe in a nation-state where power and tribe are indissolubly linked.  Examining a broad array of vocal performances, from hip-hop songs to religious chants, I frame my project as one of listening to the resonance of various centripetal and centrifugal social forces among Kenya’s Swahili people––or, more precisely, within Swahili space. 

I take this term Swahili space from the local notion of uswahili, which refers at once to Swahili-ness (encompassing notions of norms, style, and identity) and Swahili place (encompassing notions of community, neighborhood, country, and nation).  In the end it is the relationship between these two halves of Swahili space that I seek to understand.  And so I audition the voices of musicians and others who make their voices public as they resonate, literally and metaphorically, in the ears and mouths of local actors, and in the physical spaces of what are called Swahili places. 

My interest is not only––not even primarily­­––in the words that are sung, spoken, or announced.  A vocalization is a much richer piece of ethnographic data than a purely textual transcript can ever show.  To give some examples of the kind of analysis I do undertake, in one chapter of my dissertation I listen to Swahili taarab singers sing about the nature of uswahili not in the content of their romantic poems, but in the ways they set these poems to Hindi film tunes.  In another chapter, I examine how commonsense ideas about the connectedness of certain neighborhoods and the people that occupy them are produced in part within the local soundscape of public vocalizations.

Old Town Mombasa and the Resonance of the Project

Standing on a crumbling street of Old Town Mombasa, Kenya, one is surrounded by a tableau of 19th century stone architecture and narrow alleys animated by the perambulations of strikingly uniformed women and men.  Some of the women are in full black purdah; some are wearing threadbare colorful kanga cloths.  Some of the men are sporting white kanzu gowns and embroidered kofia caps; others––laborers––have only tattered slacks shredded into three-quarter length pedal pushers.  Meanwhile, the smell of incense mixes with diesel and coconut, wafting into an air that vibrates with the crackle of amplified calls to prayer.  The scene is, as one Kenyan hip-hop artist raps,  “like Cairo.”  And yet Old Town is not Cairo.  It is an integral part of the largest port city of East Africa, situated like a small casbah within a large, heterogeneous, Kenyan metropolis. 

The Kenyanness of this neighborhood is easy to forget from within.  And in some ways it is actively forgotten every day.  There is an uncanny absence of national newspapers; an overwhelming percentage of radios are tuned to local Islamic programming; and even the neighborhood’s non-Arabic speakers prefer Arabic satellite television to Kenya’s English and Swahili programming.  When Kenya does seep into the everyday existence of Old Town it is either absurd (such as when upcountry tour guides who know far more about lions and hyenas bring a safari jeep full of tourists through the “exotic” town) or deadly serious (such the strikes and riots that occurred in the 1990s after the Islamic Party of Kenya was declared illegal).

When I originally conceived this project it was as a study of the ways Swahili taarab musicians produce and negotiate notions of Swahiliness through their musical genre, which involves mélange of Arabic, Indian, and Bantu sounds. I felt that a textured ethnographic study of taarab musicians as culture brokers could shed light on the everyday politics of being or not being "Swahili" on the "Swahili coast.”  Upon moving to Old Town Mombasa and beginning my research, I discovered, as ethnographers often do, that the assumptions I brought with me were in need of critical reappraisal.  For me, it was actually a matter of reshuffling the subjects and objects of my research.  I had originally wanted to enter a Swahili place to study how Swahili people produce notions of Swahiliness through sound.  But I quickly realized that it would be far more productive to enter sound to study how Swahili (and other) people simultaneously produce Swahiliness and Swahili place.  After all, labels and stereotypes are not the only things at stake in questions of cultural identity on Kenya’s “Swahili coast.”  What are more important to the denizens of the Kenyan coast are the issues of autonomy and citizenship that are bound up with questions of identity.  By listening in on the production of Swahili space I hope to make these complex problems more audible to those searching for positive pathways beyond the area’s deepening religious and ethnic divisions.

For more information on Andrew Eisenberg's project:
http://www.columbia.edu/~aje11/

For more information on ethnomusicology:
http://www.ethnocenter.org