i heart bloggers

Peter Hoesing--an amazing musician I became friends with back in my college days--keeps a blog, The Artclectic Academic, which currently features his travels as an ethnomusicologist doing field research in Uganda. You should totally read it.

He is a fantastic writer and the pictures he throws in amplify everything even more.




















It verges on everything from really "academic":

I theorized this kind of music broadly as a clear manifestation of expressive culture common to the entire Interlacustrine or “Great Lakes” Region of East Africa. In this context, I used the term kubandwa, deriving from the proto-Bantu root -band- (something pressed or oppressed). Having read a lot of literature on so-called “cults of affliction,” I later posited kubandwa as a musical habitus (in the Maussian understanding of techniques du corps) that people in this region use to approach common health problems. In short, people in this region situate kubandwa as a set of bodily techniques within rituals that Victor Turner would call dramaturgies (basically, drama + liturgy = dramaturgy).

To the entry on drinking beer and eating bugs (my personal favorite...the entry, not the bugs).





I'm still wading my way through it but I think I'm hooked. Shine on, brother!