Abstract
The Resonance of Place: Vocalizing Swahili Ethnicity in
Mombasa, Kenya
Andrew J. Eisenberg
This dissertation is an ethnography of Swahili ethnicity on
the Kenyan coast, based on data from eighteen months of
anthropological and ethnomusicological fieldwork. Swahili
ethnicity is highly porous and ambiguous, reckoned more as
a space that may be entered into or exited than as
something one has or does not have. Nevertheless, it
remains socially “real” and politically relevant in
postcolonial Kenya, because Swahili-speaking Muslims (most
but not all of whom are considered ethnically Swahili)
comprise the core of a Muslim minority engaged in active
struggles for greater recognition and autonomy in the
country. Through cultural interpretation and semiotic
analysis, this dissertation explores the trajectories of
communal affiliation and political action among the Muslim
population of Kenya’s “Swahili coast.”
A work of “aural ethnography,” this dissertation reveals
multiple aspects of Swahili communality and identity by
attending to the ways vocal practices animate and make
sense of a place (Mombasa Old Town) that is at once a
historic “Swahili town” and an integral section of Kenya’s
modern port city. Data was collected using a sound-centered
ethnographic methodology (termed “listening in”), involving
musical participation and attention to environmental sounds
in addition to traditional ethnographic methods of
socializing, dialoguing, and interviewing.
The chapters of this study describe discursive and
non-discursive aspects of multiple genres of vocal
expression, including Islamic vocalizations of the “pious
soundscape” (i.e. muezzin calls and sermons), secular
wedding song (both Swahili “Indian
taarab”
[based on Hindi film melodies] and Yemeni Arabic
ṭarab),
and hip-hop- and reggae-influenced singing/rapping in
Kenya’s youth-oriented popular music. They reveal how these
vocal practices produce and mediate dominant meanings of
Mombasa Old Town––and dominant meanings of dwelling in
Mombasa Old Town as a person marked by gender, race, and
ethnicity––among denizens of the Kenyan coast and beyond.
This dissertation contributes to broader conversations in
the social sciences by exploring the well-trodden yet
poorly mapped terrain between ethnomusicology and
linguistic anthropology, and by extending the burgeoning
field of “vocal anthropology” through an intensive focus on
vocalization as a practice of
emplacement.
See
also my blurb on the Columbia and the World site
here.
(It is slightly out of date but still
relevant.)