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Music and Ritual Symbolism in the Ga Funeral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Barbara L. Hampton
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Extract

This essay will attempt an interpretation of the symbolic phenomena of YaraƐƐmɔ which assume the form of sounds perceived as song (lala) and gestures, inextricably linked with the songs, that are considered to be part of the dance (dzoo). YaraƐƐmɔ, performed by the Ga of southeastern Ghana,1 is a ritual in that it is both a practice through which participants relate to the sacred (Durkheim 1968:52) and “a form of religious behavior associated with (the) social transitions” of humans (Turner 1964:4–6). As a transformative, contingent ritual, being occasioned by death, it belongs to a particular class of ritual; it is a rite of passage. Like other funerary rites, those of the Ga are characterized by preliminal, liminal and postliminal phases (van Gennep 1975:148). YaraƐƐmɔ falls within the liminal phase but makes reference to the separation and incorporation phases of the passage. The music and dance of YaraƐƐmɔ, called Adowa, do not merely articulate the defining features of the ritual, but, in fact, shape it; for, as I hope to demonstrate, they constitute ritual action that is both expressive—a communication system stating the relationships among humans and those among humans, their natural environment and the supernatural—and manipulative, an encoded moral system performed to achieve certain effects in these relationships (c.f. Geertz's models of and for reality 1966:7–9). Adowa is performed at the wake the night before the burial and on the day of the burial immediately before and during the processional to the site of interment.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 14 , 1982 , pp. 75 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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