‘Tromba Spirit Possession in Madagascar’

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Ron Emoff, professor of music and anthropology at Ohio State University, presenting “Clinton, Bush, and Hussein in the Courts of Kings: Tromba Spirit Possession in Madagascar.”

Throughout Madagascar, people practice tromba spirit possession ceremonies in which they musically invite revered ancestral spirits into the present, primarily to effect the healing of illness among the living. A Malagasy custom exists in which any visitor, ancestral or not, is wholeheartedly welcomed and honored. Concurrently, Malagasy people often find the incorporation of foreign or distant power to be both aesthetically pleasing and functionally efficacious. For example, accordions first brought by French colonials have become a vital aural agent for creating the healing power manifest in tromba ceremony. Occasionally powerful Iraqi, American, and even French personalities appear at tromba ceremonies, to intensify healing power but also to embody, in enacted, encoded ways, Malagasy sentiments about and reactions to the outside world and the colonial past.

Denison University’s Global Studies Seminars are interdisciplinary intellectual forums to discuss and debate academic and policy issues of global importance.