Sonic Humanitarianism: Musical Aid in Malawi

Abstract

When a humanitarian project utilizes musical strategies, who benefits? The target community in which the musical practices are imagined to reside? Or humanitarians themselves, drawn in by a fusion of service and adventure? This dissertation tackles this question through an ethnomusicological analysis of several international aid organizations that operate in the Republic of Malawi. I argue in favor of a repositioning of music’s role in development encounters: rather than presume sound’s normative efficacy, I demonstrate that the affective surplus produced by many musical interventions can lead to interpersonal consequences that are unintended, overlooked, and, from the perspective of project designers, even counterproductive. Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork in and around Malawi’s capital city of Lilongwe, I explore these dynamics across four case studies. First, I consider World Camp, Incorporated, an organization that recruits college-aged Americans to Malawi to teach from a primary school curriculum dedicated to HIV/AIDS biology, environmentalism, and gender relations. Second, I detail Music Crossroads, a music school and performance space known as an incubator of Malawian musical talent that also plays host to international volunteers from Norway, Brazil, and Mozambique. Third, I analyze the Beating Heart Project, an initiative conceived by British producers to remix and rerelease a cache of mid-twentieth century field recordings with proceeds benefiting a community garden program in contemporary Malawi. And fourth, I profile the Tumaini Music and Arts Festival, an annual festival held in Dzaleka Refugee Camp that spotlights non-Malawian refugees as performers, entrepreneurs, organizers, and hosts. Whatever its protean effects in the humanitarian endeavors I describe, music, I argue, seldom does what it is meant by its invokers to do. Attention paid to this slippage between organizational theory and experiential praxis places tension on the still-commonplace presumption that musical sound and social change go predictably hand-in-hand.