Mobilizing Musical Performance and Expressive Culture in the Ebola 2014 Epidemic

Mobilizing Musical Performance and Expressive Culture in the Ebola 2014 Epidemic:Introduction Ruth M. Stone The recent epidemic of the Ebola virus disease, centered in West Africa, riveted the world's attention as the ominous potential loomed for the spread of the disease around the globe. While the press and scientists have focused on deploying medical strategies to combat the virus, the role of the arts in addressing the outbreak has received much less attention. Accounts of the epidemic rarely mention the arts; medical and anthropological policy papers largely ignore performance and aesthetics. But as Jill Sonke and Virginia Pesata have pointed out, "It must not be overlooked that in the Ebola response, the arts were employed at both the grassroots and formal levels to reach large populations of people with critical health information, which is presumed to have played a significant role in slowing the spread of the virus" (Sonke and Pesata 2015b). During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida formed a task force of researchers from a wide range of the arts and worked with them to develop a concept brief on the arts and health messaging (Sonke and Pesata 2014). This document characterized "effective arts-based health messaging programs" as "evidence-based, highly structured, culturally and personally relevant," and "interdisciplinary." The goal of such performance was to reach broad audiences and help change the behavior of people who participated in the events. The Center for Arts in Medicine facilitated a repository of resources, including artists who performed in relation to Ebola and publications that investigated performance during Ebola 2014 (Sonke and Pesata 2015a). Ethnomusicologists have explored the role of music in medicine and health for years, as indicated by the formation of a special interest group on medical ethnomusicology in the Society for Ethnomusicology. That group sponsored a preconference session at the 2013 national meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Indianapolis, Indiana, titled "Music and Global Health: Toward Collaborative Paradigms." Some studies have examined music in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa (Barz 2006; Barz and Cohen 2011). The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology draws together research of ethnomusicologists working around the world (Koen et al. 2008). [End Page vii] Four of the present authors—Bonnie McConnell, James Morford, Michael Rivera, and Ruth Stone—first presented their Ebola research in the fall of 2015 at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Austin, Texas, on a panel titled "Music in the Vortex of the Ebola Epidemic in West Africa." The Medical Ethnomusicology Section of SEM jointly sponsored the panel, and an archived video stream of those presentations can be found at www.indiana.edu/~video/stream/launchflash.html?folder=video&filename=SEM2015_Annual_AM_20151205.mp4. Michael Rivera, James Morford, and Ruth Stone traveled to West Africa at various times after that conference for further relevant research; Buba Darboe lives and works in the Republic of the Gambia. This special issue opens with an exploration of the verbal language that helped shape communication about the disease. Sarah Monson, cultural anthropologist, analyzes the terms and strategies that the American media employed, specifically in terms of the concepts of "panic" and "otherization" and how these ideas politically shaped the discourse during the epidemic. She relies on ethnographic interviews as well as examination of the media literature and social media of the period for her evidence. The next four articles address how musical performances in a number of countries—The Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—were deployed to fight the disease. In the first case, presented by Bonnie McConnell and Buba Darboe, the government of The Gambia had already developed an infrastructure for deploying music for health-related issues. They used a kind of prophylactic approach with music, and drew on women's hereditary groups (kanyeleng) to prepare the local population for Ebola. In the end, not a single case of Ebola emerged in this particular West African country, but the deployment of musical ensembles by the public health infrastructure provides an instructive case study. Ruth Stone examines the context of Liberia and how music was deployed throughout the epidemic. Unlike The Gambia, Liberia was hit hard by the disease

Art · Biology · Musical · Visual arts · Diverse Musicological Studies · Virology

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