Sensing the Movements

Ecological Musicking of the Black Churches in America

Abstract

One of the goals of anthropological description is to approach the totality of events that includes "imponderabilia of actual life." From this viewpoint, studying musical performances can be seen as a touchstone, as most anthropologists tacitly accept the musicological premises that extract and objectify "music" from the total event of musicking. Herein, I will try another alternative vis-à-vis describing the worship services of the Pentecostal/Charismatic black churches in America by using affordance theory. Their services are full of sound that does not fit into the framework of "music," in addition to miscellaneous behavior as well as musical performances and singing. Here, I present how congregation's behaviors are affected by sound, and how they interact with one another in the sound, through written descriptions, diagrams showing their successive behaviors, and video data. With these, I aim to extract the social affordance of sound/body. What emerges here is behavior that is not controlled by conscious selves, as well as "groove (nori)" that flows in between the individuals.