The nature of the research

The starting point for this research has been a musicology that is an historiographic, culturographic, dialogic, locally oriented tradition. The researcher brings in some of the ‘quality assessment’ that North Atlantic science has successfully developed for  description and qualitative research and, where wanted, the informed, third-person view needed to make some degree of abstraction of the complete and complex ‘local data’. All this fits into a research design with collaboration and co-development focused on local goals: description and history of the local culture and analyses of how things work around music.

Translating or emulating

The ways of working used in this study aim at attaining a little more ‘translation’ and a little less ‘appropriation’. A short excursion into Renaissance translation typology will be helpful.

Translatio, imitatio and aemulatio

To open up classical works, and contemporaneous works in other languages, for a larger public than scientists alone, writers in the Renaissance started translating/rendering these works into the vernacular. This was called translatio. When skilled, the translator went over to imitatio. He did not make a faithful copy in the words of the vernacular language but tried to follow and make variations on the intentions of the illustrious predecessor. The highest stage in translation was the aemulatio: the writer tried to surpass the predecessor. Because the writer lived in a christian society in full knowledge of the bible and the true God –advantages he felt to have over the classical predecessor– he could, to surpass him, bring in a christian parallel to the classical original and by so doing change it quite thoroughly.¹See Warners (1956).

Whether based on christian motives as in this example or on scientific ones as in the cases I am aiming at here, aemulatio seems to be in-born North Atlantic preoccupation. But, we can try. In the terms of this excursion, my intention is to try to aim at imitatio based on dialogue as the highest stage. If we do so, the dialogue about the intentions of the local actors becomes a central issue in the research.

A consequence of this stance is that not too much attention is given to critical reviews of musicological literature, more especially thought, on every new subject: this site is not about musicology. Ways of working used are described as far as they pertain to the ‘quality assessment’ mentioned above.

This will not diminish Kofi Agawu’s grievance²Agawu (2003: passim).: the music is still represented by a ‘non-African’ and, more importantly, by someone trapped in North Atlantic thinking. The choice then, considering the quantity of cultural research in Zambia by ‘Africans’, is, however sad this situation may be, between hardly any representation and this type of representation.

Also, some (North Atlantic) readers might find this site a little odd since colonial, western economic and such influences are not presented as very large nor are they highlighted. My argument is not that these influences are small or that they do not play in the background but that the vantage points of those in Chibale involved in the research and the situation in Chibale provided no reason to specifically highlight these influences.