Abstract
This dissertation is an examination of music and healing in the Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra in San Fernando, Trinidad. The potential roles of music in health and healing are explored through three perspectives. The first perspective explores the musical experiences of the group as optimal experiences that are intrinsically rewarding and facilitate healing. The second details how the meaningful embodiment of four important cultural values engenders a way of life, an outlook through which members of Skiffle Bunch ascribe meaning to their experiences that potentially encourages health promoting attitudes, behaviors, and states of well-being. The third perspective demonstrates how intense focus and strong emotion educed by the interrelation of optimal experience and the meaningful embodiment of cultural values induces a kind of trancing to which members of Skiffle Bunch attribute extraordinary healing experiences. A broader goal of presenting these perspectives in the dissertation is to lay the groundwork for a concluding perspective that positions future research findings of this ongoing project to contribute to the development of practical applications. The dissertation is based primarily on fieldwork conducted with Skiffle Bunch from early May through mid-August 2007, though it also draws upon insights developed from earlier fieldwork visits to Trinidad during the 2001 Carnival season and summer research trips in 2001 and 2003. Moreover, a steady phone and email dialogue was established with the Skiffle Bunch in 2005 and is still ongoing as of the writing of the dissertation. Methodologically, I utilize a broad array of musicological tools including: participation, observation, organology, iconography, cultural history, musical transcription and analysis, audio and video recording, formal and informal interviews, field notes, and two written surveys. I theoretically orient research findings relative to the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and ground them in ethnography informed by symbolic anthropology and musical analysis. Ultimately, the relationships between music and healing explored in the dissertation indicate that musical experiences catalyze, and often are, processes of healing for members of Skiffle Bunch. The research findings suggest that, while the relationships between music and healing examined herein occur within a specific cultural context, the principles that underlie such experiences are representative of a broader human potential for healing through musical means.
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