The well of samba: on playing percussion and feeling good in Toronto

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Canadian Ethnic Studies, Volume 41-42, Number 3-1, 2009-2010, pp. 207-232 (Article) Published by Canadian Ethnic Studies Association DOI: 10.1353/ces.2010.0038

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ces/summary/v041/41.3.pravaz.html

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NATASHA PRAVAZ

The Well of Samba: On Playing Percussion and Feeling Good in Toronto Abstract While Brazil has been exporting music in audio, film, performance, and printed form for decades, Afro-Brazilian percussion ensembles have recently emerged as locally emplaced phenomena in many North American and European cities, from Toronto and New York to Paris and Berlin.1 Such groups generally have a large membership of mostly amateur players, many of whom are host-country nationals, or immigrants from countries other than Brazil. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interview materials, this article focuses on the role that participation in Afro-Brazilian percussion ensembles plays in fostering wellness among locals and newcomers to the largest city in Canada.

In particular, I discuss three interrelated aspects of music making that have direct bearing on the emotional well-being of participants: the links between music and spirituality; music playing as a kind of flow; and band membership as substitute family and community building. In doing so, I move away from both positivist and structuralist understandings of the relationship between music and emotion, where universalizing tendencies prevail. Drawing on insights from performance theory, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, I advocate for recognition of the importance of Brazilian music making in Canada as a modality that enhances practitioners’ welfare, an argument with potential implications for the fields of community and immigrant mental health.

Résumé Alors que le Brésil a exporté sa musique depuis des décennies dans des films et des spectacles et sous forme audio et imprimée, les ensembles de percussionnistes afro-brésiliens ont récemment émergé en tant que phénomènes locaux dans nombre de villes en Amérique du Nord et en Europe, de Toronto à Paris ou de New York à Berlin1. Ce genre de groupe comprend en général de nombreux membres, surtout musiciens amateurs, qui sont pour la plupart des ressortissants du pays d’accueil ou des émigrés non originaires du Brésil. À partir d’un travail ethnographique sur le terrain et de dossiers d’entrevue, cet article met l’accent sur la promotion d’un mieux-être de la population locale et des nouveaux-venus de la plus grande ville du Canada, par le fait de participer à un ensemble de percussionnistes afro-brésiliens. J’examine plus précisément trois aspects de la pratique musicale qui sont interreliés dans leur influence directe sur le bien-être émotionnel des participants : le lien entre musique et spiritualité, la musique comme une sorte de flux, et enfin l’appartenance à une bande comme famille de substitution et lieu de construction de la communauté. Ce faisant, je m’éloigne de l’approche aussi bien positiviste que structuraliste concernant la relation entre la musique et les émotions, soit là où les tendances universalistes dominent. Ce que je recommande en m’inspirant de la théorie du spectacle, de l’ethnomusicologie et de l’anthropologie, c’est de reconnaître l’importance de la pratique de la musique brésilienne au Canada comme moyen de mettre en valeur le bien-être de ceux qui s’y adonnent, un argument qui comprend des implications potentielles dans le domaine de la santé mentale de la communauté et des émigrés.

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EMOTIONS AND THE THERAPEUTIC IN MUSIC: BETWEEN HARD SCIENCE AND ARCHETYPAL UNIVERSALISM

Until recently, scientific works on emotion rarely considered emotional reactions to music (Sloboda and Juslin 2001, 81), despite the fact that since antiquity philosophers have noted the influential role of music on humans’ moods and dispositions.

In the past few years, however, there has been a proliferation of scholarly publications from medical doctors and psychologists to neurologists and computer scientists on the affective outcomes of exposure to music on diverse populations, from autistic children to nursing students to cardiovascular patients undergoing angiography (e.g., Bittman et al. 2004; Bunt and Pavlicevic 2001; Schneider et al. 2001; Schulkind et al. 1999). This literature avails itself of recent technological and mathematical innovations to measure psycho-physiological processes such as blood pressure, cortisol and adrenaline levels, burnout, mood disturbances, and emotions more generally as they are affected by the listening or playing of specific musical pieces (see also Balkhill and Thompson 1999; Yang et al. 2006).

Whereas implicit in most of this literature is a universalizing tendency assuming that music is perceived equally across the globe, some authors are explicit about their belief that different styles of music convey intrinsically-determined emotive values and therefore can generate specific moods. Psychologists Balkwill and Thompson (1999, 61), for example, advocate the “stripping away [of] the layers of culture-specific cues and interpretations,” in order to explore the “connection between psychophysical dimensions and the representation of specific emotions in music.” Similarly, Degme i et al. (2005, 288) argue that music possesses a symbolic deep structure, and state that understanding it requires that the listener “catch” “the similar structures (mental pictures, memories, emotions, etc.) presented in a musical composition from his/her own subjective ‘world of mind.’” The authors go on to say that musical experience has much in common with “archaic” ways of thinking, and focus on music as an interior process, through which the subjective world of sounds meets corresponding forms in the human mind (288-9).

Certainly, music may produce specific changes in physiological processes, and can also have remarkable therapeutic effects on the mental states of specific populations, among other reasons due to the impact upon their emotional outlook.

However, some positivist as well as structuralist views on the relationship between music and emotion seem to share in the metanarrative that this healing occurs due to an intrinsic correspondence between the inner structures of the mind and those of musical compositions. Moreover, in the literature reviewed above, there is a pervasive, unacknowledged emphasis on the individual, interior dimensions of musical experience, and cultural aspects of artistic perception, interpretation, and production are treated at best as negligible.

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Conversely, Judith Becker (2001) emphasizes the importance of bringing to bear an anthropological perspective upon our understanding of musical processes, in particular as emotive spheres of life are intrinsically linked to the culturally inflected, intersubjective practices of listening to, composing, and performing music. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, the author develops the concept of “habitus of listening” to evoke the highly distinct modes of sound appreciation that are embodied by different societies around the world. As comparison, she provides the cases of Wolof griots of Senegal (see Irvine 1990), on the one hand, and Western, middle-class listeners of classical music, on the other. Becker explains that Wolof nobles are believed to be in need of stimulation on the part of low-caste griots, lest they fail to carry out their royal duties (2001, 142).

Both the emotion of the griots and its absence in the nobles are public, dialogical, and situational; not private and hidden. One of the primary manifestations of subjectivity among Europeans and Americans, emotions are not personal attributes for the Wolof griots and nobles in the same way. For us, emotional responses to music are not considered to be assigned by virtue of one’s class and profession, but to be an inalienable characteristic of a bounded, inviolate individual. This is not at all to say that Wolof nobles do not feel strong personal emotions, or that a griot is necessarily always highly extroverted and volatile. It is only to say that these are the dispositions, the inclinations that are likely to be fulfilled more often than not. The key participants in these musical events exhibit a habitus of listening and a type of subjectivity that largely conforms to Wolof cultural expectations (ibid., emphasis in the original).

Becker argues that our understanding of music listening practices must take into account the significant range of cross-cultural variation in how interpersonal relations and understandings of self are experienced. The author sharply criticizes descriptions of the human passions as universally uniform for silencing subaltern forms of feeling, knowledge, and morality (139). Notwithstanding, the author advocates the merging of humanistic and scientific approaches in the study of the relationship between music and emotion, lest we lose sight both of individual variation, and of a broadly understood concept of human nature. She highlights the paradox that, while cultures are inherently distinct, “most of us can, with experience and empathy, come to understand differing expressive reactions to different kinds of music as reasonable and coherent [demonstrating]… commonality and universality in relation to both music and emotion” (140). While primary socialization delimits our emotional responses, it is possible to “imaginatively enter into a much wider palette of human emotional possibilities… [and] experience relief from one’s presentation of self ” (140, 142).

The biomedical sciences and new technological developments have allowed us to gather tremendous amounts of data on the psychophysiological changes music

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brings about upon diverse groups of people, yet these disciplines do not provide useful conceptual tools to understand this information in terms of the social and cultural contexts within which such effects take place. In fact, Western biomedicine is rooted in the assumption that “the individual is a sovereign being, a distinct unit, prior to society and culture, and autonomous to them” (Kleinman et al. 1992, 9, emphasis in the original). Moreover, biomedicine fails to understand affective changes on the terms proposed by the many different cultures that have used music as an emotional catalyst for centuries. For this purpose, culturally focused social theory such as that produced by Becker (2001) and others, is more useful. In this essay, I draw on the latter to make sense of certain remarks by my research participants, for whom participation in percussion ensembles has proven to be not only therapeutic, but also a gateway toward social adaptation. First, however, it is necessary to situate these uses of Brazilian music within the politics of cultural flows.

PLAYING AT BEING OTHER: SAMBA AND ETHNO-RACIAL POLITICS IN BRAZIL AND ABROAD It is of central importance to note that the therapeutic and adaptive qualities of collective music making operate within the context of a particular cultural politics.

Traditional practices of diverse racialized populations around the world have undergone long-standing processes of appropriation by European and North American travelers, virtual and actual, whether in the context of tourist practices or in the multicultural metropolises of France, the U.K. or the U.S.A, for example. From Andaluzian pilgrimages (Crain 1992) and the Argentinean tango (Savigliano 1995), to Quechua ritual (Hill 2008) and Hawaiian luaus (Desmond 1999), ethnic “others” have alternatively supplied the unbridled passion or authentic spirituality that figure as lack in the Western imagination. Yet this process in not a prerogative of EuroNorth Americans. Local elites in the global South have used their internal neo-colonial subjects in folklorization processes of diverse political import (see, for example, Savigliano 1995, Guss 2000, Bigenho 2002, Niranjana 2006).

As I have analysed in previous work (Pravaz 2002, 2003, 2008a, 2008b), AfroBrazilian culture in general and samba music in particular have, for almost a century now, become part of a dominant, nationalist, White-centered yet mestiço-inflected discourse on Brazil’s racial democracy. The cultural practices of Afro-Brazilians have been simultaneously defined as the sensual moves and tropical disposition of exotic/erotic “Black Others,” and appropriated by the elite as flattering icons of a desired self-image, thus obscuring the highly unequal relations structuring the colour-centric society. We may say that in this case the “therapeutic” dimensions of music were reduced to providing the White elite with an alibi against racial guilt, as

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if they could pronounce: “We are a racially just society. Just see how we celebrate Black culture.”

While during carnaval it is common to see large sections of the middle and upper class dance to the beat of surdos and repeniques (samba drums), it is very uncommon for members of this population segment to actually play musical instruments in the baterias (percussion wings) of escolas de samba (carnaval associations), let alone become full-fledged members. While samba is idealized as the quintessential Brazilian art form, bateria membership is anathema to middle-class respectability and concepts of personal safety (escolas, located in the poor, racialized suburbs of Rio and São Paulo, are stereotyped as cradles of filth and crime). Transplanted to Canadian soil, however, the performance of escola-style samba has undergone significant transformations. The most significant of these, to begin with, is the ten-fold size reduction suffered by percussion ensembles. While Rio-based baterias boast a membership of 250 players on average, the more modest Canadian cousins do not usually exceed three dozen members. Moreover, while in Brazil baterias are the musical accompaniment of a larger-than-life spectacle including thousands of extravagantly outfitted dancers, a Toronto-based ensemble will only occasionally appear in public beside a dance troupe, and generally there is no direct institutionalized connection between the two organizations.

Evidently, the racialized social dynamics of samba are not erased in the context of Brazilian emigration. In fact, the vast majority of Brazilians living in North America are disproportionately White, as compared to racial demographics back home, and of middle-class background, although most lose social status upon arrival given that their credentials are rarely recognized. They do, however, improve their economic position as work opportunities and monetary remuneration increase significantly in the host country (see Brasch 2007, Magalhães et al. 2008, Margolis 1994).

These indicators are characteristic of the majority of my research participants of Brazilian origin, who often did not play or even listen to Afro-Brazilian percussion music while living in Brazil.2 The force of samba in nation-making ideologies and structures of feeling, however, is undeniable even away from home. White Brazilians playing samba abroad today identify it as the sound par excellence of their native land, a musical form that has come to stand for Brazilianness and that promises to soothe the longing for roots.3 Matt Strand, a Canadian member of Toronto’s samba band Batucada Carioca once told me, “One of the things I find fascinating is how many Brazilians, I find, come [to Canada] and find their Brazilianness here, by playing music, which they’ve never been around in Brazil.” This notion testifies to the importance of samba in definitions of Brazilian identity both at home and abroad.

Canadians themselves, as well as migrants of non-Brazilian origin who play Afro-Brazilian percussion in Toronto, also exercise an exotic erotics through which

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to “experience relief from one’s own presentation of self ” (Becker 2001, 142). Yet ethno-racial politics are different for Brazilians and non-Brazilians as Afro-Brazilian percussion mediates specific socio-cultural dynamics with different significations, depending on the social milieu. This difference is highlighted in the ethnographic literature outside the Canadian context. In Bangor, U.K., for example, playing samba is a community-building strategy for those considered social “outsiders” (i.e., nonWelsh; see Eisentraut 2001), while among Brazilians of Japanese descent in São Paulo, it is an “appeal to mainstream society for a recognition of a hyphenated existence” (Hosokawa 2005, 72). It is, therefore, important to bear in mind the diverse transnational contexts of samba’s circulation in order to grasp the ways in which Afro-Brazilian music forms shift in meaning as they move from downtown to uptown, from the tropics to the tundra.

MUSICKING IN TORONTO: CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, AGENCY AND EMBODIMENT My ethnographic research is based on fieldwork among several Afro-Brazilian music bands in the Greater Toronto Area that are made up of a combination of locals and immigrants, and focuses on how immigrants use music performance practices to help them get settled in their new country, and on how Canadians both support this process and are influenced by it.4 The groups under study have relatively similar routines regarding rehearsals (at least once a week, with some meeting more frequently leading up to gigs). With the exception of Rhythms of Resistance, an informal group that plays strictly at political demonstrations, all groups appear regularly at street festivals across the city during the summer, and the more established ones also play at private functions and other venues, from community associations to select Toronto night clubs. Members of the more established bands travel across Ontario and as far as Montreal and even Bermuda, to perform in representation of their respective groups (see Mercier 2007-08 for more details on the venues and performance modalities of most groups under study here).

Similarly to what Eisentraut (2001) reports for U.K.-based samba ensembles, the more institutionalized Afro-Brazilian percussion bands in Toronto distinguish between beginners’ classes, led by the band’s mestre (conductor) or assistants, which are open to all, and the more advanced group that constitutes the public face of each organization. These bands have section leaders, train people specifically to assist newcomers, or even have long-standing members lead community and corporate drumming workshops. On the other hand, and in the same vein as samba skills acquisition in Wales (Eisentraut 2001), the learning process in many Toronto bands tends to be informal, with veterans relaying specific information on repertoire and

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technique to somewhat-educated neophytes—a strategy Greg Downey (2008) characterizes as “scaffolding”—with ultimate authority remaining with the mestre.

What could belonging to such ensembles possibly mean for both Canadian and diasporic participants? Lest we fall back into exoticizing tropes, it is necessary to contextualize both this belonging and the perspectives of participants themselves within Canada’s national discourse of multiculturalism. Mackey (2002) has deftly analyzed the specific ways in which, in recent decades, such discourse has joined previous understandings of Canada as a White settler nation. While this previous discourse relied on images of nature, the wilderness, and the north to produce a racialized sense of nationhood, multicultural representations of the nation do not represent a radical break from previous, exclusionary models (73). Instead, they reintegrate indigeneity, ethnicity, cultural diversity, and their signposts (food, customs, performance) to serve the hegemonic project of nation building. This project is still characterized by Western principles of progress and defined by unmarked, dominant (usually White, usually British) Canadians who are implicitly constructed as the real Canadians (89) and defined as fundamentally tolerant (see also, for example, Bannerji 2000; James and Shadd 2001).

Canadian audiences’ consumption of Afro-Brazilian performances at times significantly mirrors the representational work of the official cultural policy and mainstream artefacts described by Mackey (2002), as Mercier’s work testifies (2007-08).

Moreover, the consumption of samba on the part of recent, non-Brazilian migrants in Canada could be read as imitating the respectable consumption practices of the dominant ethno-racial class, along the same lines as the Paris-mediated Japanese longing for and appropriation of Argentinean tango (see Savigliano 1995). Such longing, Savigliano shows, has been fostered by the European acceptance and promotion of tango as a symbol of lustful Latin America. To the extent that participation in “Brazilian culture” figures in the Canadian imaginary, it could be said that such desire is triangulated by dominant narratives on Brazil’s tropical allure. Yet if left unqualified, such perspective would rob performance practices of their complexity.

To do justice to my fellow players and research participants, it is necessary to introduce a little dissonance, particularly because players are often self-reflexive about their potentially problematic practices (see Pravaz, forthcoming). Moreover, as I have stated elsewhere (Pravaz 2003), to not take research participants’ accounts at face value would reduce them to footnotes in the anthropologist’s preset agenda.

It is, therefore, important to highlight at least three significant factors diverging from received academic understandings of what an engagement with “exotic” practices might entail for “Western” consumers: the socio-demographic characteristics of practitioners; the power dynamics involved; and last but not least, the extent to which Canadian lives are transformed by such engagement.

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To begin with, the majority of Canadian samba and maracatu players are young students (many in their twenties) or others struggling to make ends meet in the most expensive city in the country. They do not partake in public policy design nor are otherwise involved in the decision-making processes of the powerful. Moreover, often recent or naturalized migrants themselves, ensemble participants have a heightened awareness of the ways in which their traditions can become straw-men of “exotic” foreign customs. Rather, they engage in what Appadurai (2001, 3) has described as “grassroots globalization”: “the strategies, visions, and horizons for globalization on behalf of the poor” that are used “to create forms of knowledge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and the nation-state.” In the spirit of Jane Jacobs’ embrace of Toronto’s public culture as a site of vital collective synergies, ensemble participants lend their time, energy, and technical expertise to projects based on social relations where horizontality, friendship, and mischievousness are highly prized. As opposed to the occasional consumption of ethnic food at a restaurant or attendance at a folkloric festival—practices that may provide “colour” and “spice” to a bland existence, yet are grounded in what Mackey has described as the hegemonic project of nation building—ongoing engagement with Afro-Brazilian music as experienced and defined by many of my research participants has a radically more significant impact upon selfdefinition, values, and overall embodied existence.5 In fact, the power dynamics of ensembles are such that players become captives, so to speak, of Brazilian or Brazilophile teachers whose craft is painstakingly transmitted over a long period of time, and whose agendas are, at times, radically divergent from those of the nation-state. Practicing a form of multiculturalism from below (Bannerji 2000, 22), players surrender themselves through the microscopic yet continuous transformation of their bodily practices and sensorium, slowly changing their corporeal dispositions and developing an intimate relationship with their instruments. This new relationship, if it is to be achieved successfully, requires being finely attuned to a collectively created rhythm, which takes the form of a subtle dance.

Several of my research participants have specifically commented on how playing, rehearsing, and performing in a percussion ensemble is, for them, a form of therapy, a way of decompressing, and a means of staying grounded. Toronto-raised Layah Davis6 explained that sometimes, when she plays gigs and the public does not respond enthusiastically, her band members remark, “We just did that gig for ourselves.” She goes on: We don’t play for anybody but ourselves, really. So in that way, it’s kind of, sound as a healer, which is one of my forms of work that I do, my loves, my long-life loves is healing work. And in healing, part of that is sound and how to use sound as a healing mechanism, both the sound of the voice and the sound of instruments and crystals or

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whatever. Sound is a very powerful healer and when you hear the sound, when it really coalesces into something very specifically in tune and in rhythm and in the vibe, the moment is changed, so everybody is changed around it. Whether they allow themselves to have that experience or not is up to them, but everybody is changed. So, what I feel is really up to me, but mostly I just let the music take me.

Layah’s comments display a profound awareness of the healing properties of sound in general and music in particular at an experiential level. Interestingly, however, for Layah the effects of synchronized tunes, vibes, and rhythm are not automatic but depend upon a willingness on the part of the subject to open her/himself up. This applies not only to what she has referred to as the “sourpussing” attitude of aloof spectators, but also to players themselves, who may or may not be willing to experience a transformation through music. Personal initiative seems to be central in our ability to experience music in innovative ways.

The ability to “let music take you,” therefore, is not something given, as Degmečić and others (2005) would argue, but rather a disposition to be cultivated. In fact, this is one of the central elements of band mestres’ pedagogy and part of the attraction of becoming a group member. For many, the thrill seems to reside precisely in relaxing enough into the playing to be able to incorporate the Brazilian malandro (trickster) habitus and subjectivity that is central to samba’s ethos (see Pravaz 2011). This flexible, fluid mode of being is seen by many Canadian participants as a fundamental piece of the attraction exercised by Afro-Brazilian performance arts, an embodied stance that to a large extent accounts for the experience of wellbeing associated with playing percussion.

Not only born and bred Canadians are touched by Brazilian music performances in therapeutic ways, however. A Brazilian migrant, Betty Santos talked about her participation in these music ensembles in the following way: It changed my life, because here, as an immigrant, we have a life of work, and we almost don’t have a... our life doesn’t make much sense [alternatively, “it doesn’t have much meaning” (a vida não faz sentido)]. We come here to do manual labour, if you don’t have something that you like, you end up going mad. So for me it was important because I changed my life.

This statement is significant given the mental health challenges faced by immigrant populations, who are exposed to stressors such as unemployment, isolation, separation from family, as well as linguistic, social, and cultural barriers to settlement (Barrio et al. 2003; CMHA 1996; Health and Welfare Canada 1988; Schugurensky and Ginieniewicz 2007; Walker 2005). A native of Cuba, Joanna Duarte had this to say about participating in recreational performances: “It lets me clear my mind

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because it touches my soul and allows me to express myself. If I’m upset about something, if I’m angry, if I’m stressed, this is my medicine, don’t give me pills, don’t give me psychological help.”

The very psychological strength that allows people to make themselves vulnerable during musical experiences is itself enhanced in the process, as participants discover new skills or become aware of hidden talents. When talking about her participation as the main singer in a small ensemble, Betty said: “I surprised myself, one of the great advantages of this initiative is that I was surprised with what I was capable of doing, and I am sure I surprised a lot of other people, and it was good for me.” As Becker (2001, 142) may suggest, Betty was perhaps experiencing relief from her everyday presentation of self through music.

The emphasis in both Betty’s and Layah’s comments is on the agency of the person engaged in musicking (Small 1999), be it playing, listening attentively, or just walking by. The expression “to music” as defined by Small (1999, 12) shifts the focus from a noun to a verb as a way of emphasizing that the meaning of music and its function cannot be found in a musical work per se, but rather in the performative activities through which music is given life in the first place. It is in performance that music acquires its social and cultural significance, in performance that participants may experience emotional arousal.

The unrelenting exhortation to relax one’s shoulders and slow down uttered by Batucada Carioca’s leader, Brazilian sambista Maninho Costa, for example, is one of the myriad ways in which involvement in Afro-Brazilian percussion exposes participants to unfamiliar modes of bodily posture and engagement that ultimately impact mental outlook and perhaps even personal character.vii Laderman and Roseman explain that “the performative aspect of performance, the extent to which it does not merely refer to or talk about but does something in the world, is fundamental to our comprehension of transformative movements from illness to health, from initiate to ritual practitioners, from past to present” (1996a, 3; emphasis in the original). Although most scholarship on music and emotion might lead us to think otherwise, when Betty, Joanna, or Layah feel touched by the sounds of Afro-Brazilian percussion, it is not because of some intrinsic emotive value or deep symbolic structure inherent in the music. Rather, it is because they have chosen to open themselves up to performances that are particularly successful at doing their job. Performance is a contingent process with emergent qualities.

Performance theorists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists interested in the health-related outcomes of cultural practices offer a much needed shift of focus from structural symbolism to an understanding of embodiment itself as a healing process in religious ritual in particular and cultural performance in general. As Schieffelin points out,

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The anthropological study of ritual has moved from seeing these kinds of enactments largely in terms of structures of representation to seeing them as processes of practice and performance. The focus on performance has appeal for those interested in the nature and power of ritual experience because it is concerned with the experience-near aspects of social phenomena: with actions more than with text, with illocutionary rather than with prepositional force—with the social construction, rather than just representation, of reality (1996, 59).

The illocutionary power of ritual refers to the ability of an event to transform reality (see Csordas 1996, 93), a transformation that is effected through sensory stimulation such as the use of incense, sound, visual effects, and alcohol as ways to produce shifts in the patient’s consciousness that enable healing to take effect (see Brown 2001; Turner 1967; Levi-Strauss 1963; Roseman 1996). While scholars have studied the role of art and ritual performance in healing for decades, recent scholarship has conceptually highlighted the centrality of corporeal realities by discussing the vital place of client-based bodily techniques in the process, including dancing, singing, drumming, receiving spirits, as well as speaking in tongues, shaking, smoking, and ingesting potions, among others (e.g., Alves and Minayo 1994; Comaroff 1985; Csordas 1993, 1994, 1995; Desjarlais 1992, 1996; Halprin 1995; Hoskins 1996; Kapferer 1991; Kendall 1996; Laderman and Roseman 1996b; Schieffelin 1996). The shift in emphasis from practitioner to “client,” from symbol to affect, is a useful conceptual tool in understanding the complex ways in which playing Afro-Brazilian percussion in Toronto may figure as a mental health practice for Canada’s diasporic as well as local communities. In this regard, it would be an oversight not to mention the historical links between the percussive sounds of samba and maracatu and AfroBrazilian religious traditions such as the Candomblé (Afro-Brazilian religion).

SPIRITUALITY, HEALING, AND FLOW IN TORONTO’S AFRO-BRAZILIAN MUSIC A polytheistic religion, Candomblé’s gods and goddesses are called orixás. They embody and synthesize the different forces of life, death, and nature. In Candomblé ceremonies, cavalos (initiands) are suffused with divine energy while “recebendo o santo” (incarnating the orixás), in performances where specific body movements denote the qualities of each divinity. Concrete movement-based affinities exist between the dances of the orixás and the samba moves performed by passistas (solo samba dancers) and other escola de samba members (Rego 1996, 6; see also Browning 1995), a reality that underlines the permeable quality of sacred-secular art forms in Afro-Brazilian culture. This observation is relevant for understanding some of the more ineffable links between emotion, healing, and music-making for percussionists in Toronto, particularly considering that singing, dancing, and playing are some of the central ways of connecting with the spiritual world in Afro-Brazilian

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religions, practices with significant healing dimensions for participants, as widely testified in the relevant literature (Brown 1994; Browning 1995; Daniel 2005; Wafer 1991). Mediumship, moreover, a key component of Afro-Brazilian religion, has certainly been shown to help individuals resolve existential distress (Seligman 2005).

Generally speaking, although samba is not specifically trance-inducing, it is certainly euphoric and in various contexts, experienced as spiritually-based. A few of my research participants have made remarks about the mystical dimensions of their music practice even though they may be unrelated to or unfamiliar with AfroBrazilian religious traditions. They have explicitly referred to music-making as a spiritual endeavour, allowing them to transcend this-worldly experience. The Brazilian percussionist and cavaquinho player Humberto Porto, for example, explained to me that sometimes the drumming is generating such energy [o negócio está aquela energia] that it’s euphoric, it’s a contact with God almost, I think, because it’s like being completely non-preoccupied with what is around you, completely non-preoccupied with what is going to happen after, or what happened before. You are there, in the here and now, and, ahhhhhhhhhh, it’s very good.

Béhague explains that in Afro-Brazilian religions, “since drums have the primary religious function of calling the gods, and thus of bringing on spirit possession, they are believed to have a ‘voice’ of their own, irresistible to the gods” (2006, 98). The author states that in Nagô (Yoruba) rituals, drums are the main instrument of communication with the orixás, and that, therefore, “music acquires in Candomblé the same level of significance as the most important elements of religious dogmas and practices and is not conceived as a separate entity” (95). Humberto’s statements refer to secular samba rhythms, yet he experiences such polyrhythmic drumming as his own compelling, irresistible contact with God. Similarly, when asked about what she felt when she played percussion, Layah answered: “Well, sometimes I feel ecstatic, orgasmic, enlightened, lifted, vibrationally unfolded…. I think music has a cleansing quality, so no matter what you come in with, if you open yourself to it, you really can come out a different person, or at least in a different state of consciousness.” While anthropologists have long paid attention to sensory stimulation as a means to elicit healing through shifts in the patient’s consciousness, music therapists themselves are starting to note the therapeutic role of music-induced altered states (see, for example, Aldridge et al. 2006; Fachner 2007). Moreover, in spite of the secular nature of urban samba, therapeutic and spiritual dimensions linked to altered states are central to my research participants’ understanding of collective samba playing.

Evidently, musical processes and subjective understandings of them are inflected by the wider cultural contexts they take place in and originate from (Becker

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2001). These inflections include, as outlined in the previous section, the appropriating impulses of White middle-class Brazilians in Brazil and in diasporic contexts, as well as the impulses of host-land nationals who may, perhaps misguidedly, assign religious and/or sexualized meanings to Afro-Brazilian music. I do want to insist here, however, that anthropological attention to ethnographic detail affords the opportunity to avoid the premature closure of our analytical stance. As Flaig argues in her dissertation on the globalization of the djembe, “the terms ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ become multivalent as this cultural product is negotiated among all interested parties” (2010, 34). Flaig discusses the epistemological symbiosis that exists both within and outside the African diaspora, in which Western and nonWestern subjectivities are not to be seen as mutually opposite but rather as articulated in ways that reconfigure what is being represented (34-5).

In terms of my fieldwork materials, I am thinking here, for example, of Layah’s complex biography and personal engagement with percussion traditions from around the world. As host of a community radio show, Layah took it upon herself to become familiar with the musical traditions of a range of immigrant communities in Toronto, bringing them, via the air waves, sounds from home that might otherwise be unattainable. Her personal interest in drumming led to prolonged, in-depth learning of the rhythmic traditions of West Africa and its diaspora, familiarity with which undoubtedly facilitated her later engagement with samba in the context of Batucada Carioca and the Samba Squad, and which injected a healthy dose of African-based improvisational skills back into the Brazilian diasporic context (see Pravaz 2011 for an in-depth discussion of improvisation in Canadian-based samba).

Furthermore, while Western-based interpretations of Layah’s statements may lead to accusations of “Orientalism” (i.e., the consumption of the Afro-Brazilian as exotic/erotic spiritual Other), it should be noted that in West African performance cultures as well as in their diasporic expressions throughout the Americas, sexual innuendo, rather than an external projection of Western “consumers,” is actually present as a celebration of embodied and transcendent ways of being-in-the-world. This celebration is evidently expressed in fertility rites (see Conner 2003), but also in secular popular culture traditions such as the highly explicit navel bum customary in sambas de roda. It is not inappropriate, therefore, to experience the secular forms of Afro-Brazilian percussion played in Toronto as potentially orgasmic and/or ecstatic. Premature judgement of intercultural practices and their evaluations by participants often stems from Eurocentric perspectives that privilege rationality over embodiment, cultural purity over hybrid exchange, and Puritanism over the fusion of spiritual and sexual realms.

One of the ways in which we can further theorize the phenomenological, lived experience of music playing as reported by my respondents in ways that do justice to their meanings is to consider it in terms of “flow.” Turner (1977, 1982) and

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Csikszentmihalyi (1990) have discussed the experience of flow that may be achieved in embodied activities—ranging from running and meditating to farming and welding—in terms of a lack of concern for external rewards, spontaneity, and total commitment. This mode of being is enabled by activities in which practitioners can put their skills to use in optimal ways, producing an experience that is simultaneously challenging and exhilarating. Staving off both boredom and anxiety, they are then able to “lose themselves” in the moment, achieving states of un-self-consciousness, relaxation and emotional well-being that have been linked to high endorphin levels; lowered levels of blood pressure, depression, and anxiety, and generally enhanced immune responses due to the stimulation of neural and endocrine functions (see Ader and Cohen 1993; Birkel and Edgreen 2000; Carlson et al. 2001; Jorm et al. 2002; Mann 2000; Miller et al. 1995; Stewart et al. 1994).

Yet while directly linked to measurable psychophysiological outcomes, the therapeutic aspects of music playing are also rooted in the experiential, subjective modalities elicited by flow experiences. In the context of samba band activities, these modalities are directly linked to the ritualized, collective nature of rehearsals, public performances, and other group activities that demand participants’ total involvement. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi, Turner (1977, 47-8), argues that flow experience acquires six distinctive characteristics that differentiate it from situations not framed as flow. These are as follows: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

action and awareness are experienced as one; attention is centered on a limited stimulus field; loss of ego—no “self ” is needed to bargain about what should or should not be done to “negotiate” about the meaning to be assigned to actions; albeit unawares, actors are in control of their actions and environment, and their skills are perfectly matched to the demands of the ritual, art or sport in question; flow contains coherent, noncontradictory demands for action and provides clear, unambiguous feedback to a person’s actions; flow is autotelic, i.e., it is its own reward, needing no goals outside itself.

Linking understandings of flow to ritual and play, Turner states that since the rise of Puritanism we have been inclined, in the West, to stress the pervasively solemn and strict character of ritual. But the majority of ritual still performed in the world contains festive, joyful, and playful episodes and incidents. What Huizinga has called the “ludic” interacts with the solemn in complex fashion. Again, while there are fixed, stereotyped sequences of symbolic action, there are also episodes given over to verbal and nonverbal improvisation (1977, 35).

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The playful and sometimes improvisational character of collective art making by Afro-Brazilian music players in Toronto can be described, following Turner’s (1977, 33) theorizing of flow experiences in the context of liminality, as an enactment of the “subjunctive” mood in culture, a mood best defined by its potency, its potentiality, and its experimental texture. The subjunctive mood distinguishes itself from the “indicative” reality of mundane life for being defined by fantasy and metaphor, as opposed to being dominated by rules and controls. Play subjunctivizes reality by exploring its indeterminacy and focusing on human possibilities and desire instead of certainty (Good 1994, 153). As with Candomblé sessions in which participants open themselves to receiving saints, so musicians in their performance spaces open themselves to what has been alternatively expressed by my research interviewees as “channelling,” being “vibrationally unfolded,” having their soul touched, and feeling liberated. As Canadian-born and raised Carlie Howell and Jonathan Rothman explained in recent interviews, encountering Afro-Brazilian performance practices for the first time constituted an emotionally charged turning point, where a transcendental homecoming to themselves was experienced through exposure to fundamentally foreign, yet welcoming and strangely familiar, cultural traditions.

The sense of being touched by something larger than themselves, of becoming a vessel, of experiencing liberation is echoed by Layah’s remarks about letting music take her and coming out a different person. According to Walker (1990, 120), when Candomblé devotees open themselves to the presence of the orixás, incorporating these immaterial forces, they are fundamentally sharing the gods’ spiritual power (axé) with the human community. Such spiritual energy, she argues, may also be described as a “vibration,” an energetic frequency that can be “accumulated, condensed, reinforced, and transferred from one domain to another” (127).

Rather than a forced interpretive link, the analytical juxtaposition of an AfroBrazilian religious tradition in Brazil and a secular community practice in Canada figures here as my attempt to retrace disavowed genealogies that disturb a pervasive neo-colonial phallogocentrism. As Candomblé mediums share divine axé with the human community, so do musicians share their ability to produce “unfolding vibrations” with fellow performers and audiences alike. Ritual and art touch each other.

As Small explains, they are modes in which “we use the language of gesture to explore, affirm, and celebrate our concepts of how we relate, and should relate, to ourselves, to one another and to the world” (1999, 15). When musical flow practice is achieved in a collective setting, the quality of the experience is enhanced by the embodied presence of those who are living the moment together.

For many of my research participants, the centrality of the collective nature of Afro-Brazilian music making in Toronto is linked to their migrant status.

Spirituality, healing, and music all coalesce as inseparable aspects of newcomers’ search for roots and belonging. As Humberto states,

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[I started to play music seriously] when I came to Canada. I think it’s that thing, you are away from your land, you want to maintain that bond, which is something your spirit really needs, you know.

Host-land nationals, on the other hand, also experience an encounter with roots in their engagement with samba and maracatu. Albeit borrowed, these traditions often come to occupy a place of central importance in participants’ identities.

Similarly to what Hosokawa (2005) and Eisentrout (2002) report for JapaneseBrazilians and Anglophones in Wales respectively, playing samba provides an opportunity for social cohesion and for the validation of self-understandings that are set apart from the surrounding, majority population. While Japanese-Brazilians celebrate their difference in the land of mestiçagem and non-Welsh sambistas embrace their outsider status in Bangor, the usage of samba by Torontonians vis-à-vis identity formation processes rests mainly upon the desired ability to be recognized as honorary Brazilians or, at least, competent sambistas. The affinities developed between Brazilians and non-Brazilians in the context of Toronto’s samba and maracatu communities are largely structured by a cultural exchange in which Brazilian mestres and honorary Brazilians who have perfected the craft of Afro-Brazilian percussion offer artistic expertise and the modelling of a highly valued mode of beingin-the-world, while other participants bring their willingness to learn and, ideally, the commitment to an often strenuous calisthenics routine. The ongoing exchange sustains the formation of thriving communities whose very existence highlights the importance of collective music making for migrants in the greater Toronto area.

“FAMILIES WE CHOOSE”: ART, COMMUNITY, AND MENTAL HEALTH8 Aside from associations with health, well-being, and spirituality, another way in which immigrant members of Afro-Brazilian percussion ensembles discuss the importance of their participation in these groups is literally in terms of “family.”

They often remark that the band they belong to is a substitute family, a community they can count on for support, and an important source of identity, meaning, and belonging. Juan Valencia, for example, a Bolivian professional and fellow tamborim player with Batucada Carioca, who settled in Toronto over a decade ago, has often remarked on the centrality of the friendships formed through band membership for his personal well-being in Canada. Anthropological developments in kinship theory (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Peletz 1995; Ragone 1994; Schneider 1980; Weston 1992) point not only to the culturally bound, symbolic status of relations of “blood” and marriage, but also, more generally, to the contested nature of the concept of family. These developments highlight that in many cases and contexts, from gay and

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lesbian kinship to surrogate motherhood, nonbiological ties trump “shared substance” (Schneider 1968) in defining familial ties. In doing so, such theories allow us to conceptualize the bonds shared by fellow players in their own terms, thereby stressing the highly political, denaturalizing character of percussionists’ relationships. At the same time, defining players’ relations as family points to the central place these social links perform in providing musicians in general, and migrants in particular, with stable, reliable, and nurturing ties in Toronto.

A performance-based art, Brazilian music in Canada always assumes a collective character involving a high degree of social interaction among members of the migrant community and enabling the creation of collective bonds and shared stories based on the migration experience. Migration is always difficult, even when leaving traumatic experiences behind, since it involves uprooting oneself from the known territories of landscape, work, family, and cultural life. It also often involves trading citizenship for an uncertain, precarious status. As Schugurensky and Ginieniewicz (2007) have argued, establishing new ties in Canada can be taxing and unsettling for Latin Americans, particularly as their credentials and training are rarely recognized.

New language skills must be acquired, and social networks reconstituted. In fact, several band members of migrant origin have reported difficulties finding work in Toronto, and, more often than not, participants end up engaging in strenuous, minimum wage manual labor such as housecleaning or construction, even when they have university degrees. Within this exacting context, music performance becomes a favoured way of reshaping one’s experience. The rhythms and modes of ritual and art are central instruments for enabling emotional communion with others (Dissanayake 2000, 6), a fundamental dimension of Brazilian music performance as experienced by my research participants. Moreover, in this case, the building of social networks through play also fosters a degree of integration with the host society. Belonging to these groups allows migrants to develop skills and to establish social contacts and networks that may end up in opportunities for employment. For example, a migrant woman has found work through a club where her band usually performs and today she cleans the home of the establishment’s owner. Construction workers often team up with one another in the context of music ensembles, sharing resources and information about upcoming job openings. In this regard, the cultural, informal groups studied here may have a much broader social impact than commonly acknowledged, promoting community capacity building and access to different life experiences. Such outcomes are directly linked to the importance of community art in fostering mental health for migrant populations.

Community art is “a form of public art . . . characterized by its experiential . . . inclusive [and] collaborative nature” that involves individuals in a “collective, creative process” (Lowe 2000, 364). In their function as spaces of sociability and

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exchange, the Toronto bands I studied provide a safe context for newcomers to make social contacts with Brazilian and other migrants and to access a series of material and emotional resources that would otherwise be unattainable. Incidentally, it is important to consider that the community or communities that migrants become involved with (as members of Afro-Brazilian percussion ensembles) include not only migrants, but also Canadians who are well rooted in Toronto, which in itself can be greatly advantageous to new settlers. Maninho Costa (Brazilian leader of samba band Batucada Carioca), for example, has been assisted by his wife, Negin Bahrami, in establishing his group in the local scene. As well, Brazilian musician Aline Morales (current leader of maracatu band Baque de Bamba) has worked in collaboration with Canadian Alex Bordokas (leader of maracatu band Mar Aberto) to make a name for herself in Toronto and beyond (see also Mercier 2007-08). Furthermore, members of large ensembles are regularly part of smaller music groups attempting to make a name for themselves, and they benefit from the exposure and connections forged through ensemble performances across the city.

For Canadians, on the other hand, one of the fundamental ways in which belonging to a samba or maracatu group provides access to material and symbolic resources is through the participants’ ability to claim a certain degree of membership in a highly prized “club”—that of honorary Brazilians. While such membership may be read as yet another attempt on the part of Western consumers to appropriate subaltern cultural traditions for their social cachet, it is interesting to note that participants often have a sophisticated understanding of the broader contexts informing their own practices. Matt Strand, for example, a professional Canadian dancer who lived for two years in Rio’s neighbourhood of Mangueira (the cradle of samba), talked about his experiences in Brazil in ways that highlighted an understanding of his Whiteness as a important signifier mediating social relations: I think what confuses people about Brazil is how on the institutional level, and on the level of history, how race is such an integral part of that, but on the street level…such fluid notions of identity. There’s tons of racism on the street, but at the same time notions of identity are so flexible…so, that’s the reason I lived in Mangueira for a couple of years, and for me to go to Mangueira and study samba…I was totally accepted…and championed, the more I learned and I got it, I [gestures upward]. You wouldn’t find the same openness in a Canadian or an American, particularly an American context, if I went into an American ghetto to learn hip-hop, that’s a correlation if you want…. I met a Black American woman down there, she was studying race relations, and I asked her, “Simone, what do you think of race relations here in Brazil?” She said, “Nineteen-sixties!”

Six months later I asked her, she’s like, “I have no idea.”

Evidently, one of the main reasons why it is relatively easy for someone like Matt to be accepted and “championed” in a samba context is the fact that, as discussed

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earlier, Afro-Brazilian culture has been appropriated by the local White elite as a symbol of national identity and, therefore, does not “count” as a key element in identity politics as hip-hop does in the American context.ix Moreover, considering the fact that mestiçagem celebrates and incites racial and cultural “mixing” and “whitening” (see Pravaz 2002, 2003, 2008a, 2008b, 2009), having a White North American around may have been considered a matter of “pride” for Mangueira members (Mangueira is one of the samba schools with the most exposure during carnaval and is frequented by the local middle class as well as by international tourists).

A factor to take into account when considering the politics of cultural appropriation of non-Western cultures by North Americans who return to the North, then, is the prestige associated with the knowledge of and skill at exotic foreign practices.

In fact, it is very likely that North Americans with Brazilian flair have significant social advantages over Brazilian migrants, who are often marginalized as bearers of authenticity in the Canadian social landscape and do not receive equal recognition.

As such, interactions between a few of the Brazilian mestres and honorary Brazilians who attempt to master samba, for example, may be risky business for the former.

However problematic the relationship between White North Americans and Brazilian sambistas may be, to the extent that these “gringos” fall in love with Brazilian culture and genuinely seek to embody “Brazilianness,” they constitute a repository of familiar gestures, language, and cultural traditions that bring familiarity to the large group of migrants longing for home and who seek refuge in the samba and maracatu ensembles that populate Toronto streets.

Because of all of the above factors, band membership may be conceptualized as a preventative mechanism that protects migrant band members from common social variables linked to the onset of anxiety and depression, such as isolation, and a sense of irreparable uprootedness. Small underscores that emotional arousal in musicking is not a response to any “built-in emotional content residing in a piece,” but to the relationships of the performance (1999, 18). He challenges current ideas of music as a code for the expression or communication of emotions “emanating from a composer to each individual listener through the supposedly neutral and transparent medium of the performance.” When music does its job, it is a sign, according to Small, “that for the duration of the performance the lived-in order has merged with the dreamed-of order” (ibid.). This is so because “in taking part in any capacity in a musical performance, we are articulating (which is to say, we are exploring, affirming, and celebrating) human relationships in a way for which words are not only inadequate but also unnecessary” (ibid.). This celebration of human relationships through music is indeed a collective flow experience explicitly sought after by my research participants, for whom, in many cases, the everyday world precludes flow, as it is either boredom- or anxiety-inducing, or both.

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Within this context, it is not surprising that collective playing is experienced as therapeutic by my respondents. The interrelated aspects of collective music-making as a ritualized, mood-enhancing, sociable, expressive practice speak to the similarities between belonging to an amateur percussion ensemble and the explicit goals of music therapy: “the structured use of music to assist people of all ages in times of need” (Degme i et al. 2005, 292). Degme i and others (297) discuss music therapy as an efficacious treatment for persons with psychosocial, affective, cognitive, and communicative needs, music being a form of sensory stimulation that provokes responses due to the familiarity, predictability, and feelings of security attached to it.

They address the role of music therapy as a relief in helping to cope with events surrounding a crisis. Considering that the uprootedness embedded in any process of migration, forced or otherwise, is more often than not lived and experienced as a form of personal crisis, the role of community music in activating psychic and social processes emerges as a crucial, timely, accessible, inexpensive and creative therapeutic modality that is rarely acknowledged as such.

CONCLUSION Advances in the medical sciences make it possible to measure positive psychophysiological outcomes of exposure to different types of music, such as lowered levels of cortisol, adrenaline, blood pressure, depression, and anxiety; high endorphin levels; and enhanced immunity. While some authors explain the links between mood and music by reference to universal homologies between the structures of music and those of the mind, culturally-bound theorists prefer to emphasize embodied dispositions, the illocutionary force of performance, agency, and the experiences of flow and altered states.

As Afro-Brazilian secular music forms such as the samba trace their roots, in part, to religious ritual, the “irresistible” calling of the drums is experienced by many Canadian-based percussionists as a medium that produces shifts in their consciousness and states of being. Yet this calling is performance-bound, in the sense that it depends on the contingent aspects of a particular rehearsal or gig to “pull it off.”

Only when the music-making is successful at its job do participants experience flow, liminality, and loss of self. The therapeutic and preventative effects of membership in Afro-Brazilian percussion ensembles for the mental and emotional well-being of migrants to and natives of Toronto is thus enabled and enhanced by music’s role in the production of spiritual and/or flow experiences.

Moreover, the emotive effects potentially produced by playing together are directly linked to the collective character of Afro-Brazilian drumming, a community-generating activity which allows musicians to “enter a wide palette of human

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emotional possibilities” and “play with” their everyday life identities. Music is at the crux of the development of ad-hoc communities that function at times as substitute families and provide symbolic coherence to migrants through intimacy with particular aesthetic forms.

My fieldwork material indicates that for immigrants as well as for locals, the forms of play addressed here encourage feelings of well-being, social belonging, and self-esteem, which have significant therapeutic effects. Acknowledging the wider social, cultural, and psychophysiological effects of collective music making can go a long way in supporting community health and migrant settlement processes.

NOTES 1. I use the term “Afro-Brazilian” advisedly, as Afro-ness is not always stressed in diasporic contexts of music production. It should become clear from my discussion below that in Brazil musical forms such as the samba are contested cultural objects, embroiled in rather complex discourses of both racialization and “melting pot”-style mixing. These political uses of subaltern cultural forms are not necessarily evident abroad, granting perhaps, the use of the term “Brazilian” instead of the hyphenated form. Nonetheless, I choose to stress a disavowed genealogy that pertains to an array of associated features—spirituality, altered states, eroticism, and collectivity—which, while “Orientalized” by an exoticizing Western gaze, also constitute a direct challenge to the latter’s phallogocentrism.

Je me sers délibérément du terme «afro-brésilien» en se sens qu’on ne met pas toujours l’accent sur l’africanité dans le contexte diasporique de la production musicale. Il devrait être clair, suite à mon étude ci-dessous que des formes musicales telles que la samba sont des objets culturels contestés au Brésil, mêlés à des discours plutôt complexes qui mélangent la «racialisation» et le style «creuset ethnique». Ces usages politiques de formes culturelles subalternes ne sont pas forcément évidents outre-mer, tout en concédant peut-être l’emploi de «Brésilien» plutôt que du terme avec trait d’union. Toujours est-il, j’ai choisi de mettre l’accent sur une généalogie désavouée qui se rapporte à toute une série de traits qui lui sont associés : spiritualité, état altéré de conscience, érotisme et collectivité – qui, bien qu’«orientalisés» par un regard occidental en quête d’exotisme, constitue aussi un défi direct au phallogocentrisme de ce dernier.

2. I discuss elsewhere (Pravaz, Tambor de Crioula) the implications of these socio-demographic differences vis-àvis the performance of Black Brazilian culture in Canada.

3. I do not have space here to do justice to the complex and contentious politics around samba’s appropriation by White elites in Brazil. See Pravaz (2002) for a more detailed treatment of the subject.

4. The information relayed here draws on participant observation and interviews with members of large ensembles (membership of 20 drummers or more) emerging in the Toronto scene in the last ten years. Among these, the oldest is Alan Hetherington’s Escola de Samba de Toronto, a.k.a. Bateria, and from which (in part) several other samba-based groups eventually formed, including Rick Lazar’s Samba Squad (the group with the most public visibility in the city and beyond), Maninho Costa’s Batucada Carioca (the most “Rio-centric”), and Ty Kashet-Jonathan RothmanJon Medow’s (and counting) Samba Elegua collective (the most irreverent, youthful, and street-oriented). Other AfroBrazilian percussion groups of significance in Toronto are not samba-based, but rather Maracatu ensembles such as Aline Morales’s Baque de Bamba, as well as Mar Aberto, led by Alex Bordokas.

5. For an extensive discussion of this distinction within the context of Bolivian Andean music, see Bigenho.

6. All names used here are real, at the request of my research participants. This procedure has been approved by the Research Ethics Board of my university.

7. See chapter 8 (The Rogue’s Swagger) of Downey’s book Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an AfroBrazilian Art (2005) for a detailed discussion of the relationship between embodiment and character development in Afro-Brazilian performance art (capoeira in particular).

8. This section is titled after Weston’s ethnography on queer kinship, Families We Choose (1992).

9. The idea that samba cannot be used as a means to celebrate Afro-Brazilianness due to its appropriation by the elites is a contested topic. See Pravaz 2002 and 2008b.

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NATASHA PRAVAZ is associate professor of Anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She teaches courses on performance practices, anthropology of gender and the body, popular culture in Latin America, and anthropological theory. Her research focuses on Brazilian music and dance practices as related to hybridity, nationalism, and transnationalism.