"Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Healing in the Black Sacred Arts"

For the past thirty years, Professor Friedson has been conducting comparative research on music and ritual in Africa. His initial work in northern Malawi, under the auspices of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, takes a phenomenological approach to musical experience in traditional diagnostics and therapeutics among the Tumbuka-speaking peoples. This was followed by a long-term research project in the Volta Region of Ghana, studying one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast, a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the Northern Region of the country. He is author of Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing, and Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land, winner of the Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology.