Music for Global Human Development

Abstract

This chapter outlines a model for engaged ethnomusicology fostering human development, locally and globally, through sustainable music-centered community collaborations. Human development is a process of upholding human value in the world—rights, freedoms, social justice. Human development is impeded by dehumanization—the human treated as a nonhuman through an impersonal world system (and ironically shaping much “development” work today). The model builds on Habermas’s duality of system and lifeworld, but argues that the maintenance of the lifeworld—locus of human value—depends not only on rational “communicative action” (as per Habermas), but equally on affective social connectivity, constructed primarily through a profoundly social “soundworld,” where sonic feedback loops of thought-feeling produce “resonance.” The chapter describes projects that use participatory action research to forge collaborative, community-engaged networks, blurring differences between “researcher” and “researched,” drawing participants into a shared, resonant soundworld, across boundaries of ethnicity, religion, nation, and class. Projects based in Liberia, Ghana, and Egypt address post-conflict trauma, public health issues, maternal and neonatal health, cultural continuity and civil society. The chapter suggests that resonant networks of participatory action research in ethnomusicology have the potential not only to transform local communities—whether rich or poor—but also to transform the networks themselves, toward global human development.