Beyond WEIRD and towards the decolonisation of music for wellbeing and health

Abstract

Disciplinary background A. Background in critical anthropology of music for wellbeing and health. The recent surge of interest in how music is used in everyday life to support wellbeing and health (Sheppard & Broughton 2020; MacDonald 2013) has been characterised by an over-representation of Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic societies (WEIRD) (Bradley 2012; Henrich et al 2010). This proposal takes a critical stance regarding pervasive WEIRD biases in the current understanding of music for wellbeing and health. Disciplinary background B. Background in the embodied, ecological, and enactive -“4E”- cognitive science and the philosophy of participatory sense-making (PSM). The proposal builds on PSM and 4E’s fundamental hypothesis about mind and behaviour as shaped by the continuous coordination between body, brain, physical and social environment at and across multiple timescales (Chemero 2011; Loaiza 2016; Schiavio et al 2017; Moran 2014). Abstract Our aim is to identify an alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health grounded in anthropological accounts of Afro-Brazilian music [9,10], and explore a theoretical framework and methodological implications that link this alternative understanding with 4E conceptions of irreducible ecology between body, mind and environment and coordination across multiple spatio-temporal-scales. WEIRD-based research conclusions have tended to endorse assumptions about music, wellbeing, and cognition that are couched in terms of individual-centred processes and internal psychological mechanisms. Anthropological accounts of, for example Afro-Brazilian music, present an important alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health, namely music-as-health-establishing. The process of musicking in ritual and festival contexts establishes health in its maintenance and repairing of relationships (or ‘coordination’) with ancestors, each other, materials and environment (Daniel 2005).