Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnomusicologie – Congo'

In December 2018, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, reopened its doors after a renovation project that started nearly 20 years ago. Founded by the infamous King Leopold II, the RMCA contains cultural and natural history collections from Belgium's former colonies of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as other parts of Africa and beyond. Today, a new ‘Welcome pavilion’ leads the visitor through a monumental subterranean corridor to the historic building's basement and to an introduction to the history of the collections. The exhibition halls on the ground level have been refurbished, including the old colonial maps painted on the walls, while in the Crocodile Room, the original display has been retained as a reminder of the museum's own history. The largest halls now present displays linked to the scientific disciplines and themes within the museum's research remit (Figure 1): ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’ (anthropology), ‘Languages and Music’ (linguistics and ethnomusicology), ‘Unrivalled art’, ‘Natural History’ (biology), ‘Natural resources’ (biology, geology) and ‘Colonial History and Independence’ (history, political science). Eye-catching developments include: a room featuring some of the statues of a racist style and subject matter, which were formerly exhibited throughout the museum, and are now collected together in a kind of ‘graveyard’ (although this symbolic rejection is not properly explained); a new Afropea room focusing on diaspora history; a section on ‘Propaganda and representation’ (Imagery), a Rumba studio and a Taxolab. In place of racist statues, and occupying a central position in the Rotunda, is a new sculpture by Aimé Mpane named ‘New breath, or burgeoning Congo’. The accompanying label states that this piece “provides a firm answer” to the remaining allegorical colonial sculptures in the Rotunda by “looking at a prosperous future”. Alas, this answer is not as clear as is claimed and its message may be lost on many visitors.

Cette thèse s'intéresse au présent des musiques urbaines congolaises (RDC) dans leurs rapports à la vie quotidienne, à l'histoire et à l'identité de sa capitale Kinshasa. Partant d'une intuition fondamentale de Claude Lévi-Strauss (la musique serait, comme le mythe, une machine à supprimer le temps), c'est autour de la problématique de la musique comme rapports aux temps (social et symbolique; historique et mémoriel; musical; performatif) que l'auteur cherche à en renouveler la portée en lui donnant une emprise analytique nouvelle. La thèse débute par une étude générale de l'évolution des musiques urbaines congolaises à l'aune des catégories endogènes contemporaines (« moderne », « religieuse », « traditionnelle » et « internationale »). Combinant l'histoire et l'anthropologie culturelle, l'ethnomusicologie et l'écriture audiovisuelle, différents plans de la vie quotidienne et de la pratique musicale sont ensuite observés, analysés, confrontés : celui d'une commune de la capitale (Bandai); celui d'un certain nombre d'acteurs individuels, principalement des musiciens et des mélomanes; celui de la ville entière comme espace imaginaire et identitaire. À la fois théorique, comme interrogation générale sur les relations entre la musique et la vie sociale, et empirique, comme ethnographie des conduites et des savoir-faire qui lui sont associées à Kinshasa, la thèse cherche ainsi à dépasser les écueils du culturalisme en interrogeant la manière dont la « globalisation » met en mouvement les notions « d'universalité » (la musique, le temps, l'humain) et de « particularité » (l'appartenance, le quotidien, l'organisation sociale) tels que définis par le projet de modernité
This thesis is concerned with present-day Congolese (DRC) urban music with regard to its relations with daily life, to history and to the identity of its capital city Kinshasa. Rooted in a fundamental intuition by Claude Lévi-Strauss (that music might be, like myth, a machine that annihilates time), it is around the problem of music and its manifold relationships with time (social and symbolic; historical and memory-like; musical; performative) that the author seeks to renew its scope by giving it a new analytical foothold. The thesis begins with a general study of the evolution of Congolese urban music, measured against contemporary endogenous categories ("modern", "religious", "traditional" and "international"). Through the combination of history, cultural anthropology and audiovisual records, various views culled from daily life and musical practices are then observed, analyzed, and compared: that of a commune of Kinshasa (Bandai); that of a certain number of individual players, mainly musicians and music lovers; that of the whole city as an imaginary space and the birthplace of identity. Both theoretical, as a broad interrogation of the relations between music and social life, and empirical, as an ethnography of the behaviours and the know-how with which it is associated in Kinshasa, the thesis thus attempts to avoid the pitfalls of culturalism by questioning the way in which "globalization" sets in motion the notions of "universality" (music, time, human being) and of "particularity" (belonging, daily life, social organization) as defined by the project of modernity