College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item MUSIC, TRANCE, AND TRANSMISSION IN THE SANTO DAIME, A BRAZILIAN AYAHUASCA RELIGION.(2015) Blocksom, Benjamin Nye; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis illuminates the core values within Santo Daime communities and how these are transmitted and practiced during rituals. Santo Daime, a Brazilian Ayahuasca Religion originating in the western Amazon state of Acre, is practiced both inside and outside its urban Amazonian roots, including most Brazilian states and smaller communities in a handful of Western countries, such as the United States, Mexico, and the Netherlands. Adepts of the Santo Daime combine the sacramental use of Ayahuasca (a psychotropic tea with a long history of use in the Amazonian basin), collective shamanism, and music performance practices (singing, dancing, and playing instruments) to achieve a state of religious ecstasy. Using a multi-disciplinary approach with emphasis on ethnography, an expansion of Judith Becker's categorization of trance, and musical and phonological analysis I argue that the doctrine of the Santo Daime and the transmission of these teachings through music are inseparable elements of producing and navigating the altered states of consciousness collectively experienced in Santo Daime rituals.Item From the Liminal to the Land: Building Amazon Culture at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival(2006-04-27) Kendall, Laurie J.; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Every year in August, thousands of womyn from around the globe make a journey that takes them from the liminal world of patriarchal marginalization, oppression, and violence to the safety of a land where they build a matriarchal culture of families, homes, and sacred traditions. This new culture binds these womyn to each other as a people and to the 650 acres in Michigan that they call their homeland. This dissertation is a five-year ethnographic study of the cultural community womyn build at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It focuses on the experiences of 32 participants, and the physical work they do to create a world that places their minds and bodies, their values and experiences, and their relationships in the center of their own community structures. By inverting the concept of liminality used to describe lesbian cultural spaces, this study reframes these womyn as a diasporic group who journey home once each year to reconnect with their home, family and sacred traditions. The significance of the study is that it demonstrates the ways womyn resist patriarchal oppression by using love as a technology for building a matriarchal culture. Theoretically, by inverting the concept of liminality, researchers might better understand and articulate the interlocking structures of power and oppression, as well as the "methodologies" that marginalized people use to resist oppressive forces in American culture.