During a 2022 community-engaged music project focused on the revitalization of nsadwase nnwom, or palmwine music, in Ghana, I witnessed severe environmental degradation. The River Pra, once known for its clear waters, had deteriorated due to illegal gold mining operations ("galamsey"), leading to murky waters, deforested banks, and serious health consequences. Drawing from ethnographic research with Akan elders, palmwine musicians, and individuals involved in mining, this paper explores what the field site becomes in ethnomusicological research when the Anthropocene is decentered; specifically, by privileging Akan cosmologies, where music and nature exist as ontologically interconnected divine gifts. Within this framework, I examine the relational ethics between music and the natural environment, particularly their reciprocity. What happens when humans and their musical cultures fail to reciprocate generous gifts from nature? Could music inadvertently contribute to the global ecological crisis? I investigate these questions through palmwine music, which depends heavily on natural resources in both its intangible and material forms—palm wine, made from palm tree sap, is consumed and used for libation during performances. Additionally, the tradition's storytelling mode, steeped in Akan philosophies and values, provides insight into music's relationship with environmental challenges. By examining how Akan cosmologies function within palmwine music, this paper contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on sustainability, advocating for a holistic approach that protects both music and the environment.

On a panel titled, “African Diaspora, Navigating Duality,” Kweku Amoako, CEO of Afropolitan Cities, described a shift in perceptions of Africanness from his young adulthood when, “Even Africans didn’t want to be African,” to the present, where “people are buying into the culture. People want to be African.” Amoako said this at Amplify Africa’s 2023 AFRICON, the—then— second annual conference, held in Los Angeles, aimed at bringing together African and Afro-diasporic professionals from various fields across music, education, business, and technology. Leveraging the explosive popularity of Afrobeats and Amapiano, nascent cultural businesses are dedicating themselves to promoting a vision of African culture that seeks to capitalize on this cool factor to promote a more contemporary image of Africa and African culture. Organizations such as Amplify Africa and Afropolitan Cities are mirroring trends in Fintech, where development-oriented visionaries are looking to private capital, entrepreneurship, and digital media to accelerate Africa’s economic and infrastructural growth and using this tidal wave of African artist visibility to do it. Conducting fieldwork at business conferences such as AFRICON and networking events such as Afropolitan Cities raises significant questions about sites of investigation for this growing African popular music scene. This paper explores discourse surrounding African popular music as it is being conducted in business circles, or sites not traditionally seen as ethnomusicological. When these sites and “communities” are disparate and loosely defined network, how do we begin to capture the full picture of this cultural ecosystem?

Ethnomusicology has long privileged the field as a site of sonic encounters, yet what happens when sound itself is mediated through two-dimensional images? This paper rethinks African music field research by exploring the role of visual and material archives—specifically, a collection of early 20th-century Italian colonial postcards depicting Eritrean musicians—as a means of historicizing acoustic genealogies. The sepia-toned photographic moments, which capture musicians performing traditional instruments such as the kirar (box lyre), chira’wata (bowed lute), embilta (long flute) and keboro (drum), raise crucial questions about how indigenous music lived within the colonial gaze. Drawing on sound studies work by Steven Feld (1992), Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014), Nina Eidsheim (2018) and Sylvia Wynter’s critiques of Western epistemologies that prioritize textual over embodied knowledge, the paper engages with the limitations and possibilities of imagining sound from silent representations. What methodologies—whether oral histories, deep listening, speculative analysis, or comparative ethnographic research—allow us to reinsert these lost sonic narratives, particularly Tigrinya guayla before its mid-century recordings, into contemporary understandings of Eritrean musical history? By bridging archival research with contemporary fieldwork, this paper also considers how scholars of African music navigate the tensions between presence and absence, sound and silence, visibility and erasure. The paper argues for a methodological expansion that embraces multisensory, interdisciplinary and non-traditional approaches, repositioning the field not only as a site of direct experience but also as a space where sonic memory, image, and imagination converge.

Festival International de Folklore et de Percussions de Louga (International Festival of Folklore and Percussion of Louga), or “Fesfop,” is a community-led cultural organization founded in 2000. Over the course of its quarter-of-a-century history, Fesfop’s activities in the region have included the production of an annual festival of music and dance; management of a community radio station; presentation of various colloquia and applied workshops; organization of “solidarity tourism and discovery excursions”; and the maintenance of a museum of percussion and arboretum. As a community-led organization, Fesfop is one of several institutions local to West Africa that defies a false binary reproduced by recently renewed debates concerning African cultural heritage wherein the preservation of materials of cultural heritage is closely associated with Western cultures while the preservation of cultural heritage through embodied practice is considered primarily the purview of non-Western cultures. Through interviews with Fesfop’s president and founder, artistic director, radio presenters, performers and educators, this paper demonstrates how Fesfop and institutions like it embody autochthonous approaches to the preservation of material cultural heritage, and, specifically, how these institutions are active in the continued social life of material cultural heritage in ways that may be instructive for a variety of archives and museums with similar holdings in the West. This paper also considers how figuring such institutions, which have often been ignored by the ethnomusicological field, as important sites of cultural heritage and knowledge may impact the relational ethics through which knowledge concerning African music is produced.