Keeping in touch via cassette: tracing Dinka songs from cattle camp to transnational audio-letter

Deep listening: towards an imaginative reframing of health and well-being practices in international development

“…4 Its population comprises some 63 different language groups, the largest of which is the Dinka ( Muonyjieng ), a Western Nilotic people who share close social, linguistic and cultural features with a number of smaller African Nilotic pastoralists, namely the Luo and Nuer. Dinka are scattered across several states in South Sudan, and while the geographical distances between them have resulted in marked linguistic and cultural variation across dialect groups, there nonetheless remains an overriding sense of Dinka identity, which is rooted in common beliefs, values and practices, and reinforced by a shared history of war, trauma and forced migration (Impey, 2013).…”

“…The pervasive use of songs to chronicle individual, group and social life marks them as a kind of “primary symbolic landscape” in Dinka culture, replacing oral discourse in many instances in the public disclosure of certain kinds of information (Deng, 1973). Through song, challenging or distressing experiences are transformed into a subject of “art,” hereby drawing admiration from a wider public and reinforcing respect for the composer and the performers for whom it is intended (Deng, 1973, p. 84; Impey, 2013). As noted by Deng: Songs everywhere constitute a form of communication which has its place in the social system, but among the Dinka their significance is more clearly marked in that they are based on actual, usually well-known events and are meant to influence people with regard to those events.…”

The ethnographic archive and the poetics of history: Revisiting Godfrey Lienhardt’s archive

“…As one musician said to the ethnomusicoligist Angela Impey, 'If you know our Dinka songs, you will know our Dinka people.' (Impey 2012) This sentiment is why scholars have been interested in oral literature to understand other societies. But how exactly they tell us what they do is more complicated and neither Deng or Lienhardt develop this question explicitly.…”

“…Angela Impey's research on the transmission of Dinka songs in the diaspora shows this wonderfully, by demonstrating how songs can nurture feelings of 'belonging' following the displacement of civil war, by poetically drawing together time, place and cultural meaning. (Impey 2013) Many of these insights are true of research on oral cultures and archival materials. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown of sixteenth century pardon tales, archival work is not necessarily about peeling away layers to reveal bare fact, it is about using texts to understand how meaning was crafted and conveyed.…”

The mobile phone and society in South Sudan: A critical historical-anthropological approach

“…Some people maintained contact through letter-writing, although literacy was not general, while oral messaging has retained its importance from precolonial times to the present (cf. Impey 2013).…”