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Musicking and Dancing Imbalu at Namasho: Enacting Indigenous Education Among the Bagisu, Uganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2022

DOMINIC D.B. MAKWA
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Abstract

This paper discusses how the activities during which people gather to create, perform, and transmit imbalu circumcision music and dance at Namasho Cultural Site (NCS) become a platform for the Bagisu of the Balutseshe clan to tutor boys about society’s gender ideology, social histories, and rituals of the sacred swamp, thus turning the place into a communal classroom for imparting this knowledge. Due to the changing context of contemporary Bagisu, I argue for efforts to archive these events to make them accessible by future generations in order to uphold imbalu performances as a mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination.

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Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 53 , December 2021 , pp. 127 - 154
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© International Council for Traditional Music 2021

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