Ruthie Meadows, “Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrìsà”

Ruthie Meadows, “Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrìsà” | Hemispheric Institute of the Americas Book Talk Series

In the first book-length ethnographic study on music and Ifá divination in Cuba and Nigeria, Ruthie Meadows (University of Nevada, Reno) explores how Ifá practitioners in Cuba, Nigeria and the Caribbean are reshaping Yorubá rituals through cross-cultural exchange. In Cuba, worshippers turn to Yorubá traditions for their perceived effectiveness. Meadows’s study of the “Nigerian-style” ritual movement reveals how women and men Ifá priests use music and ritual to transform gender roles, challenge state policies, and redefine religious authority.

Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrìsà was published in 2023 by the University of Chicago Press.

About Meadows

Ruthie Meadows is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music at the University of Nevada, Reno. Meadows’s research focuses on global circulations of music and sound of the Hispanophone and circum-Caribbean, with attention to sexuality studies and gender studies, ritual music, jazz, and ecology. In 2021, Meadows’s article on women and batá percussion in Cuba received the Society for Ethnomusicology’s (SEM) Jaap Kunst Prize, recognizing the most significant article written in ethnomusicology by a scholar in the first ten years of their scholarly career. Currently, Meadows’s second book project explores Cuban women in jazz and jazz fusion.