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A brief introduction to Gnawa

The Gnawa are ritual specialists. They are descended from slaves brought across the desert in the trans-Saharan slave trade who use their particular brand of music for ritual healing most often related to possession by Jinns. Over the last 2 decades Gnawa music has become a bit of a phenomenon and has been fused with various global music forms from throughout the globe. It has grown to such an extant that new initiates into Gnawan music will learn to play the music without also learning the art of ritual healing connected to the music. Here is a small sample from youtube: https://youtu.be/aqOy6O-CKNc
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I'm an anthropologist by training concerned with issues of race and global health. These seemingly disparate issues are more closely related than one might think although I came to them serendipitously. Being the child of hippie parents who grew up in all white segregated communities, my parents left college and vowed to have their children live diversity on a daily basis. So they moved us into an all Black neighborhood on Chicago's south side and my sister and I grew up being one of the few white students in all of the schools we went to. Consequently, I have always been drawn to discussions of race, diversity and, most significantly, privilege. After undergrad, I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to a small desert community in Tata Province, Morocco as a health volunteer. Ultimately Peace Corps was more about one on one cultural exchange than anything to do with health care and it wasn't until I entered graduate school and began looking for specific applications o
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