140 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2011 ligraphy. What Foreman ofers is a glimpse at some of the musical complexities of the geisha’s musical world, part of the gei that makes them who they are and helps determine their identity and meaning within and across cultural spheres. Henry Johnson Otago University, New Zealand References Foreman, Kelly M. 2002. “Te Role of Music in the Lives and Identities of Japanese Geisha.” Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University. Iwasaki, Mineko. 2002. Geisha, a Life. Translated by Rande Brown. New York: Atria Books. Sugimoto, Yoshio. 1997. An Introduction to Japanese Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon. Clare A. Ignatowski. 2006. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press. xxi, 223 pp., black and white photographs, maps, fgures, index, bibliography, discography. Cloth, $65.00. Every so ofen, a new book about an African performance practice appears on the shelves that is at once distinguished from other ethnographies by its combination of elegantly crafed text, its keenly observed detail, and its astute, thought-provoking analysis. Journey of Song is one such work, ofering a dense yet absorbing read, and drawing one deeply into the dust and drama of its subject matter. Written from an anthropological perspective, which privileges analysis of performative meanings and social functions over the examination of musical structures and form, Journey of Song ofers a comprehensive investigation of gurna society, an ancestral song and dance association of the Tupuri people of Northern Cameroon. Tupuriland is distinguished from neighbouring districts by its relative homogeneity and its vehement resistance to Islamicization. By tradition, the Tupuri are rural subsistence farmers. However, due to the pres- sures of drought and overuse of land for cotton cash cropping, many have begun to migrate to regional towns and the state capital, Yaounde, transporting with them the gurna association which they have reformulated and repositioned in multiple ways to accommodate what Mbembe calls (2001:102) “chaotically pluralistic” conditions of the “post-colony” (2). Te book title alludes to a number of journeys embarked upon in this study. First, it recounts the journey undertaken by Ignatowski herself, from Peace Corp agricultural trainer in Tupuriland and occasional witness to the gurna dance in the 1980s, to anthropological scholar some ten years later. Her comprehension of Tupuri social and economic life is signifcantly transformed by her understand- Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/etm/article-pdf/55/1/140/1217764/ethnomusicology.55.1.0140.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022