Abstract
This article discusses the valiha, a Malagasy tube zither, recognizing it as an anthropological phenomenon – posthumanistically speaking – relational. The valiha, Madagascar’s traditional and par excellence national musical instrument, is not merely an organological object constituting the material heritage of the Malagasy people. As a human creation, the instrument is not simply a carrier of knowledge about its culture, but an active participant in it, organizing human experience within the framework of social practices related to the transmission of ancestral tradition and adaptation in processes of global changes. Transformations in construction, tuning, and the instrument’s function are linked to stabilizations and transformations of social attitudes and values. Inspired by posthumanisms, the article transcends the mind-body and culture-nature divides to rethink the relationship between human and matter. The analysis covers the ontology of the musical instrument, its anthropological-organological evolution, its agency in shaping Malagasy music and identity, and valiha’s multidimensional instrumentality – musical, cognitive, social, and transcendental.
References
Adams, R. E. (2018a). The making of a national instrument. Music in Art, 43(1), 141–158.
Adams, R. E. (2018b). Madagascar’s musical migrations: Instruments as framework to reimagine early Indian Ocean contact [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cape Town].
Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baily, J. (2025). John Blacking and the “human/musical instrument interface”: Two plucked lutes from Afghanistan. European Journal of Musicology, 23(1), 137–152.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831.
Blacking, J. (1955). Eight flute tunes from Butembo, East Belgian Congo. African Music, 1(2), 24–52.
Blacking, J. (1959). Patterns of Nsenga kalimba music. African Music, 2(4), 26–43.
Blacking, J. (1973). How musical is man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Blench, R. M. (2014). Using diverse sources of evidence for reconstructing the past history of musical exchanges in the Indian Ocean. African Archaeological Review, 31(4), 675–703.
Born, G. (2005). On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity. Twentieth- Century Music, 2(1), 7–36.
Chernoivanenko, A., Liu, Y., Zhang, X., Murza, S., & Ivanova, L. (2023). A musical instrument as an anthropological phenomenon. Ad Alta: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 13(1), 64–68.
Haraway, D. J. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. J. Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York: Routledge.
Heyde, H. (1975). Grundlagen des natürlichen Systems der Musikinstrumente. VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik.
Ingold, T. (2007). Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), 1–16.
Johnson, H. M. (1995). An ethnomusicology of musical instruments: Form, function, and meaning. JASO, 26(3), 257–269.
Kartomi, M. J. (2001). The classification of musical instruments: Changing trends in research from the late nineteenth century, with special reference to the 1990s. Ethnomusicology, 45(2), 283–314.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai
(Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 64–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kvifte, T. (2008). What is a musical instrument? Svensk Tidskrift för Musikforskning, 90, 45– 56.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Magrini, T. (1988). La valiha dell’Ile Sainte-Marie (Madagascar). Culture Musicali, 10–11, 233–258.
McLeod, N. (1964). The status of musical specialists in Madagascar. Ethnomusicology, 8(3), 278–289.
McLeod, N. (1977). Musical instruments and history in Madagascar. In J. Kunst (Ed.), Essays for a humanist: An offering to Klaus Wachsmann (pp. 189–215). Town House Press.
McLeod, N. (1980). Malagasy Republic. In S. Sadie (Ed.), The New Grove dictionary of music and musicians (Vol. 11, pp. 547–549). Macmillan.
Nettl, B. (1964). Theory and method in ethnomusicology. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Nęcka, E., Orzechowski, J., Szymura, B., & Wichary, S. (2006). Psychologia poznawcza. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Pfeifer, N. (2023). Botanical resonance: Learn more about Madagascar instruments. Discover and Share. https://discoverandshare.org/2023/01/13/botanical-resonance-learn-more-aboutmadagascar-instruments/
Rakotomalala, M. (1998). Performance in Madagascar. In R. M. Stone (Ed.), The Garland encyclopedia of world music (Vol. 1, pp. 781–792). New York, London: Garland Publishing.
Randafison, S. (1991). Madagasikara ethnomusicology [Unpublished lecture notes]. University of Washington, School of Music. Randafison, S. (n.d.). The valiha [Unpublished manuscript].
Razafindrakoto, J. (1999). Le timbre dans le répertoire de la valiha, cithare tubulaire de Madagascar. Cahiers d’Ethnomusicologie, 12, 173–189.
Razafindrakoto, J. M. (2003). La valiha face à la tradition et à la modernité: Un paradoxe permanent. Kabaro, 2(2–3), 129–145.
Sachs, C. (1938). Les instruments de musique de Madagascar. Institut d’Ethnologie, Université de Paris.
Schmidhofer, A. (2005). Some remarks on the Austronesian background of Malagasy music. In The international forum of ethnomusicology in Taiwan: Interpretation and evolvement of musical sound (pp. 75–93). National Taiwan Normal University.
Tullberg, M. (2022). Affordances of musical instruments: Conceptual consideration. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 935448.
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcel Frąckowiak
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.