Main description:

Medical Ethnomusicology is a new field of integrative and holistic research and applied practice that approaches music, health, and healing anew, engaging the biological, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual domains of human life that frame and inform our experiences of health and healing, illness and disease, life and death. The power of music to create health and healing at the individual, community, and societal levels is not only linked to these
domains of human life, but is intimately interwoven with the ever present and multifaceted frame of culture, which is often where meaning lies, and is a key factor that creates or inhibits efficacy.
l The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology appeals to all those interested in music, medicine, and culture, and represents a new stage of collaborative discourse among researchers and practitioners who embrace and incorporate knowledge from a diversity of fields. Importantly, such knowledge, by definition, spans the globe of traditional cultural practices of music, spirituality, and medicine, including biomedical, integrative, complementary, and alternative models; is rooted in
new physics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, and of course, music, dance, and all the healing arts.
: The book is more than the first collected volume to establish the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and express its broad potential; it is also an expression of a wider paradigm shift of innovative thinking and collaboration that fully embraces both the health sciences and the healing arts. The authors encourage the development of this new paradigm through an openness to and engagement of knowledge from diverse research areas and domains of human life conventionally viewed as disparate,
yet laden with potential benefits for an improved or vibrant quality of life, prevention of illness and disease, even cure and healing.

Contents:

1. Confluence of Consciousness in Music, Medicine, and Culture ; 2. A Fourfold Framework for Producing Sociohistorically Specific, Clinically Relevant, Cross-Culturally Resonant, and Biomedically Viable Research on Music and Medicine ; 3. Religion, Spirituality, and Healing: Research, Dialogue, and Directions ; 4. Art, Culture, and Pediatric Mental & Behavioral Health: An Interdisciplinary, Public Health Approach ; 5. Music-Prayer-Meditation Dynamics in Healing ; 6. Healing Through Flexibility Primers: Examples from Indonesia, the United States, and Northeastern Thailand ; 7. The Performance of HIV/AIDS in Uganda: Medical Ethnomusicology and Cultural Memory ; 8. Alzheimer's Disease and the Promise of Music and Culture as a Healing Process: The Need for a Unifying Theory ; 9. Music Therapy Evidence-Based Outcomes in Dementia Care: A Way to Better Life Quality for Those with Alzheimer's Disease and Their Families ; 10. Songwriting in the Nursing Home: Transcending the Boundaries of Institutionalization through Music ; 11. Preventive Care for the Dead: Beleganjur Music and the Communal Care of Souls in Balinese Cremation Ceremonies ; 12. The Application of Hood's Nine Levels to the Practice of Music Therapy ; 13. Music and the Meditative Mind: Toward a Science of the Ineffable ; 14. Cosmological Dialogues and Celestial Battles: Shamanism, Music, and Healing in Two Contrasting South American Cultural Areas ; 15. Therapeutic Dimensions of Music in Islamic Culture ; 16. Homoeopathic Healing With Music ; 17. Effects of Music for Human Health and Wellness: Physiological Measurements and Research Design ; 18. Building Community Within the Healthcare Environment: Marrying Art and Technology ; 19. Personhood Consciousness: A Child-Ability Centerd Approach to Socio-Musical Healing and Autism Spectrum "Disorders" ; 20. The Lakota Hoop Dance as Medicine for Social Healing ; 21. The Educator's Role in Cultural Healing and the Sacred Space of the World Music Classroom