In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity.

Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community.

Tony Perman is an assistant professor of music at Grinnell College.

"The real strength of the text lies in its reliance on the author's long-term fieldwork experiences and his nuanced and clearly communicated musical analysis to help elucidate the practices of a community whose experiences are worth recounting." --H-Net Reviews

"Perman's approach is an unambiguous recognition of the interpretive community's perspectives on an ethnography study's subject or text, which represents a clear adherence to a widely acknowledged good practice." --African Studies Quarterly

"Refreshing . . . Along with the theory and history, peppered throughout the text are the author's descriptions of people, places, and events; these are beautiful, person-centered and humanizing, in a way I wish all ethnographic writing would strive for." --Journal of Folklore Research