Systematics, cultural evolution and ethnomusicology : an interdisciplinary study of African harps

Abstract

The harp is a stringed instrument played today on several continents, including Africa; it is on this continent that it presents the greatest diversity (whether morphological, contextual or functional, but also with regard to the vernacular vocabulary associated with it). However, the history of the harp in Africa is poorly known and its diversity poorly characterized: this thesis is part of an interdisciplinary approach to describe this musical instrument in its entirety. To this end, an exhaustive, standardized and objective descriptive methodology has been developed: it allows us to describe its morphology and contexts of use, as well as to collect the associated vernacular vocabulary and ethnographic data of various kinds. This methodology specifies 489 descriptive parameters, including 223 for morphology, and has been applied to a corpus of 700 harps. These were initially described between 2016 and 2023, in 19 European and African museums, but also in the field (Gabon, Cameroon and Uganda). The resulting dataset is the most extensive to date, providing a quantitative and objective characterization of African harps. A cladistic analysis was then carried out on a matrix containing 318 harps and 121 characters, in order to study the evolution of African harp morphology and to better understand how their innovations are transmitted. The analysis revealed three main clades whose geographical distribution corresponds to the descriptions in the literature, and which are mainly represented by harps from Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The split-network produced, as well as the cladistic analysis and associated indices, have shown that the morphological evolution of African harps is not entirely tree-like, revealing a non-negligible amount of homoplasy and horizontally transmitted innovations. Finally, this work explores the practice of interdisciplinarity: (1) by questioning how concepts can be mobilized in an interdisciplinary context