Evans-Pritchard Lectures 2027 - Lecture 1: Music / Forgiveness
Lecture 1: Music / Forgiveness
Evans Pritchard Lectures 2026-27
Nomi Dave: Big Mouth: Sound, Law, and Sexual Justice
I begin this lecture series with a discussion of two songs released in response to sexual violence in Guinea. While both songs were connected to an artist accused of assault, one called for an end to sexual violence while the other defended the artist and called on women to forgive him. I show how, in both examples, music shifts the narrative away from questions of crime and culpability, sidestepping legal elements of proof to appeal instead to emotion and feeling. In this process, the victim-survivor is erased, and her only role – along with the role of other women – is to forgive.
About the series
This lecture series, Big Mouth, considers sound, listening, and media in relation to sexual justice. Exploring a series of legal cases in Conakry, Guinea, it asks how testimony is voiced, silenced, heard, and amplified in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. Each lecture is framed around an audiovisual mode and a socio-legal concept, showing how informal testimony re-orients the legal within a broader pursuit of justice. Big Mouth involves a research collaboration with the filmmaker Bremen Donovan and the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah, including a forthcoming book and an experimental documentary film directed by Bremen.
Nomi Dave is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music, St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She is a trained lawyer, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and DPhil in Music from Oxford. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics and Pleasure in Guinea, for which she received the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She founded and co-directed the Sound Justice Lab at the University of Virginia. She will be delivering a series of lectures on her new forthcoming book, Big Mouth: Sound, Law and Sexual Justice (University of Chicago Press).
