Susanne Fürniss

Biographie

Susanne Fürniss is an ethnomusicologist and Senior Researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in France. She is affiliated to the institute of Eco-anthropology, Musée de l’Homme, Paris.Initially trained for music teaching, she pursued an interdisciplinary academic curriculum. She earned her Habilitation in Ethnology.

Fürniss is a specialist of Central African music heritages particularly of so-called Pygmy-societies. Her research includes music systematics, organology and the relation between music, society and religion. Her recent research concerns the study of Central African harps in European and African museums, the identification and evaluation of historical recordings of traditional Cameroonian music and the cultural history of the Fang people in Central Africa. She is the principal investigator of the international research project NGII – The current relevance of ancient rites: the Ngii brotherhood of the Fang people of Central Africa (France-Gabon-Spain).

Her research is published in about 60 articles, in the Encyclopédie des Pygmées Aka an on the CD Recordings on Wax-cylinders from South Cameroon 1907-1909.

In the DIASKW project, Dr Fürniss is contributing her expertise from previous research, particularly on the material culture of Pygmy societies in northern Congo, and will be searching for comparable objects in Tervuren and Paris in order to shed new light on the provenance of the Lübeck objects.