Beyond WEIRD and towards the decolonisation of music for wellbeing and health

Our aim is to identify an alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health grounded in anthropological accounts of Afro-Brazilian music [9,10], and explore a theoretical framework and methodological implications that link this alternative understanding with 4E conceptions of irreducible ecology between body, mind and environment and coordination across multiple spatio-temporal-scales.WEIRD-based research conclusions have tended to endorse assumptions about music, wellbeing, and cognition that are couched in terms of individual-centred processes and internal psychological mechanisms. Anthropological accounts of, for example Afro-Brazilian music, present an important alternative understanding of music for wellbeing and health, namely music-as-health-establishing. The process of musicking in ritual and festival contexts establishes health in its maintenance and repairing of relationships (or ‘coordination’) with ancestors, each other, materials and environment (Daniel 2005). By foregrounding this holistic, ethnographic conceptualisation of music’s socio-functional connection with health, we eschew methodological and ontological individualism and seek to contribute to a decolonising research position in cognitive science (Smith 2013). Furthermore, we see a connection to unorthodox 4E approaches to cognition that emphasise the situatedness and irreducibility of cognition (not restricted to the ‘head’ and not separated from body and environment) (Loaiza 2016; Moran 2014). This connection offers a theoretical and methodological framework for joint advancement. Highlighting the relationships between coordination, music and health furthermore helps to understand how people can use their knowledge and heritage -as embodied in coordinated activities -to recover and reorganise their experiences of wellbeing. This has particular relevance in the disrupted context of the pandemic. Our critical starting point takes into consideration the interactions between dissimilar forms of knowledge and promotes marginalised knowledge about musical healing. Interdisciplinary