Ritual as strategic action: the social logic of musical silence in Canadian Islam (original) (raw)
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Sounds, Bodies and Power: Politics and Poetics of Religious Sounds
National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute, Feb 27-28, 2020
Whether through mantras, Quran recitation contests, or Christian congregational singing, sounds, bodies and texts depend on each other for the continued vitality of the sacred and the way it is experienced in Asia. However, texts have been given utmost priority in the field of Religious Studies for a series of historical and cultural reasons that have been summarized as a "scriptist bias" and "ocularcentrism". Ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures, at the expense of the auditory and other sensory realms, has produced a kind of "disciplinary deafness" in the study of religions. This conference aims to consider the importance of "a sonic turn" to bring forth understudied connections between bodies, sounds and media in the private and public life of religions in Asia. It welcomes toolbox approaches from multidisciplinary scholars who combine methods and perspectives from religious studies, history, ethnomusicology, anthropology, media studies, folklore and performance studies. Bodies of texts, which represent our common acceptation of the term corpus/corpora, will give way to a specific attention on "bodies of songs" (Hess 2015), "bodies of sounds" (Dodds and Cook 2013), the "skinscapes" of religious experience (Plate 2012), the sensory and embodied dimensions of the sacred (Csordas 1994, Meyer 2011), and the "entextualization" of the body through sacred sounds (Flood 2005). The role of sounds and embodied practices will also emerge as encompassing these intimate and affective dimensions, and reflecting broader questions on mediatization, and on the relationship between sounds, religions and power. In fact, the use of sound shapes the ways in which space is produced and perceived. Hence religious soundscapes, especially in urban and multicultural spaces, have been discussed as enveloping and claiming territorial authority, establishing boundaries, or awakening inter-religious tensions. An emerging literature on congregational singing as establishing community and the sense of belonging, and recent scholarship on the relationship between religious soundscapes and place-making are helpful in articulating the theoretical liaison between sound, people, places and identities. However, these conceptual frameworks, frequently based on urban, predominantly Christian, and North Atlantic contexts, often neglect intimate discourses, real experience and lived understandings of sound-and what sacred sound does to the people who are creating, listening, producing, and interpreting it. The focus on the sonic aspect of religion cannot be separated from movement and touch, as fundamental dimensions of the experience of the religious body. Sound, and the senses of the praying/playing/listening/dancing body, appear as an interconnected and fundamental point to start an innovative discussion on the politics and the aesthetics of religious experience. The ways in which performed and sounded religious experiences are produced, transmitted, reproduced, commodified and received is also inseparable from the technical and mediated ways in which these communicative acts take place. Therefore our discussion is necessarily embedded in the understanding of the relationship between religion and media. Sound and the sonic ritual body are articulated and understood in different religious mediatizations, as cultural expressions communicated by oral, textual, musical, danced, digital, and other vehicles. Whether conveyed by live performance, graphemes, televangelism, or social media, the sensorial field of religious chanting, preaching, mourning, ritual dancing, or singing, becomes a site for broader social negotiations, sectarian contestations and trans-territorial identity formations, ultimately unsettling and multiplying the discussion on religion, the senses and the media in Asia. Our discussion is interested in the various intersections between religious sounds, bodies, mediascapes and the reflection of power relationships, in order to understand contemporary issues that comprise but are not limited to: Community-making and place-making processes; Sound in ritual performance and the heritage discourse; Multicultural soundscapes in the public sphere; Sacred music, migration and diasporas; Sonic contestations and the production of inequalities; Religious sounds in new and changing mediascapes.
SUGGESTIONS OF MOVEMENT: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices
Cultural Anthropology, 2018
In this essay I make a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to sonic atmospheres with recent anthropological research on the voice that seeks to overcome the opposition of discursive signification and sonic materiality. Detailed examination of sonic events shows that sonic atmospheres enact suggestions of movement that go beyond the metaphorical. Arguing against theories of sonic affect that take the sonic to be an asignifying material flux, I seek to demonstrate that vocal sound’s meaningfulness is internal to the processual nature of its material forms.
Sound and music play a vital role in many religious and spiritual practices around the world. However, they have not been studied considerably in the field of religion or in related disciplines thus far. This article begins to bridge this gap by drawing a preliminary cartography of the research field and proposing a transdisciplinary methodological basis for further studies. It includes a survey of the state of research and firmly locates the field within the secular study of religion rather than within phenomenological, theological or religious approaches. The key concepts “sound,” “music” and “religion” are introduced; and the manner in which common perceptions of these concepts have prevented us from noting some of the most interesting phenomena, especially in contemporary religiosity, is discussed. Finally, a spectrum of potential research perspectives that could be covered by future studies is proposed.
Sound, Music, and the Study of Religion
Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion
The study of religion has been greatly enhanced in recent years by the new emphasis on lived religion and materiality (Meyer et al. 2011). It also impels us to consider how the aesthetic factors into the interpretation of religious worlds (Meyer 2009). Moreover, the shift in academic focus from beliefs and texts to practice and the sensorium has generated stimulating new questions about religious communication and mediation (Morgan 2009). Surprisingly, music and extramusical sound receive scant attention despite the significance of sound and hearing in our lives. Scholars of religion have been slow to engage the multidisciplinary boom in sound studies of the last few years (Keeling & Kun 2011). 2 In what follows I discuss some of the historical biases and methodological challenges related to studying religion from an acoustic and auditory perspective. I review the work of some authors who have overcome what Isaac Weiner calls our 'disciplinary deafness' (2009, 897) and made the 'sound of the sacred' a centerpiece of their research and publications. 3 In the course of the essay, I identify some of the topics that are arguably integral to the development of a more sonically aware religious studies, as well as areas that await more study. The undervaluation of sound in the academic study of religion is linked to the privileging of sight over sound in Western modernity, whereby the aural as a spiritual sense is diminished (Chidester 1992; Schmidt 2002). Furthermore, listening is held to be the most passive of the senses, and 1 My work on sound and music in religion has been greatly aided by a course I taught on this topic (spring 2011) and by the assistance of Jeremy Spiers. I also acknowledge the contributions of the 'Sound In/As Religion' symposium' that I organized at the 2010 World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) in Toronto. 2 On this topic, see the excellent blog, Sounding Out! <www.soundstudiesblog.com>. 3 Cf. Morgan 2012 on 'the look of the sacred'.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2010
Mauritian Muslims have recently come to treat sound reproduction as enhancing and authorizing the transnational circulation of devotional discourse and poetry. In this article, I investigate the alternation between the storing of signs through media and their performative recontextualization as a practice that straddles the boundary between signification and materiality. The argument is that particular theological assumptions about mediation shape the deployment of media technology in religious settings. Such assumptions also influence the processes of entextualizing authoritative religious discourse. In the article I analyze how a sense of immediacy between religious performers and spiritual authorities emerges though the combination of uses of sound reproduction informed by a semiotic ideology of recitational logocentrism with particular deictic markers in discourse.
Atmospheric resonance: sonic motion and the question of religious mediation
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2022
Because of its material characteristics, the sonic poses a challenge to the influential paradigm of religion as mediation. This article makes a case for a neo-phenomenological analytic of atmospheres in order to do justice to the sonic in anthropological approaches to religion. Approaching the sonic as atmospheric half-things, I propose a different understanding of religious mediation from the one developed in contexts where images, objects, and technical media dominate. Based on research on the recitation of Urdu devotional poetry among Mauritian Muslims, it is suggested that sonic religion does not function as a stable in-between connecting humans and the divine. Instead, it operates through processes of resonant bundling, intertwining different strands of lived experience, including religious traditions.
Afterword: Sonic Materiality, Religion, and Non-Religion
Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power, eds. Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I.J. Hackett, 2024
The afterword centers on the following question: If it is the case that the forms of territoriality and belonging such as those discussed in the contributions to this volume are already constituted and well-known through discourse, why should one pay attention to the sonic? It is argued that the particular entanglement of the sonic with embodiment enables religious sounds to provide somatic evidence for religious ritual outcomes, experiences, cosmologies, and aspirations. Sonic materiality with its inbuilt multimodality also affords the bundling of the forms of territoriality and belonging that feature prominently in the book's contributions with religious traditions and practices, suffusing them with the same felt qualities at the level of felt-bodily motion and perception.
PREMISE: How can music allow a man to see the face of God? How can music direct the spirituality of those creating, practicing, and listening to it? Music and sound have played a significant role in religious practice throughout and across human history and culture, but this sonic aspect of religious and spirituality has been significantly ignored. This thesis attempts to explore spiritual manifestations of people, both generally and specifically, through musical and sonic experiences, redirecting the focus of study in religion and spirituality from the visual to the aural, creating a concept of Spirosonance as compared to Theosonance. METHODS: Part One of this dialogue begins by deconstructing and reconstructing notions of religions, religion, and spirituality along with music, sound, and noise to first lay a foundation of definitions for the study, while also questioning common notions of these human constructs. This section hopes to begins creating better tools to define, discuss, and understand these constructed notions, employing subjectivity as a priority to objectivity in forming definitions. This sections ends by outlining the general concept of Spirosonance and how it can be used to better understand people's spiritual experience of sound. In Part Two of this discourse, a particular case study is used to demonstrate concepts discussed in Part One, outlining Christian monastic practices and experiences of music as related to their spirituality. Further in this section, outsider's experience of this same monastic music is examined to understand how people outside this tradition are also gaining spiritually from this same music. CONCLUSION: Many possible reasons can be given as to why monastic chant is so popular among such wide varieties of people as a spiritual enhancer. The reasons given here are just a few, focusing on the most cited characteristics of chant that people find attractive or exceptional. Ultimately, why someone is moved or attracted to the chant is personal and could be for any reason. What was attempted here was to show how, in a few ways, people are perhaps experiencing something personal, something spiritual, within this chant that does not necessarily tie itself to religious practice. There is clearly something about this music that speaks to people beyond the terms of religion, moving into more "spiritual" realms. Most importantly, what was attempted here is the creation of better tools of understanding music as both a tool of religion and a catalyst for spirituality, forming spirituality as a character of those experiencing the music, not a character of the music itself.