Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Jankowsky, Richard C., author

Title Ambient Sufism : ritual niches and the social work of musical form / Richard C. Jankowsky
Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xix, 244 pages) : illustrations, music
Series Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
Chicago studies in ethnomusicology
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Website Figures and Audio, Video, and Musical Examples -- Notes on Transliteration, Musical Notation, and Accompanying Website -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Ambient Sufism -- 2. Ritual Reflexivity: Musicality, Sufi Pedigrees, and the Masters of "Intoxication" -- 3. Ritual Hospitality: Women Sufis and the Musical Ethics of Accommodation -- 4. Ritual Alterity: The Musical Management of Sub-Saharan Otherness -- 5. Ritual Remnants: Legacies of Jewish-Muslim Ritual Musical Convergences -- 6. Ritual as Resource: Set-List Modularity and the Cultural Politics of Staging Sufi Music -- 7. Conclusion: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance rituals. Richard C. Jankowsky illuminates the virtually undocumented role of women and minorities in shaping the ritual musical landscape of the region, with case studies on men's and women's Sufi orders, Jewish and black Tunisian healing musical troupes, and the popular music of hard-drinking laborers, as well as the cohorts involved in mass-mediated staged spectacles of ritual that continue to inject ritual sounds into the public sphere. He uses the term "ambient Sufism" to illuminate these adjacent ritual practices, each serving as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche while contributing to a larger, shared ecology of practices surrounding and invoking the figures of saints. And he argues that ritual musical form--that is, the large-scale structuring of ritual through musical organization--has agency; that is, form is revealing and constitutive of experience and encourages particular subjectivities. Ambient Sufism promises many useful ideas for ethnomusicology, anthropology, Islamic and religious studies, and North African studies
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on January 27, 2021)
Subject Sufi music -- Tunisia -- History and criticism
Sufi music -- Social aspects -- Tunisia
Music -- Tunisia -- Religious aspects
Sufism -- Tunisia -- Rituals
Islamic music -- Tunisia -- History and criticism
Islamic music -- Social aspects -- Tunisia
MUSIC -- General.
Islamic music
Music -- Religious aspects
Sufi music
Sufism -- Rituals
Tunisia
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 022672350X
9780226723501