Music and Trance as Methods for Engaging with Suffering
Author(s):
Tamara Dee Turner
Publication Year:
2020
Type:
journal article
Journal/Book Title
Ethos
Publisher
Editor(s):
Pages:
74-92
Volume:
48
Issue:
1
Abstract:
This article explores a religious community in Algeria where, with the ignition and structure of ritual music, a wide spectrum of trance processes are explicitly cultivated so that pain and suffering can be engaged, moved, and expressed through trance dancing. The way that trance is described in d ̄ıw ̄ an indicates that it is understood as emerging primarily from the realms of feelings, particularly the dialectical role of painful feelings. Furthermore, varieties of trance are named and indexed either by the sorts of affects they involve or as types of actions that trance feels like. Thus, rather than trance being something of the “mind” here, it is an affective experience, ordered by how it feels. This article takes a close-up, sensory ethnographic approach to flesh out the rich, detailed taxonomy of feeling intensities that are used to describe how trance feels, examining what tranced suffering does both socially and personally. [affect, body, suffering, Sufism, trance]
Citation (Chicago Author-Date):
Turner, Tamara Dee. 2020. “Music and Trance as Methods for Engaging with Suffering.” Ethos 48 (1): 74–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12265.