Full Description
Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of communities in Algeria that practice dīwān: a nocturnal musical ritual in which practitioners enter various modes of trance to achieve affective "ignition" and emotional release through the body. Seen by other locals as a form of "popular" or "folk" Islam, Algerian dīwān exists as a racially identifiable and minority practice embodying centuries of historical trauma rooted in the trans-Saharan slave trade by entwining sub-Saharan pantheons and knowledge with North African religious philosophies and structures.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside archival sources, oral histories, and ritual analysis, author Tamara Dee Turner considers dīwān through an affective, embodied lens to challenge mainstream assumptions of affect theory as well as Western approaches to healing and mental health. Instead of separating emotional influences from cultural environments or conscious thoughts, dīwān practitioners carefully cultivate a specific atmosphere, or hāl, that allows them to reach the trance-like state where music and bodily movements can navigate the gaps between tradition and modernity, the human and nonhuman, and the sacred and the secular.
A much-needed ethnographic approach to the living family lineages, practices, and intimate epistemologies of dīwān, Dancing at the Thresholds is a story about the nature of healing and how wellness depends on the respect of wider, affective ecologies beyond both the individual and the human.
Contents
Accessing Audiovisual and Supplemental Materials
List of Illustrations
Note on Transliteration
Prelude
Introduction
PART 1. Rupture and Emergence: Trans-Saharan Roots, Routes, and Afro-Maghribi Emplacement
1. Caravans, Sufis, and Maghribi Islam
2. The Emergence of Dīwān and Its Polyvalent Pantheon
3. Sounding and Embodying the Pantheon
PART 2. Affective Ecologies of Ritual: Atmosphere, Affective Labor, and Bodily Ignition
4. The Magnitude of Atmosphere
5. Launching and Warming the Ritual Ecology
6. (Inter-)Corporeality, Trance, and Affective Ignition
PART 3. "Modernizing" Dīwān: Imbricated Milieux and New Economies of Transmission
7. New Economies of Transmission
8. The National Dīwān Festival
Epilogue: Trajectories of Dīwān
Appendices
Glossary
Sources
Acknowledgments
Index
