Full Description
Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of a racialized community in Algeria that literally trance dances at the thresholds of consciousness. It also tells the story about how these communities negotiate and "dance" at thresholds of the sacred and profane, at the perceived clashes of Islam and animism or of sub-Saharan versus North African lifeworlds.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork alongside archival sources, oral histories, and ritual analysis, author Tamara Dee Turner considers these dances through an affective, embodied lens to challenge mainstream assumptions of affect theory. The dance embodies centuries of traumatic histories haunting these communities: their ritual, dīwān, coalesced over three centuries of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Embodying these tumultuous pasts, dīwān rituals move painful feelings through the trancing body to the point of affective "ignition" and release. However, to accomplish this, ritual actors must cultivate specific atmospheres conducive to trance and transformation via a particular Algerian understanding of atmosphere called "hāl."
A much-needed ethnographic approach to the living family lineages, practices, and intimate epistemologies of diwan, 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
