Papers by Richard Jankowsky
Journal of North African Studies, 2017
Sufisms in North Africa are both esoteric and exoteric; that is, they harbor hidden forms of know... more Sufisms in North Africa are both esoteric and exoteric; that is, they harbor hidden forms of knowledge and experience known only to initiates but perform them regularly in rituals that are public or semi-public, making them accessible to all. When musics of these rituals are brought onto the concert stage, then, they pose analytical challenges to binaries such as spectatorship/participation, loss/renewal, and authenticity/inauthenticity. In Tunisia, the staging of Sufi music has been monopolized for decades by a staged spectacle called el-Hadhra, which, along with its offshoots and competitors, proceeds according to a modular logic of culture in which music, dance, trance, and other aspects of ritual are approached as separable, extractable, and available for recombination in a plug-and-play manner. This paper unpacks the implications of this logic of modularity through a close reading of el-Hadhra that focuses on strategies of minimizing and maximizing the ‘contextual gap’ between ritual and stage performances. The resulting ambiguities, I argue, encourage multiple and sometimes contradictory readings that nevertheless illuminate the musical and ritual chains of value activated by Sufi performance and draw attention to the shifting social, religious, and political functions and meanings of Sufism in the Tunisian public sphere.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
Books by Richard Jankowsky
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunis... more 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. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo68654485.html.
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Papers by Richard Jankowsky
Books by Richard Jankowsky