Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North

Senses, Media and Power

Carola Lorea, Rosalind Hackett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040800898
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

What makes sounds religious? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds. Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North implements a sonic turn in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, in this volume editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett propose an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, the editors present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations, demonstrating that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Audiovisual samples
• List of Illustrations, (Verse) Samples and Captions
• Introduction: The Potential of a Sonic Turn Toward an Acoustemology of the Post-Secular
• 1 Speaking in Tongues in Comparative Contexts and their Digital Soundscapes
• 2 Sonic Ways to Embodied Remembrance Sufi dhikr in an Italian Roma camp
• 3 Aural Auras of Inner Sounds Conch Shells, Ritual Instruments, and Devotional Bodies
• 4 Sounding Pain Public-Private Aspects of Shi‘a Women’s Sonic Practices in Muharram
• 5 Sounds Electronic New Sonic Mediations of Gender and Spiritual Empowerment
• 6 Sounding Remembrance, Voicing Mourning Material, Ethical, and Gendered Productions of a New “Voice” in Shah Jo Rag
• 7 Sonic Gendering of Ritual Spaces
• 8 Sounding Resilience and Resistance Tarana Songs of Rohingya Refugees in Malaysia
• 9 Festival as Ritual and Ritual in Festival Sounding “Exotic Borderlands” in Northern Taiwan
• 10 Music as Epistemic Bulwark in West Bengal
• 11 The Power and the Politics of Embodying Dancehall Reconciling Sonic Affect and the Religious Self in Singapore
• 12 Performing vs. Recording: The Sound of Modern Bali
• 13 Amplified Waves The Politics of Religious Sound in Indonesia and Beyond
• 14 A Theory of Ritual Polyphony in Chinese Religious Performances
• 15 The Ensoundments of the Materially Ethereal in Indigenous Riau (Sumatra)
• 16 Bodies with Songs The Sounds and Politics of Interstitial Lyrics in Bengali Devotional Performance
• Afterword: Sonic Materiality, Religion, and Non-Religion
• Index