Richard Jankowsky

Affordances and Ambiguities of Ritual Repair and Transformations of Consciousness in North Africa

Abstract

In the spirit of Steven Friedson’s attentiveness to the inseparability of music and ritual transformations of consciousness (“music as ritual and ritual as music,” 2009: 12), this paper expands on my prior work exploring how ritual might be understood as an act of revealing music’s powers of intervention and transformation. I examine the multiple affordances of ritual healing music that not only include individual healing and transcendence, but also historical, social, and even economic repair for Tunisians of sub-Saharan heritage and other underrepresented minorities in North Africa. With particular attention paid to the ritual dynamics of performance (Kapferer 2005), particularly the architecture of time (Rouget 1985) created by musical form, sonic density, and processes of intensification, I explore the “imaginative horizons” (Crapanzano 2004) evoked by ritual music that reinforce and
challenge a sense of betweenness attending to human and spirit worlds, shattered and repaired selves, and proximate and distant histories and geographies. Ritual transformations of consciousness, from this perspective, are not mysteries to be solved, but rather constitute sites of emergent meanings and ambiguities. Indeed, I shall suggest, it is in part the mystery, or inarticulable “secret” (Arabic: sirr) of ritually transformed consciousness (Arabic: wijd;
takhmīr) that allows for the multiple affordances of ritual transformations of consciousness and encourages, however obliquely or incompletely, the work of ritual repair.

Bio

Associate Professor, Tufts University. Formerly on the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Through ethnographic methods, his research revolves around the intersection of music, ritual, and power in North Africa, particularly music’s capacity to heal and create transcendence, to maintain and narrate histories of underrepresented populations, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. His latest book, Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press. His previous monograph, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (Chicago: 2010), received three honorable mention awards for book prizes from academic societies in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and North African Studies. He is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow as well as a Fulbright Fellow and an American Institute for Maghrib Studies Fellow.