[Linganth] American Anthropological Association Panel Call for Papers

[Deina A Rabie]

*Prayer, Poetry, and Song: Cultivating Religious Sound in a Secular World*



In a world that seems increasingly beset by friction between religious and
secular factions and among religious subgroups themselves, the ways in
which religious identities are cultivated come under increasing scrutiny.
In contradistinction to the modern, rational and secularist project that
prioritizes the eyes and mind over the other senses, this panel seeks to
examine the ways in which sound, poetics, and verbal art anchor religious
practices that, in turn, become sites of communal constitution and
political contestation. One mode of competition, for example, is through
the creation of soundscapes, like the Islamic *aṭhān* or call to prayer,
that index and represent groups within a socio-political space. Another is
through the use of congregational song and poetry to mark communal ritual
practice as well as a subversive means of political protest. A final
example is the deployment of pop songs, rewritten as religious protest
songs by groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, and the countering use of
intentional silence and laughter by secularists at public demonstrations.



Accordingly, the panel seeks to address the following questions: How do
sound, song, and poetics create the infrastructure of community making? In
pluralistic spaces of public dissemination, in what ways are sonic
religious interpellations taken up as intended, and in what ways are they
taken up for senses in which they are not intended (Spadola 2014)? How do
embodied practices signal the different ways public deployment of religious
sound is taken up? Moreover, how does the iteration of these ritual moments
(Derrida 1971) become sites of continual group making and remaking (Latour
2005)? What kinds of affective relationships are generated through such
practices? How do the practices of listening, cultivated inattention
(Larkin 2014), singing, and silence index competing ideologies and create
sites of contestation between religious and nonreligious entities and
different religious groups?



Dr. Emilio Spadola, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate
University, is the confirmed discussant on this panel.



If you are interested in joining our panel for the November 2016 AAA
conference, please send an abstract of your papers (no more than 500
words) by April 6, 2016 to Deina Rabie at drabie at utexas.edu and Miriam
Laytner at miriam.laytner at ou.edu.
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