[Linganth] Tamara Dee Turner on her new book about Algerian dance

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Tamara Dee Turner answers Jane Goodman's questions about
her book, Dancing at the Thresholds: Music, Trance, and Feeling in Algerian
Dīwān of Sīdī Bilāl.

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: *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.
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