Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions (New Perspectives on Gender in Music)

This book documents ways in which women’s performance practices engage with and localize world religions while creating opportunities for women’s agency. This study draws on the rich resources of three disciplines: ethnomusicology, gendered studies of religion, and religious music studies. It is a meta-ethnography formed by comparisons among different ethnographic case studies. The book analyses women’s performances at religious events in cultural settings spread across the world to demonstrate the pivotal roles women can play in localizing the practice of world religions, exploring moments in which performance allows women the agency to move, however momentarily, beyond culturally determined boundaries while revealing patterns that suggest unsuspected similarities in widely divergent religious contexts. With the rise of religious fundamentalism and with world politics embroiled in debate about women’s bodies and their comportment in public, ethnomusicologists and other scholars must address questions of religion, gender, and their intersection. By reading deeply into, but also across, the ethnographic detail of multiple studies, this book reveals patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. It invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries and suggesting that they can actively work to counter the divisive rhetoric of religious exceptionalism by revealing the many ways in which religions and cultures are similar to one another. The women of communities in Hindu India and Christian Orthodox Finland alike offer lamentations and mockery during wedding rituals. Catholic women of southern Italy perform tarantella on pilgrimages while Muslim Berger girls recite poetry at Moroccan weddings. Around the world, women actively claim agency through performance during such ritual events. These moments, though brief, allow them a rare freedom to move beyond culturally determined boundaries. In Ritual Soundings , Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals represent. | Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Women Performers and World Religions: On Ritual, Local Practice, Universals, and Comparison 2. Wedding Lamentation: Singing Sorrow, Embodying the Future 3. Demeter's Lamentation and Baubo's Mockery: Responses to the Marriage (Abduction) of Persephone 4. Revelry and Resistance: Prenuptial Performances of Mockery and Ridicule 5. Girl's Poetry and Social Critique at Muslim Berber Weddings 6. Transgression and Tarantella among Catholic Women in Calabria Afterword Notes Bibliography Index |" Ritual Soundings incorporates a remarkable range of diverse case studies that demonstrate Weiss's thorough scholarship and great knowledge surrounding women's performance practices within localized forms of major world religions." — Journal of Folklore Research Reviews "This study is a treasure trove of marriage-rituals that women perform within the context of the world religion they are affiliated to. It is a pleasure to savour the presentation of their variety." — Religion and Gender "As I read along, I found myself smiling and nodding at the text's cleverness and its validating evidence for women's agency in the performance of scandalous 'soundings' of protest and dissent. This is a fascinating, well-written, and extraordinarily well-research book."—Ellen Koskoff, author of A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender | Sarah Weiss is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz (Kunst Universität Graz). She is the author of Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java . "The women of communities in Hindu India and Christian Orthodox Finland alike offer lamentations and mockery during wedding rituals. Catholic women of southern Italy perform tarantella on pilgrimages while Muslim Berger girls recite poetry at Moroccan weddings. Around the world, women actively claim agency through performance during such ritual events. These moments, though brief, allow them a rare freedom to move beyond culturally determined boundaries. In Ritual Soundings, Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals present."--Site web de l'éditeur This text documents ways in which women's performance practices engage with and localize world religions while creating opportunities for women's agency. This study draws on the rich resources of three disciplines: ethnomusicology, gendered studies of religion, and religious music studies. It is a meta-ethnography formed by comparisons among different ethnographic case studies. The work analyses women's performances at religious events in cultural settings spread across the world to demonstrate the pivotal roles women can play in localizing the practice of world religions, exploring moments in which performance allows women the agency to move, however momentarily, beyond culturally determined boundaries while revealing patterns that suggest unsuspected similarities in widely divergent religious contexts Introduction -- 1. Women performers and world religions : on ritual, local practice, universals, and comparison -- 2. Wedding lamentation : singing sorrow, embodying the future -- 3. Demeter's lamentation and Baubo's mockery : responses to the marriage (abduction) of Persephone -- 4. Revelry and resistance : prenuptial performances of mockery and ridicule -- 5. Girls's poetry and social critique at Muslim Berber weddings -- 6. Transgression and tarantella among Catholic women in Calabria -- Afterword